Originally Posted by Snow_Leopard:
“I felt the same about Coleen. She wasn't good at skating at all, but just kept getting the votes. Ridiculous!”
There wasn't a DOI companion show that year and Coleen was the only contestant with a platform to publicise herself. She was appearing on Loose Women and writing her column in The Mirror at the same time as doing DOI and she used them both to beg for votes. The other contestants were all lucky if they managed to get on any chatshows at all. That must have had a big effect on the voting.
For example, Jessica that year didn't appear on any chatshows until almost the end of the series and the interview she did was very short in comparison to interviews I saw with other contestants. It came across as though someone at DOI suddenly woke up to the fact that they hadn't arranged any publicity for her and so they got her squeezed into a couple of spare minutes on the Alan Titchmarsh show. Only problem was, Alan spent almost the entire interview talking about Jessica's husband and Coleen Nolan and barely asked her anything about herself.