Kitten's sex fantasy

She has already proclaimed herself the hardcore Left-wing lesbian of Big Brother.

But the father of Kathryn 'Kitten' Pinder last night said her tales of being a teenage prostitute are a lie - and slammed Channel 4 for the show's obsession with sex.

Kenneth Pinder, a retired surveyor, said his daughter was in fact at a £12,000-a-year boarding school at 16, the age when she told fellow contestants on the reality show she was working as a child prostitute in London.

She had, however, completed a well-regarded dissertation on prostitution while a university student, so he assumed she must have drawn on that knowledge for her attention-seeking stories on screen.

And Mr Pinder, 57, who had to remortgage the family's detached home to satisfy 'radical' Kathryn's request to go to private school, said the whole family are devastated by her sudden appearance on television.

None had been told she was to take part. Mr Pinder and his former wife Elizabeth-Anne - they split in 1998 - were last night understood to be making desperate efforts to persuade producers to remove their 24-year- old daughter from the programme before more harm is done.

Since she entered the Big Brother house on Friday - publicly kissing her girlfriend Lianda Gibson and giving cameramen her trademark one-finger salute as she did so - she has already became unpopular with fellow inmates and had all her belongings taken.

At his home in St Albans, Hertfordshire, Mr Pinder, who calls his daughter Kat, said: 'Kat was having problems at her secondary school in Beverley, Yorkshire, and she chose to go to private school.

'We remortgaged the house, and she chose Denstone College in Staffordshire.

'When she reached the age of 16, she was still at Denstone College. She was still there right to the end of the following academic year.

'She was nearly 17 when she left. She then came home to live with her parents in Beverley.

'She was a full-time student at Wyke Sixth-Form College in Hull and followed on to Hull College doing A-levels. She studied continuously in Hull and was living in Hull right through university until she got her degree in 2003.

'She missed getting a first- class degree by a whisker and got the departmental prize. Only then did she move to Brighton. She never lived in London.

'I do not know why she has said what she has said. Her parents have loved her and cherished her.'

He added that she may have found it easy to talk about prostitution on the television show because her degree dissertation had been a comparison of prostitution in London with that in Amsterdam.