TV star AJ Odudu on why life can be ‘humbling’ and how we can all restore hope

AJ Odudu is supposed to be sorting tins. The Big Brother host is lending a hand at her local food bank in Blackburn. She’s been put on the packaging station: divvying non-perishables between parcels and checking expiration dates. But she keeps seeing people she knows – and she wants to catch up.

“Oh yeah, a few people,” she explains later, duties complete. “One of the volunteers here does a keep fit class with my mum down at the local leisure centre. She was asking, ‘How’s your mum? Heard that she had a knee replacement, send her my love.’

“And I saw someone who was in the year below me at secondary school, she came in with her three kids to donate… there’s people who recognise me from the local church or the local school or things like that.”

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“To be fair, it does smell really good,” she says, accepting a helping. I gratefully follow suit.

AJ Odudu is busy. She’s about to be on our screens most nights – Big Brother returns this week. It’s a huge gig; last year, more than 2.5 million people tuned into the launch of the reboot. The presenter recently wrapped on Dress the Nation, a new reality show documenting the search for a Marks & Spencer’s designer, and her diary is filled with commitments like guest-judging on RuPaul’s Drag Race UK and attending the National Television Awards. The night before her interview with Big Issue she was “up until 3am” updating her mum with the gossip from her whirlwind schedule.

But Odudu is “never too busy” to come back home to Blackburn. And “never too busy” to visit the food bank.

“I want to be here; I want to play my part,” she says. “I want to cheerlead all these amazing volunteers who are filled with hope and ambition. But it’s also obviously very harrowing to hear that need has increased.”

Blackburn is one of the busiest centres in the Trussell network. Last year, volunteers distributed emergency food parcels to 12,303 adults and 9,132 children. They’re very happy to have the “lovely” Odudu here. 

“AJ’s from Blackburn, this is her hometown,” food bank manager Gill Fourie tells me. “She’s part of this community, so it’s really important that she uses her voice for good in this area.”

AJ Odudu – recently announced as Trussell’s newest ambassador – is proud of where she’s from. She waxes lyrical about its “amazing sense of hometown glory” and “work ethic”. Her pride is emphasised by her distinctive Lancashire accent, which early 2010s TV producers (unsuccessfully) demanded she soften. Odudu is at the food bank to “give back” to this community. As the sixth of eight children born to Nigerian immigrant parents, she is no stranger to financial hardship. Florence – Odudu’s mother – worked as a cleaner; her dad, James, was a joiner. Money was tight. Nonetheless, the house was filled with “joy and vibrancy and loudness”.

“I kind of did know we were working-class – not everyone [at school] was on free school meals, and not everyone in my class was sharing beds, that sort of thing. I shared the top bunk with my younger sister for years,” she recalls.

“But I never felt like I was missing out on anything. My mum used it to her advantage. I’d say, ‘Oh, can I have those trainers, or that computer game? Can I paint my room?’ And she’d say, ‘You absolutely can. But you have to work really hard for yourself and buy it.’ I kind of love that ethic.”

AJ Odudu rattles off a list of her former jobs: cleaning local betting shops, waitressing at Blackburn Rovers FC, stacking shelves at Marks & Spencer, scrubbing dental equipment, steaming clothes – “I did it all.”

In fact, she returned to retail shortly after her first big presenting gig – co-hosting Big Brother’s Bit on the Side in 2013 – fell through. Following years of sporadic TV spots, it felt like the then-25-year-old’s big break, but she was unceremoniously replaced after a few months and ended up in a call centre. It’s clearly still a difficult memory. 

“Life really is humbling sometimes.” Odudu pauses, her spoon of vegetable chilli hovering mid-air.

“But it was good for me to hear from my mum like, ‘You’ve done it before, you can do it again, and there’s no shame in people earning an honest living.’”

In the years that followed, Odudu qualified as a personal trainer and started a YouTube channel. Slowly but surely, the TV gigs started returning. By 2021, she was a silver-screen regular, dancing her way to the final of Strictly Come Dancing (a torn ligament forced an 11th-hour withdrawal).

But she seems as proud of her work in retail and hospitality as she is of her glittering showbiz career.

“We are all playing our part in society. Every single job is of value,” she says, slicing the air to accentuate her point. “If that’s what you gotta do to keep the lights on, then that’s what you gotta do.”

As the cost of living crisis grinds on, ‘keeping the lights on’ is getting harder and harder. There are currently three million children in working households living in poverty, up from 2.1 million in 2010. The TUC estimates that, if earnings had grown according to trends before the financial crisis, the average worker would be £14,000 a year better off. The food bank is filled with people who – if life were fairer – wouldn’t need to be here.

“I’ve seen people that I went to school with come in here, who I know have jobs, hard-working people with families, who have to rely on the food bank,” Odudu says. She points at the floor – downstairs, people are collecting their parcels as we speak. “It can happen to anyone – that’s the harsh reality of poverty.”

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A decade and a half of Conservative government has entrenched the existing inequalities, particularly in the north. Over 15 years, austerity measures robbed the Blackburn with Darwen Borough Council of around £148 million in government grants – roughly half of its spending power. These sweeping reductions necessitated a real-terms spending cut of more than £500 per resident.

The council can no longer afford to provide many of the services that locals once took for granted.

“We struggled financially growing up, but I was never hungry, I was never cold,” Odudu says. “Growing up in a working-class family, we leaned on support. We had the support of good free education at our local comprehensive school, the support of the advice that you can get at your local town hall, the support that you can get by having access to a computer a couple of days a week in the local library… that’s reducing, people are being left behind.”

More than a third (36%) of Blackburn’s children live in poverty, almost twice the English average of 19.9%. Healthy life expectancy in the town is now just 59, three years below the national average.

The social fabric of deprived communities is being stretched. And often, AJ Odudu says, minorities pay the price. Just take the riots that rippled across the UK this summer.

“A lot of racism stems from miseducation about jobs, for example, and the ability to have access to jobs,” she says. “It’s all down to poverty. It’s that lack of social mobility that makes people want to point the finger at other people for their hard life.”

Growing up, it sometimes felt like Odudu was part of the “only black family in Blackburn”. She remembers dreading the school register – teachers didn’t even try to pronounce her birth name, Onatejiro, shortening it instead to AJ. (She’s embraced AJ now, though: “I was like, Do you know what? I’m in it. And now it’s obviously my whole TV name. It’s a stage name, Jamie Foxx isn’t called Jamie Foxx, that’s fine.”) She has previously written about “dark and painful” racist bullying at school.

Nonetheless, she’s confident that “any form of -ism” can be overcome, if people “get access to different people and voices and views”.

Poverty makes overcoming prejudice a lot harder. There is a “hopeless feeling” in left-behind Britain, Odudu says.

“Seems like there’s a feeling of, ‘I might as well kick off, there’s nothing to lose.’ People need to have the ambition and the hope that there is something to lose, and that everyone has a place in society.”

That’s going to need investment. Asked what she would like the government to prioritise, Odudu pulls a pained face: “Oh my gosh – how long have you got?”

“First of all, I think that minimum wage could be comparable to the actual cost of living. Inflation goes up, yet wages don’t. And there should be enough money to support the NHS – I mean, public services are on their knees, and it’s harrowing to see.”

AJ Odudu has backed Trussell’s Guarantee Our Essentials campaign, calling for an increase to universal credit to ensure a living standard for benefits claimants. The goal is to eradicate the need for food banks, and to make them a thing of the past.

But until then, Odudu – who spent a portion of her morning diligently scanning boxes of tea bags for use-by dates – says she’ll keep volunteering. Food bank manager Gill rated the TV broadcaster’s skills a nine-out-of-ten. “She could do better. She needs to come back.”

“Absolutely,” Odudu says, nodding vigorously. “I will absolutely be back.”

Click here to find your nearest Trussell food bank, or donate

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