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‘I refuse to be a victim': Anne Diamond on surviving her son's death, a brutal divorce and now cancer
Anne Diamond is passing judgment on the sofa on which she is sitting in a private room at Le Manoir, the Oxfordshire restaurant and hotel close to where she lives, run by her friend Raymond Blanc. 'It's got a nice firm cushion. But yours is too soft. You can't get out of it very easily,' she says. She knows a bit about sofas, of course. 'The thing to be aware of when you are sitting on one, particularly on TV, is your knees. It's all the camera can see. So when I did breakfast TV I would always wear skirts that covered them up.' I almost feel as though I am in the studio with Diamond, on an episode of Good Morning Britain in the 1980s as she says this. She has the same sparkly girl-next-door cheer at 70 that she had as an astonishingly young 26-year-old in 1979, when she breezed onto our screens and helped kickstart a golden age of daytime television. Immediately, her brightly coloured persona and effervescent warmth marked a break with the twin-set-and-pearls era of previous female television presenters such as Jan Leeming. Instead she was just like us, chatting to celebrities as though she'd known them forever, sharing photographs on air of her first pregnancy scan and eventually ditching the posh frocks for knitwear – albeit extraordinary 1980s creations with shoulder pads and sequins. 'I figured out for myself that wearing ostentatious designer clothes didn't work,' she says. 'People didn't like that very much. So I wore jumpers.' She's wearing one today, in fact, under a smart white suit. 'A lot of TV at the time was still pretty stuffy. But Good Morning Britain didn't have any airs and graces.' We've met the week after the programme with which she is indelibly associated – although by 1992 she and her co-presenter Nick Owen had jumped ship to front a new BBC show, Good Morning with Anne and Nick – has descended into turmoil. Headlines are screaming 'ITV bloodbath' as the channel announces 220 job cuts to its daytime schedule, including Good Morning Britain and Loose Women, on which Diamond appeared as a regular panellist between 2016 and 2018. What on earth is going wrong? 'It is failing to connect,' says Diamond in the sort of voice that implies this would never have happened on her watch. 'It's become terribly showbiz but in a lowest-common-denominator way. I find it difficult to watch because it's all Coronation Street stars.' Nor does she think it's newsy enough. 'It should have more of a news magazine format. Instead they've gone for the quick buck, which hasn't worked, because their viewing figures are much lower than they say. Both ITV and the BBC [whose flagship show is BBC Breakfast] have massaged the figures to make them look higher than they are.' Officially both programmes have around five million viewers. Either way, it's a far cry from Diamond's days, when Good Morning Britain would regularly attract an audience of around 14 million. Diamond realised the show had become a fixture of the cultural landscape when she met Paul McCartney at a function at the Dorchester. 'People had said a morning breakfast show would never work because people in Britain didn't watch TV at breakfast. But we quickly proved them wrong. At the Dorchester there was an enormous crowd around Paul and [his wife] Linda, but Paul turned around and said, 'Annie Diamond!' And I said, 'You know me?' And he said, 'Well, we have our cornflakes every morning and we watch breakfast television when you are on.' I found that stunning.' The key to Diamond's appeal was that she never pretended to be anyone other than who she was. Parts of Britain couldn't always keep up. When, in 1987, she announced she was pregnant with her then-boyfriend Mike Hollingsworth (they married in 1989 and divorced 10 years later) and that she planned to keep on working, the tabloid press erupted. 'It didn't occur to me that because I was pregnant I shouldn't be on screen,' she says. 'But the papers screamed that I was the most famous unmarried mother in Britain, which my mother didn't like, particularly. Some people clearly found it revolting that a pregnant woman should be presenting morning news.' Yet viewers were delighted, sending in well wishes and knitted booties by the bucket load. It was testament to how much Diamond had inserted herself into their lives. 'People almost felt as though they knew us. The trick with that sort of show is to create a family of presenters that people can become fond of. We also had a keep-fit spot, cartoons and lots of cookery – things to keep the whole family watching.' She thinks the steep decline in viewing figures on breakfast TV is not simply a case of audiences turning to streaming formats. 'It's just not family-orientated anymore. It's all about sex. It's like the Daily Mail [sidebar] of shame. And that's a mistake.' Is the format salvageable? 'I'm tempted to say yes, but I would make it more him-and-her on the sofa. I certainly don't know whether paying big money to big stars is the way to do it. I love the BBC, but the culture there at the moment is c--p; it's got an awful lot wrong with it. They allow some big stars to be on every programme and to dominate the channel, yet there is lots of young talent underneath that should be being brought through.' At this point, the name Gary Lineker inevitably pops up. The Match of the Day presenter left the BBC last weekend after two decades when the corporation finally lost patience over his use of social media to promote certain causes, including Palestine. 'If they had handled Lineker better and curbed his tweeting years ago, he'd still be on television,' says Diamond, who has great admiration for Lineker as a presenter. 'But it was the same with Huw Edwards. The BBC didn't handle it until it became such a crisis, the only way out was to get rid of him. That is bad management.' Does she think the corporation is scared of their big stars? 'If so, I can't think why. There's no excuse for why they've allowed them to become too big to handle. Instead, they let everything grow into a full-blown, front-page crisis.' She points to the cuts to regional broadcasting as a case in point. Diamond started out as a rookie journalist in regional newspapers on the south coast before joining BBC West in Bristol in the late 1970s. 'If you come up through regional news, it teaches you a respect for the people you're broadcasting to,' she points out. 'But I think there are a lot of broadcasters nowadays – producers, directors, executives, particularly, and presenters – who don't understand that there are people watching and listening. It's important you get your words right.' Does she agree with Mishal Husain, who, on departing Radio 4's Today programme in April, argued that 'personality-focused journalism doesn't have to be bombastic', a comment that was widely seen as a criticism of some of the changes to Today? 'Yes. You have presenters who have been allowed to get carried away with their own sense of importance.' Diamond, the middle of three girls, grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. Her father, who held a physics degree, was recruited by the Ministry of Defence at the outbreak of the Second World War to help develop radar at a hastily established base inside Malvern College – where the pupils were relocated to Eton and Harrow. It was there he met Diamond's mother, who worked as a secretary on the same project. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, she neither knew who she was working for nor, for many years afterwards, what her husband's role involved. Diamond only began to understand her father's importance – he had worked on miniaturising radar to fit individual aircraft – when several eminent scientists attended his funeral in 1997. After the war ended, bits of information about the radar project started dripping out. At the time, however, the level of secrecy was so high that even the residents of Malvern had no idea who these young men (and several women) in civilian clothing were. 'They were very suspicious,' says Diamond. 'They spat at the scientists [around 2,000 had come to Malvern] and sent them white feathers because they were convinced they must be conscientious objectors. It must have been terrible for my father, because all he wanted to do was fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. And yet he was ordered to become a designated worker instead.' Diamond made a documentary, Anne Diamond: VE Day and the Secret War, about her father for Viking TV, and is working on developing it into a series. She is keen for more stories about the scientists who worked at Malvern, and has set up an online campaign, Radar Families, in which she hopes to compile a social history of this forgotten chapter of Second World War history. Some of the stories are eye-popping – one includes an RAF test plane carrying cavity magnetrons (a high-powered vacuum tube used in early radar) crashing, and the onboard scientist having to clamber over the dead bodies of RAF pilots to get to the cavity magnetron before the emergency services arrived. I suggest to her that the subject would make an excellent film. 'Yes, well, it's probably not as exciting as a 'shoot them down' war movie. But those men were heroic. Malvern is the forgotten Bletchley Park. Without radar we wouldn't have won the war.' Beneath Diamond's shiny forthright sincerity there are nerves of steel. She has been through some dreadful times. In 1998 she separated from Hollingsworth after it was revealed he had had an affair; it later transpired he had been unfaithful throughout their marriage. Once again the red tops had a field day. 'There was a picture of me going into work at LBC, where I was hosting the radio breakfast show at the time, and they took a picture of me arriving at the studios at three in the morning,' she says. 'I looked very dishevelled, because you do at three in the morning. That made the front pages, with the headline 'Has Anne Diamond lost her sparkle'? The next day, my mother and sister, who was a hairdresser, arrived and sorted out my appearance. I remember my mother saying: 'Don't be weak, be strong. Weak is not a good look.'' And that helped? 'Yes, yes it did. But it was brutalising. You sit at the end of your bed and you feel, 'Cripes, who am I?' Because for so long I'd known where I was in life. I was a wife and mother.' But that heartache couldn't compare to what had happened seven years earlier. In 1991, she and Hollingsworth lost their third son, Sebastian, to sudden infant death syndrome (also known as cot death) at just four and a half months old. They already had two older sons, Oliver and James, and went on to have two more, Jake and Connor. Thirty years on, Diamond's grief remains raw. 'You don't get over the loss. By the time they are four and a half months, you've built the rest of their lives in your mind. I knew he was going to be a rugby player because he had that sort of physique. He was such a part of the family.' The attitude from the medical establishment at the time only intensified her grief. It was, at best, indifferent; at worst, misogynistic. '[Sebastian's death] was dismissed as a gynaecological problem. The attitude was very much 'Motherhood is a gynaecological issue, and if you lose babies, you lose babies. You simply have to cheer up and have another one.' But to me, it was the biggest tragedy of my life, and the idea that I just had to accept it was shocking.' So she refused to do so. She badgered away at the pathologist and the coroner for information, to no avail. 'I was just angry. I was angry at Sebastian for not crying out. And I was angry at the people who came to take his body away. It was three days before they did the post-mortem. Any trace of anything useful to know would have been lost by then.' Yet the Department of Health already knew at that point that putting children to sleep on their backs dramatically reduced the risk of cot death. A research project in New Zealand had been launched, encouraging all parents to put their children to sleep on their backs, and the government had agreed to allow a group of newborn babies in Bristol to be used as a control group. On discovering this, Diamond was consumed by a fury that has barely abated. 'I was incensed. Terribly hurt. I still think that if I'd been told [the advice from New Zealand], Sebastian would be alive today.' She persuaded a group of experts to meet the then-health minister, Virginia Bottomley ('the health secretary William Waldegrave never bothered to see me') and convinced Bottomley that they needed a television campaign. Initially, she had to battle just to get Bottomley to listen. 'I later gathered from the medical experts that, when they talked to the health minister without me present, she expressed her doubts about my veracity because I was a bereaved mother and just a TV presenter.' The resulting campaign, Back to Sleep, remains the most successful health campaign in television history, reducing cot deaths from 2,500 a year to around 300. In 2023, Diamond was awarded an OBE for services to public health. She becomes teary, and I feel a lump in my throat too. 'Going to the palace was wonderful. To hold a medal and think, 'That's for Sebastian.' I'm very proud of him.' The day after Sebastian's funeral, The Sun published a photograph of Diamond and Hollingsworth carrying his coffin. In 2011, Diamond cited this as evidence of excessive press intrusion during the Leveson Inquiry, accusing Rupert Murdoch of running a campaign against her after she had challenged him in the 1980s over his papers' disregard for the private lives of celebrities. She also told the inquiry that The Sun had offered her nanny £30,000 for a story and had infiltrated the hospital shortly after she gave birth to Oliver by impersonating a doctor. Today, she is a bit more sanguine about the impact of all this. 'I had fame when fame was very difficult to handle, and you had to be prepared that every single thing you did made a bloody picture in the papers. You knew you were always being scrutinised every moment of your life and that reporters were going through your rubbish. So I am fanatical about shredding everything.'But I know what sort of stress constantly being in court does to you, and what it means to become obsessed with how unfair the press is being,' she continues. 'That's why I worry about Prince Harry [Diamond knew his mother, Princess Diana, well during the 1990s]. I worry about the fact that he is obsessed with getting justice in a world in which maybe you can't. And actually, the best thing you can do is just get very good security guards and live behind a high fence if that's what you can afford.' She is, I suggest, a rare voice of support for Harry. She agrees the British public have lost sympathy for him. 'He needs his mum, but then, she might have become obsessed as well. He needs someone to say, 'Enjoy your best life'. The trouble is he hasn't got anything else to think about or do.' Diamond never had that luxury, for which she is grateful. She had four children to bring up, a career to manage. Thanks to the influence of her 'very pragmatic' mother, who sounds tremendous, she has always simply got on with things. In 2023 she announced she had undergone a double mastectomy, after being diagnosed with breast cancer – she is now cancer free. 'I was never scared. And I knew it was treatable. I just thought, 'Right, lop the breast off, if that's what you have to do. Just get rid of it.' You have to accept that your body is a bit like an old car, and that it needs a lot of work and you have to look after it.' It's because of her health that she doesn't want another mainstream presenting job. She currently presents the breakfast show on GB News at the weekend, 'which is just right'. She dislikes some of the critical conversations around GB News. 'Terms such as 'woke' and 'far-Right' are becoming almost meaningless,' she says. 'To call somebody far-Right just because they have a worry about immigration is not fair, because it's a simple human worry. It's all too easy to label people.' She is chuffed the show has been once again nominated for the Television and Radio Industries Club best news show, having won it twice before. 'That must annoy [traditional broadcasters].' Diamond never dated after splitting with Hollingsworth. 'It put me off dating forever. Honestly, I've been there and done that. I've never been interested, or never allowed myself to be interested. But I'm quite happy where I am. I defend the right of people to live like that and to think, 'Actually, I don't need a man.' Throughout my life I've survived because I've refused to think of myself as a victim.' Her resilience is humbling. She is quite the most astonishing person, a born survivor. 'I'm the oldest presenter on GB News. I'm very lucky to be still on air. People keep saying to me, 'Why don't you retire?' I know I should, but at the moment, I've got it good.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Telegraph
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘I refuse to be a victim': Anne Diamond on surviving her son's death, a brutal divorce and now cancer
Anne Diamond is passing judgment on the sofa on which she is sitting in a private room at Le Manoir, the Oxfordshire restaurant and hotel close to where she lives, run by her friend Raymond Blanc. 'It's got a nice firm cushion. But yours is too soft. You can't get out of it very easily,' she says. She knows a bit about sofas, of course. 'The thing to be aware of when you are sitting on one, particularly on TV, is your knees. It's all the camera can see. So when I did breakfast TV I would always wear skirts that covered them up.' I almost feel as though I am in the studio with Diamond, on an episode of Good Morning Britain in the 1980s as she says this. She has the same sparkly girl-next-door cheer at 70 that she had as an astonishingly young 26-year-old in 1979, when she breezed onto our screens and helped kickstart a golden age of daytime television. Immediately, her brightly coloured persona and effervescent warmth marked a break with the twin-set-and-pearls era of previous female television presenters such as Jan Leeming. Instead she was just like us, chatting to celebrities as though she'd known them forever, sharing photographs on air of her first pregnancy scan and eventually ditching the posh frocks for knitwear – albeit extraordinary 1980s creations with shoulder pads and sequins. 'I figured out for myself that wearing ostentatious designer clothes didn't work,' she says. 'People didn't like that very much. So I wore jumpers.' She's wearing one today, in fact, under a smart white suit. 'A lot of TV at the time was still pretty stuffy. But Good Morning Britain didn't have any airs and graces.' We've met the week after the programme with which she is indelibly associated – although by 1992 she and her co-presenter Nick Owen had jumped ship to front a new BBC show, Good Morning with Anne and Nick – has descended into turmoil. Headlines are screaming 'ITV bloodbath' as the channel announces 220 job cuts to its daytime schedule, including Good Morning Britain and Loose Women, on which Diamond appeared as a regular panellist between 2016 and 2018. What on earth is going wrong? 'It is failing to connect,' says Diamond in the sort of voice that implies this would never have happened on her watch. 'It's become terribly showbiz but in a lowest-common-denominator way. I find it difficult to watch because it's all Coronation Street stars.' Nor does she think it's newsy enough. 'It should have more of a news magazine format. Instead they've gone for the quick buck, which hasn't worked, because their viewing figures are much lower than they say. Both ITV and the BBC [whose flagship show is BBC Breakfast ] have massaged the figures to make them look higher than they are.' Officially both programmes have around five million viewers. Either way, it's a far cry from Diamond's days, when Good Morning Britain would regularly attract an audience of around 14 million. Diamond realised the show had become a fixture of the cultural landscape when she met Paul McCartney at a function at the Dorchester. 'People had said a morning breakfast show would never work because people in Britain didn't watch TV at breakfast. But we quickly proved them wrong. At the Dorchester there was an enormous crowd around Paul and [his wife] Linda, but Paul turned around and said, 'Annie Diamond!' And I said, 'You know me?' And he said, 'Well, we have our cornflakes every morning and we watch breakfast television when you are on.' I found that stunning.' The key to Diamond's appeal was that she never pretended to be anyone other than who she was. Parts of Britain couldn't always keep up. When, in 1987, she announced she was pregnant with her then-boyfriend Mike Hollingsworth (they married in 1989 and divorced 10 years later) and that she planned to keep on working, the tabloid press erupted. 'It didn't occur to me that because I was pregnant I shouldn't be on screen,' she says. 'But the papers screamed that I was the most famous unmarried mother in Britain, which my mother didn't like, particularly. Some people clearly found it revolting that a pregnant woman should be presenting morning news.' Yet viewers were delighted, sending in well wishes and knitted booties by the bucket load. It was testament to how much Diamond had inserted herself into their lives. 'People almost felt as though they knew us. The trick with that sort of show is to create a family of presenters that people can become fond of. We also had a keep-fit spot, cartoons and lots of cookery – things to keep the whole family watching.' She thinks the steep decline in viewing figures on breakfast TV is not simply a case of audiences turning to streaming formats. 'It's just not family-orientated anymore. It's all about sex. It's like the Daily Mail [sidebar] of shame. And that's a mistake.' Is the format salvageable? 'I'm tempted to say yes, but I would make it more him-and-her on the sofa. I certainly don't know whether paying big money to big stars is the way to do it. I love the BBC, but the culture there at the moment is c--p; it's got an awful lot wrong with it. They allow some big stars to be on every programme and to dominate the channel, yet there is lots of young talent underneath that should be being brought through.' At this point, the name Gary Lineker inevitably pops up. The Match of the Day presenter left the BBC last weekend after two decades when the corporation finally lost patience over his use of social media to promote certain causes, including Palestine. 'If they had handled Lineker better and curbed his tweeting years ago, he'd still be on television,' says Diamond, who has great admiration for Lineker as a presenter. 'But it was the same with Huw Edwards. The BBC didn't handle it until it became such a crisis, the only way out was to get rid of him. That is bad management.' Does she think the corporation is scared of their big stars? 'If so, I can't think why. There's no excuse for why they've allowed them to become too big to handle. Instead, they let everything grow into a full-blown, front-page crisis.' She points to the cuts to regional broadcasting as a case in point. Diamond started out as a rookie journalist in regional newspapers on the south coast before joining BBC West in Bristol in the late 1970s. 'If you come up through regional news, it teaches you a respect for the people you're broadcasting to,' she points out. 'But I think there are a lot of broadcasters nowadays – producers, directors, executives, particularly, and presenters – who don't understand that there are people watching and listening. It's important you get your words right.' Does she agree with Mishal Husain, who, on departing Radio 4's Today programme in April, argued that 'personality-focused journalism doesn't have to be bombastic', a comment that was widely seen as a criticism of some of the changes to Today? 'Yes. You have presenters who have been allowed to get carried away with their own sense of importance.' Diamond, the middle of three girls, grew up in Malvern, Worcestershire. Her father, who held a physics degree, was recruited by the Ministry of Defence at the outbreak of the Second World War to help develop radar at a hastily established base inside Malvern College – where the pupils were relocated to Eton and Harrow. It was there he met Diamond's mother, who worked as a secretary on the same project. Bound by the Official Secrets Act, she neither knew who she was working for nor, for many years afterwards, what her husband's role involved. Diamond only began to understand her father's importance – he had worked on miniaturising radar to fit individual aircraft – when several eminent scientists attended his funeral in 1997. After the war ended, bits of information about the radar project started dripping out. At the time, however, the level of secrecy was so high that even the residents of Malvern had no idea who these young men (and several women) in civilian clothing were. 'They were very suspicious,' says Diamond. 'They spat at the scientists [around 2,000 had come to Malvern] and sent them white feathers because they were convinced they must be conscientious objectors. It must have been terrible for my father, because all he wanted to do was fly a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain. And yet he was ordered to become a designated worker instead.' Diamond made a documentary, Anne Diamond: VE Day and the Secret War, about her father for Viking TV, and is working on developing it into a series. She is keen for more stories about the scientists who worked at Malvern, and has set up an online campaign, Radar Families, in which she hopes to compile a social history of this forgotten chapter of Second World War history. Some of the stories are eye-popping – one includes an RAF test plane carrying cavity magnetrons (a high-powered vacuum tube used in early radar) crashing, and the onboard scientist having to clamber over the dead bodies of RAF pilots to get to the cavity magnetron before the emergency services arrived. I suggest to her that the subject would make an excellent film. 'Yes, well, it's probably not as exciting as a 'shoot them down' war movie. But those men were heroic. Malvern is the forgotten Bletchley Park. Without radar we wouldn't have won the war.' Beneath Diamond's shiny forthright sincerity there are nerves of steel. She has been through some dreadful times. In 1998 she separated from Hollingsworth after it was revealed he had had an affair; it later transpired he had been unfaithful throughout their marriage. Once again the red tops had a field day. 'There was a picture of me going into work at LBC, where I was hosting the radio breakfast show at the time, and they took a picture of me arriving at the studios at three in the morning,' she says. 'I looked very dishevelled, because you do at three in the morning. That made the front pages, with the headline 'Has Anne Diamond lost her sparkle'? The next day, my mother and sister, who was a hairdresser, arrived and sorted out my appearance. I remember my mother saying: 'Don't be weak, be strong. Weak is not a good look.'' And that helped? 'Yes, yes it did. But it was brutalising. You sit at the end of your bed and you feel, 'Cripes, who am I?' Because for so long I'd known where I was in life. I was a wife and mother.' But that heartache couldn't compare to what had happened seven years earlier. In 1991, she and Hollingsworth lost their third son, Sebastian, to sudden infant death syndrome (also known as cot death) at just four and a half months old. They already had two older sons, Oliver and James, and went on to have two more, Jake and Connor. Thirty years on, Diamond's grief remains raw. 'You don't get over the loss. By the time they are four and a half months, you've built the rest of their lives in your mind. I knew he was going to be a rugby player because he had that sort of physique. He was such a part of the family.' The attitude from the medical establishment at the time only intensified her grief. It was, at best, indifferent; at worst, misogynistic. '[Sebastian's death] was dismissed as a gynaecological problem. The attitude was very much 'Motherhood is a gynaecological issue, and if you lose babies, you lose babies. You simply have to cheer up and have another one.' But to me, it was the biggest tragedy of my life, and the idea that I just had to accept it was shocking.' So she refused to do so. She badgered away at the pathologist and the coroner for information, to no avail. 'I was just angry. I was angry at Sebastian for not crying out. And I was angry at the people who came to take his body away. It was three days before they did the post-mortem. Any trace of anything useful to know would have been lost by then.' Yet the Department of Health already knew at that point that putting children to sleep on their backs dramatically reduced the risk of cot death. A research project in New Zealand had been launched, encouraging all parents to put their children to sleep on their backs, and the government had agreed to allow a group of newborn babies in Bristol to be used as a control group. On discovering this, Diamond was consumed by a fury that has barely abated. 'I was incensed. Terribly hurt. I still think that if I'd been told [the advice from New Zealand], Sebastian would be alive today.' She persuaded a group of experts to meet the then-health minister, Virginia Bottomley ('the health secretary William Waldegrave never bothered to see me') and convinced Bottomley that they needed a television campaign. Initially, she had to battle just to get Bottomley to listen. 'I later gathered from the medical experts that, when they talked to the health minister without me present, she expressed her doubts about my veracity because I was a bereaved mother and just a TV presenter.' The resulting campaign, Back to Sleep, remains the most successful health campaign in television history, reducing cot deaths from 2,500 a year to around 300. In 2023, Diamond was awarded an OBE for services to public health. She becomes teary, and I feel a lump in my throat too. 'Going to the palace was wonderful. To hold a medal and think, 'That's for Sebastian.' I'm very proud of him.' The day after Sebastian's funeral, The Sun published a photograph of Diamond and Hollingsworth carrying his coffin. In 2011, Diamond cited this as evidence of excessive press intrusion during the Leveson Inquiry, accusing Rupert Murdoch of running a campaign against her after she had challenged him in the 1980s over his papers' disregard for the private lives of celebrities. She also told the inquiry that The Sun had offered her nanny £30,000 for a story and had infiltrated the hospital shortly after she gave birth to Oliver by impersonating a doctor. Today, she is a bit more sanguine about the impact of all this. 'I had fame when fame was very difficult to handle, and you had to be prepared that every single thing you did made a bloody picture in the papers. You knew you were always being scrutinised every moment of your life and that reporters were going through your rubbish. So I am fanatical about shredding everything. 'But I know what sort of stress constantly being in court does to you, and what it means to become obsessed with how unfair the press is being,' she continues. 'That's why I worry about Prince Harry [Diamond knew his mother, Princess Diana, well during the 1990s]. I worry about the fact that he is obsessed with getting justice in a world in which maybe you can't. And actually, the best thing you can do is just get very good security guards and live behind a high fence if that's what you can afford.' She is, I suggest, a rare voice of support for Harry. She agrees the British public have lost sympathy for him. 'He needs his mum, but then, she might have become obsessed as well. He needs someone to say, 'Enjoy your best life'. The trouble is he hasn't got anything else to think about or do.' Diamond never had that luxury, for which she is grateful. She had four children to bring up, a career to manage. Thanks to the influence of her 'very pragmatic' mother, who sounds tremendous, she has always simply got on with things. In 2023 she announced she had undergone a double mastectomy, after being diagnosed with breast cancer – she is now cancer free. 'I was never scared. And I knew it was treatable. I just thought, 'Right, lop the breast off, if that's what you have to do. Just get rid of it.' You have to accept that your body is a bit like an old car, and that it needs a lot of work and you have to look after it.' It's because of her health that she doesn't want another mainstream presenting job. She currently presents the breakfast show on GB News at the weekend, 'which is just right'. She dislikes some of the critical conversations around GB News. 'Terms such as 'woke' and 'far-Right' are becoming almost meaningless,' she says. 'To call somebody far-Right just because they have a worry about immigration is not fair, because it's a simple human worry. It's all too easy to label people.' She is chuffed the show has been once again nominated for the Television and Radio Industries Club best news show, having won it twice before. 'That must annoy [traditional broadcasters].' Diamond never dated after splitting with Hollingsworth. 'It put me off dating forever. Honestly, I've been there and done that. I've never been interested, or never allowed myself to be interested. But I'm quite happy where I am. I defend the right of people to live like that and to think, 'Actually, I don't need a man.' Throughout my life I've survived because I've refused to think of myself as a victim.' Her resilience is humbling. She is quite the most astonishing person, a born survivor. 'I'm the oldest presenter on GB News. I'm very lucky to be still on air. People keep saying to me, 'Why don't you retire?' I know I should, but at the moment, I've got it good.'
The Sun
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Sun
From Coleen Nolan's ‘miserable' skinny stage to why Nadia Sawalha's WON'T calorie count – Loose Women diet secrets
THE Loose Women ladies are the stars of daytime TV and are known for their candid conversations. But many of the iconic panellists have also opened up about their weight loss journeys and relationship with food. 15 15 15 While many of them champion embracing your body and female empowerment, some have been honest about their diets and how they stay trim. Nadia Sawalha After years of yo-yo dieting Nadia Sawalha, 60, has ditched restrictive eating and learned to feel confident in her own skin – partly thanks to her Loose Women co-stars. The size-14 presenter now regularly strips off on social media to promote body positivity and favours 'intuitive eating' — an approach to food that rejects diets, meal plans and willpower. Nadia, who was a founding Loose Women member in 1999, says: 'You don't restrict any foods and go with what you really want, so one day it might all be bone broth soups, veggie juices and brown rice but the next it could be burger and chips. 'There are literally no banned foods, so there's no bingeing. I only eat when I'm hungry and stop when I've had enough.' She's previously opened up about doing the 16/8 intermittent programme, and said: 'Intermittent fasting is not a diet. 'It's a way of eating for life that works brilliantly for me. 'It's about more energy, mental clarity, freedom from the diet culture, oh yeah, and weight loss. And it doesn't cost anyone a penny!" She also had CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] to break the pattern of negative thinking towards her body. However, Nadia credits a 2017 underwear shoot with her Loose Women co-stars Stacey Solomon, Jane Moore, and Coleen Nolan, for helping her to finally accept herself. She shared: 'When people ask me what the secret is, it's every single day telling the voices to, 'shut the f*** up'.' Jane McDonald A few years ago, Jane wowed fans with her incredible weight loss - and revealed the secret to her success is eating one type of bread. The TV star, 62, lost a whopping four stone transforming her body from a UK size 12-14 to eight. Jane signed up to ITV's Sugar Free Farm in 2017 – where she ended up shedding weight. While on the show she discovered a different kind of bread that would aid weight loss because it doesn't have any yeast in it. 15 On the TV show she met nutritionist Angelique Panagos, who gave her a bread recipe that changed the way she ate forever. Jane told the Daily Star: "The only bread I eat is one that I've got a recipe for from Angelique. "It's got no yeast in it and it's made with lots of pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, wholemeal flour, oats and yogurt of all things. "It's literally 20 minutes and it's made – ready to put in the oven.' She also cut out 'white carbs', including crisps, white bread, pasta and flour. She starts her day with a green smoothie, and told the Daily Record: "I blend up a mixture of raw greens, flax seeds, chia seeds, spinach, kale, mint and a banana. It really is lovely." Coleen Nolan 15 Coleen Nolan, 60, who has been a Loose Women panellist since 2000, is known for her honesty and tackling difficult personal topics on-air, including relationships, cancer in her family, and body image. She previously shared how she did a juice diet to lose three stone in three months for her wedding. Speaking on the show, she said: 'I've done every single diet on the planet, one of which was just pure liquid diet. Did it work? Absolutely. Three stone, three months - that's what it said it would do and that's what it did. 'At the time I had a goal and it was for my wedding and I thought I'm never going to get this weight off.' After battling to keep her weight under control for years, Coleen cashed in on the celebrity fitness DVD craze, releasing four of her own between 2007 and 2009. With a gruelling diet and workout regime, she had shed 4st and dropped from a size 18 to a 10 - but it was an unhappy time for her. 'I looked amazing, actually,' she says. 'I would say that's probably the best I've ever looked. 'Funnily enough, I got offered a lot more primetime jobs.' But the 5ft 7in star says the constant exercise and dieting made her miserable. She revealed: 'As a person, I was probably the unhappiest I've felt. I lost me somewhere,' says the mum-of-three. 'I lost my personality and didn't know who to be any more.' The presenter's weight has fluctuated over the years, and admitted in 2021 she was told she needed a gastric band and to lose weight if she wanted a successful career on the box. Coleen said: "I have had a head of a big TV company saying: 'if you want to get in prime.' Now she has switched to a vegan lifestyle which has helped her lose two stone gradually. Denise Welch 15 15 Long-serving panellist Denise Welch, 67, who has delighted fans with her no-filter honesty since 2005, has undergone a dramatic transformation over the past decade. She lost over two stone with LighterLife and kept it off for more than 10 years - although admitted giving up alcohol made it worse. The LighterLife programme includes shakes, snacks, and carefully-measured daily meals, along with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which educate clients about emotional triggers for overeating. She admitted: "When I gave up drinking 10 yrs ago I gained a sweet tooth and very quickly one addiction was in danger of being replaced by another. "I'd put on two stone and was aware that my knees were aching and my breathing was impaired. "With the help of @lighterlife and working with a mentor, I changed my relationship with food. I lost two stone in two months and use those tools to this day." Linda Robson 15 15 Linda Robson changed her diet and lifestyle habits following a health scare in 2018 and lost two stone. Linda disclosed to a fan at the time that she had cut out on sugar, along with limiting her carbohydrate intake and alcohol. She had vowed to change her diet in January 2017 after she was warned by doctors that her drinking habits - which at the time was almost a bottle of wine a night - could put her at risk of diabetes. She dropped three dress sizes in a year with her healthy overhaul, and said: "I've stopped weighing myself but I think I've lost about two and a half stone. I've gone from a 16 to 18 dress size down to a 12 to 14." Brenda Edwards 15 15 Earlier this year, Brenda Edwards, 56, who has been on Loose Women since 2019, revealed the truth behind her jaw-dropping weight loss after dropping three dress sizes. Brenda said: 'Every time I seem to come off the show recently, I do get lovely viewers saying to me you've lost a lot of weight, are you on a well-known jab. 'I'm just working, very busy, just relooking at how I treat my body, and swimming!'
BBC News
3 days ago
- Business
- BBC News
Loose Women's Nadia Sawalha brands ITV cuts 'absolutely brutal'
Loose Women panellist Nadia Sawalha has said ITV's cuts to its daytime schedule came "out of the blue" and have been "absolutely brutal" for those working on the announced last week it was axing more than 220 jobs and making cuts to shows including Loose Women and on her YouTube channel, Sawalha said: "What's been brutal, absolutely brutal, over the last week, honestly I feel tearful about it, is that hundreds of people... are going to be made redundant out of the blue, these are all the people behind the scenes that support us in every way."There have been reports that the pool of panellists will be reduced, and Sawalha said she "could be let go tomorrow, [or] I could be let go in five years". In an annoucnement last week, ITV boss Kevin Lygo stressed that daytime is "a really important part" of its programming, and said he recognised that the plans "will have an impact on staff". In her video, Sawalha, who has also appeared in EastEnders, Dancing on Ice and The Bill, said Loose Women and Lorraine had been "highly successful", but that she accepted inflation was "insane, and cuts have to be made", before becoming emotional."Behind the scenes there are people that are really suffering, and what you don't realise is when you attack the show you attack them, because you never see all the army of people behind the scenes and how hard they work," she said."So to all my friends and colleagues behind the scenes that have just got a huge shock out of the blue, I'm so sorry."She added that she thought some conversations about the cuts had been "misogynistic", stressing the impact of the cuts on many of her friends and colleagues on the show, who have worked there for decades. "I can't tell you how upsetting it was to see people walking around numb with shock and fear about what they are going to do... [when] television is coming very slowly to its natural end."Speaking from her own perspective, she added: "What people don't realise at Loose Women is that we're self-employed. I am self-employed. Every contract is a new contract."I could be let go tomorrow, I could be let go in five years, you don't know because we're not employees." 'Impact on off-screen staff' Under the changes, Loose Women and Lorraine will be broadcast for 30 weeks out of 52. Lorraine Kelly's morning show will also reduce from an hour to 30 ITV did not comment on Sawalha's views, they referred to Lygo's comments about the cuts in last week's announcement."I recognise that our plans will have an impact on staff off-screen in our Daytime production teams, and we will work with ITV Studios and ITN as they manage these changes to produce the shows differently from next year, and support them through this transition," ITV's managing director of media and entertainment said. "Daytime has been a core element of ITV's schedule for over 40 years and these changes will set ITV up to continue to bring viewers award winning news, views and discussion as we enter our eighth decade."During weeks when Lorraine is not on air, Good Morning Britain will extend by half an hour, from 06:00 BST to 10:00 BST. This Morning will stay in its slot on weekdays across the February, ITV announced that soaps Coronation Street and Emmerdale would see their content cut by an hour a week between them from next this month, ITV chief executive Dame Carolyn McCall said the company was making "good progress" on a cost-cutting drive, and that she expected to make £30m non-content savings during the past few years, there has been a downturn in advertising revenue, part of a funding squeeze throughout the TV industry.
The Independent
3 days ago
- Business
- The Independent
Loose Women star Nadia Sawalha criticises ‘out of the blue' ITV daytime cuts
Loose Women panellist Nadia Sawalha has hit out at ITV's 'out of the blue' cuts. Speaking alongside her husband Mark Adderly on the couple's YouTube channel on Wednesday (28 May) , Sawalha said that whilst her job is secure, many people behind the scenes are 'really suffering'. Last week, ITV confirmed that Loose Women, alongside other popular daytime talkshow Lorraine, would be slashed from one hour to 30 minutes from next year. They will both now only air for 30 weeks. The broadcaster also announced that 220 jobs across the station's daytime output are expected to be cut. Struggling to contain her tears, Sawalha said: 'To all my friends and colleagues behind the scenes who have just got a huge shock out of the blue, I'm so sorry.'
