Melton woman’s quest to find love on The Undateables TV show

The 25-year-old teaching assistant was matched with Alex Manners (23) on the popular Channel 4 programme, The Undateables, which helps people coping with challenging and often-misunderstood conditions and disabilites to find love.

Kelly and Alex, who have both been diagnosed as being on the autistic spectrum, met in a park in Birmingham and as the cameras rolled they instantly hit it off.

They have kept in touch with phone calls and text messages but the isolation demanded by the current Covid-19 crisis means their budding romance has to be put on hold for now.

Kelly’s episode aired on Wednesday and she was watching on excitedly with her mum, Ruth, as footage showed her getting ready at home, the couple meeting and eating ice cream together and then playing a game of mini golf.

Kelly told the Melton Times: “For the most part it was as though the cameras didn’t exist and a lot of what you saw was me and Alex being organic.

“I came out with a lot of what mum calls ‘Kellyisms’ and now they’ve gone out on national television.

“Mum thought it was brilliant. She must have rewatched the bit where they showed our house about 10 times.

“It hit me that I was on the show when the series first started and they showed a trailer and I was on it hugging Alex. I remember my mum shouting out ‘Kelly you’re on the trailer’

“I had a lot of interest on social media on the night it was aired and the reaction was quite positive although I did get a bit of ribbing for my eye make-up.”

The film crew were at her home from 8am as Kelly picked her outfit and put her make-up on. She was asked to hide behind a tree before emerging to meet Alex for the first time.

As they played mini golf later on in front of the cameras, children and adults from a sports camp in the park gathered to watch them.

It was a busy day for Kelly as she had to get to Twinlakes Theme Park later on to attend a dress rehearsal for the Xtreme Scream attraction.

She recalled: “I went from being thoroughly made up and putting on a lovely dress from the 1970s to having to wear a load of bandages and having fake blood chucked at me.”

Kelly, a former pupil at the town’s Sherard Primary School, is known to many through her popular blog, My Melton, which campaigns to make Melton Mowbray more welcoming to young adults aged 16 to 26 after it came bottom in a BBC Newsbeat survey last year ranking UK places on how suitable they were for young people.

She said: “I applied for the show because at the time everything was falling into place in my life.

“I had finally got my foot in the door for my dream career because I’ve wanted to work in education since I was 13 or 14.

“The My Melton stuff was taking off and starting to get traction and the only thing I didn’t have was a love life.

“My attitude was ‘what is the worse that can happen? If we don’t hit it off, I’ve lost nothing and I’ll still be single’.”

Alex, who lives in Solihull in the West Midlands, has written a book - That’s Not Right! My Life Living With Aperger’s - which is available to buy online on Amazon and he also runs a popular You Tube channel.

The couple are clearly well matched but can we expect love to develop in the future between them?

Kelly added: “I’m still in regular contact with Alex but it has been difficult with the Covid-19 situation.

“There is quite a distance between us and we are also both incredibly busy but you never know what will happen in future.”

Go online to www.mymelton.weebly.com to read Kelly’s blog, My Melton.