Inside the squalid council flat where tragic Lovers’ Guide star Wendy-Ann Paige spent her final years living on £5 benefits handout a day after squandering £8m fortune

This is the squalid Essex council flat where once-millionaire sex guru Wendy-Ann Paige spent her final years, penniless and living on disability benefits of just £5 per day. 

Wendy – who made millions teaching Britons to have better sex – was found dead aged 61 on 13 December in the filthy one-bedroom high rise flat on a rough estate she shared with long-term partner Christian Bines.

Now Mr Bines, 50, has shown MailOnline inside the chaotic flat on a rundown council estate where she spent her last years.

As our exclusive photos show every surface cluttered with empty energy drink cans, crisp packets and unemptied ashtrays.

Dog mess from Ms Paige’s beloved Chihuahua called Cheech covered part of the floor while a questionnaire from a local food bank further cements the couple’s financial woes.

Sipping from a filthy ‘I heart sex’ mug while leaning back on a shabby and stained sofa surrounded by dirty dishes and stale biscuits, Mr Bines said: ‘Look around you, this is how we lived and I’m very embarrassed about it.

‘Wendy once had it all but in the end, she had nothing. Life was very hard for us both, we were just about surviving, and it was like that for many years. Neither of us worked and all we had was our benefits money, which wasn’t very much.

‘At times we lived on just £5 or £6 per day and we’d not eat for two or three days, and when we did, it was usually toast. We didn’t have enough money for heating or the bills. Life has been very hard for us.’

Elsewhere in the flat was the kitchen overflowing dirty water and littered with dirty dishes and discarded food. Adjoining it was a grimey bathroom containing a soiled toilet and a stained bath filled with buckets.

At the height of her fame, Wendy spiced up the bedrooms of an entire country when she starred in the Lovers’ Guide and amassed an £8 million fortune, later living in a sprawling seaside mansion.

She was mobbed by fans wherever she went and rubbed shoulders with A-listers like Jack Nicholson and Michael Douglas.

But her life unravelled as did her success, when she succumbed to a £70,000-a-year addiction to cocaine. 

And her fortune dwindled when she invested thousands into a restaurant business in Thailand with her former husband Tony Duffield – as well as her battles with depression, anxiety and PTSD – left her penniless.

Mr Bines added: ‘It’s crazy to think that she was so once so rich and famous and then lived and died in a place like this without a penny to her name. Towards the end Wendy was crying a lot, trying to figure out where it all went wrong?’

Wendy’s appearance in The Lovers’ Guide – which showed her having real orgasms during sex with Mr Duffield, and a graphic scene of a male model masturbating – stunned repressed Brits and was so explicit it had an 18 certificate.

But the video rocketed up the sales charts, beating Disney’s Little Mermaid and Bruce Willis action movie Die Hard to the number one spot.

She went on to write the best-selling Sextrology in 1994, a guide to finding the ideal sexual partner through astrology and became a columnist for two national newspapers.

In 1992 she married Mr Duffield in Las Vegas on her way to play poker with Jack Nicholson – an event she missed for the whirlwind wedding.

But just seven years later in a failed effort to save their crumbling marriage Wendy sold her 18-bedroom mansion and sunk much of the proceeds into a move to Phuket, Thailand to open a restaurant.

The following year the restaurant failed and the couple split for good with Mr Duffield revealing to a newspaper they would bonk 10 times per day accusing bisexual Wendy of putting his life at risk by triggering a dangerous heart condition with marathon sex sessions.

In a 2001 interview with the News of the World, he said: ‘All the sex had put a strain on my ticker.

‘I had a bypass operation, but tried not to bypass any situation with my wife. I tried to satisfy her but I wasn’t enough. If I ever said no she’d get really upset and cause a terrible scene.

‘Normal sex was never enough for Wendy. She’d been having sex with girls since she was at school and genuinely enjoyed it.

‘I never suggested it, but I was like any other man-if a sexy girl is cavorting on the carpet with your wife you turn off the football! We joined a gym together in Kent and Wendy was very popular. She loved having sex with other girls in the Jacuzzi and showers and was the life and soul of the changing rooms.

‘I still have a high sex drive, but I also have the severe heart problem. Unfortunately the two don’t mix. My surgeon warned me that sex will kill me if I overdo it.’

He went on to start a new life in Thailand with 30-year-old lover Nok while Wendy returned to the UK where she moved into a council flat next door to Mr Bines.

He said: ‘Most of her money was done by the time she got back from Thailand. She didn’t want to go there in the first place, it was all Tony’s idea.

‘And a lot of her money went on drugs. But Wendy loved them, she couldn’t stop taking cocaine, it made her happy. She had no regrets about putting all that money up her nose, but she had a lot of regrets about marrying Tony.’

He added: ‘She was a very beautiful woman and I recognised her straight away because I’d watched Lovers’ Guide and had seen her on TV. She had a great body and legs. I couldn’t believe that she was interested in me. About three weeks after meeting we started a relationship.

‘The sex was amazing. Let’s just put it this way, she taught me a few things.’

Battling drug addiction and mental health problems, Ms Paige never worked again after returning to the UK, relying on benefits right up until the time of her death.

Mr Bines revealed that he has never worked for the past 24 years either and the couple survived on their combined benefits of around £300 per week.

But he admitted: ‘I’m sure if she had the money, Wendy would still have been doing cocaine, despite our living circumstances, because she was a real party girl.’

Mr Bines spent the last three years caring for Ms Paige who was diagnosed with depression, anxiety and PTSD.

She had also been left virtually bed bound following a fall last year which left her with a slipped disc in her back, a broken collarbone and arm, which she never truly recovered from.

Sitting in their squalid flat, Mr Bines revealed Wendy would share tales of her hedonistic lifestyle and show him pictures of the lavish 18-bedroom mansion she had owned in East Sussex.

He added: ‘She enjoyed talking about the old days and telling me stories about what she’d got up to and the famous people she’d met. She loved the glitz and glamour and living the high life but wasn’t big headed about it.

‘Sometimes she’d talk about her mansion and tell me how lovely it was. And then she’d look around our flat and feel very sad.’

The flat the couple shared is located on the top floor of a block on a rundown council estate in Southend, Essex, where there is open drug dealing and the smell of marijuana wafts through the air.

Mr Bines added: ‘Wendy just got on with life because she had to, but it wasn’t easy for her at first. A lot of the people around here don’t know how rich and famous she once was because she never made a big deal of it.’

He found Ms Paige unresponsive after trying to wake her on the morning of 13 December and immediately called 999.

Police are investigating the death and a post-mortem is yet to be carried out to determine her cause of death.

Fighting back the tears, Mr Bines said that they were looking forward to the festive period despite their precarious financial situation and dire living conditions.

He admitted that he does not have any money for her funeral and does not know when it will take place.

Mr Bines said: ‘Wendy was my best friend and companion. We might not have had much but at least we had each other.

‘She was a wonderful, kind-hearted human being and I’m devastated by her loss. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her.’