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'The Celebrity Circle' final: Who won? Did the catfish or the real celebs triumph?

The Circle - celebrity
The Celebrity Circle cast (Channel 4)

Lady Leshurr has been crowned the winner of the first series of The Celebrity Circle, where she played as a catfish pretending to be Big Narstie.

It was emotional news for the rapper, who explained that she had wanted to do the reality series in aid of Stand Up To Cancer for very personal reasons.

Watch: Saffron Barker opens up about her childhood struggles

Read more: Lady Leshurr opens up about pansexuality

She said: "I did this because I lost my sister to breast cancer and literally this means everything to me, thank you."

Leshurr lost her sister Carmen in 2019, and spoke on Dancing On Ice recently about how her sister had kept her diagnosis from her family for a long time.

Lady Leshurr
Lady Leshurr was the show's first celebrity winner (Channel 4)

As Leshurr's brother-in-law had also passed away before Carmen, their children now live with the rapper's mum.

In second place on The Celebrity Circle was Saffron Barker, joint third were Denise Van Outen and Rachel Riley (Pete Wicks and Sam Thompson), and fifth place was will.i.am (Rickie Haywood-Williams and Melvin Odoom).

In the last episode, the finalists met up for a dinner party where they discovered each other's real identities and the fact that only Van Outen and Barker were actually themselves.

The group agreed that the biggest shock was discovering Wicks and Thompson were Rachel Riley, but were also surprised that Big Narstie's real identity was Leshurr.

Explaining how they had been so successful, Wicks said: "Anything nice that you liked about Rachel was probably Sam. Anything intelligent was me."

Odoom and Haywood-Williams revealed that they had actually contacted their alter ego will.i.am before the show to get some tips on how to play him.

He had told them: "Anything someone says, just go bigger. Make it bigger, make it ridiculous."

LONDON, ENGLAND - SEPTEMBER 04:  Big Narstie attends the 2018 KA & GRM Daily Rated Awards at Eventim Apollo on September 4, 2018 in London, England.  (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Grime Daily)
Lady Leshurr was pretending to be Big Narstie (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images for Grime Daily)

Viewers discovered at the start of the episode that last night's double blocking had seen Van Outen visit Kim Woodburn - aka Baga Chipz - to break the bad news of being evicted.

Meanwhile, it was catfish galore at Peter Andre's apartment (really Charlotte Crosby) when Wicks and Thompson, who'd been playing as Rachel Riley, went round to complete the blocking.

Read more: Duncan James had bank account cleared out in catfishing scam

In one of their last challenges, the players had to vote for the winners of a series of awards including who they would be most likely to stay friends with, and who was the most genuine.

Van Outen and catfish Riley voted for each other as friends, but Van Outen was offended when the Riiey boys chose Barker as their most genuine player instead of her.

Watch: Denise Van Outen and Eddie Boxshall meet psychoenergetic therapist, Mark Johnstone, in their new podcast, Before We Say I Do...