A family crisis left Fiona Phillips facing her toughest challenge yet, turn to page
ITused to irritate Fiona Phillips that during her 12-year tenure on the GMTV sofa she was always described as bubbly. ‘I like drinking bubbly, but not being perceived as it,’ she once said. However, it’s not hard to see why. Smiley and energised, she talks at 100 miles an hour, interrupting herself with horrified laughter: ‘I’m doing that thing with my arms again. I must be really annoying to watch on television.’
She apologises several times for losing her thread, unable to pin down her thoughts. This is because she ran out of the house earlier without her only working debit card (her others may have been hacked, but she hasn’t had time to ring the bank), having frantically gone through the pockets of everything she wore yesterday while filming a documentary The Truth About Stress for the BBC, part of its mental health season.
‘My husband says to me, “You’re always losing things.” And I think, “Yes, because I’m so busy.” If you can learn to just be in the moment, as I’ve discovered while making this programme…’ And off she goes again, not at all in the moment, about how she’d stopped at a train station on the way back from filming to do an emergency food shop for her teenage sons Nathaniel, 17, and Mackenzie, 14, even though her husband Martin Frizell (who has his own busy job as editor of This Morning) said he would take care of it. ‘I still worry.’
She’s living proof of the gender stress gap; a recent study found that women worry more than ➤
➤ men about situations, real or imagined, because we hold on to concerns and churn them over. ‘We still do everything, don’t we? Men get stressed about things at work, but they don’t seem to notice at home,’ she notes wearily.
However, the programme, in which Fiona and three volunteers undergo a variety of stress tests, questions whether all stress is bad. ‘If you learn to use it properly then it’s good – it sharpens your performance and motivates you,’ she explains. ‘It helps us to perform better, to run away from danger or to face it. That butterfly feeling is your body preparing you for a performance. Brilliant actors use stress in the way it’s meant to be used; it powers them up.’
But while acute bouts of ‘productive stress’ give us an evolutionary advantage, chronic stress may shorten our lifespan and contribute to major killers such as heart disease, dementia, diabetes and cancer.
No wonder the World Health Organization has dubbed stress the ‘health epidemic of the 21st century’.
It’s this chronic stress that Fiona, 56, knows all too well. A classic sandwich- generation mother, for the best part of a decade she juggled her high-powered job at GMTV (and its 3.30am starts) with babies and ailing parents. She also took on extra work, presenting a show called OK! TV, and taking part in Strictly Come Dancing and Loose Women (it was important to show her bosses that she was in demand).
Now Fiona is also campaigning to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s, which killed her mother Amy at the age of 74 in 2006, and her father Neville six years later. When it comes to stress, big and small, Fiona has been there.
Back in 2008, Fiona surprised everyone when she abruptly resigned from her reported €350,000-a-year GMTV contract stating that she ‘couldn’t have it all’. As an interviewer she was incisive, compassionate, funny and had great chemistry with her co-hosts Eamonn Holmes and Ben Shephard. She didn’t find live TV particularly stressful, even when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu popped up on a live link with no warning or briefing ‘and Eamonn said, “You do it!”’ Or the time Arnold Schwarzenegger walked out of an interview in a huff: ‘He didn’t even say, “I’ll be back!”’
The job was going well, but everything else in her life was crumbling. Fiona found out by chance in 2000 that her mother had early- onset Alzheimer’s from the psychiatrist who was treating her – her parents knew but hadn’t told her. ‘For that generation, especially my dad, it’s a pride thing – don’t bother the children.’
Usually spry, her mother had been behaving out of character for some years – forgetting things, not caring about her appearance or the state of their home in Wales – and had been prescribed antidepressants. ‘One thing after another started happening. She set fire to the kitchen: she forgot she’d put some fat on the burner and it went up in flames. Then she put her hands in the flames and got badly burned.’
It was clear that something was ‘catastrophically wrong’ when Fiona’s son Nathaniel was born in 1999 and Amy came to ‘help with the baby, as grandmas do. She was crying all the time. She wanted to fill the kettle to make a cup of tea, but she just stared at the taps, looking really worried, touching them gingerly. I wondered what on earth was wrong with her.’
Her parents’ marriage became increasingly troubled. ‘My dad would ring me up saying, “That bloody woman, you’ll never guess what she’s done now.” I thought it was their relationship falling apart, but it was because she was really ill and we didn’t know.’ By the time Amy had to go into a home, Neville had become extremely distant and refused to visit. ‘I felt as though my whole world was imploding because Dad was behaving oddly. I took against him. I thought, “You cold, horrible man; this has brought out your true colours,” but it turned out he was ill [with Alzheimer’s] as well and we didn’t know.’
Not surprisingly, Fiona almost buckled. She was making the five-hour drive from London to Wales almost weekly on very little sleep, sometimes pulling over in her car when her editor phoned wanting her to make changes to her newspaper column: ‘I felt like crying. I would sit in a layby with the children screaming in the back, but I always did it. I pulled it together professionally, but my stress levels were constantly topped up. I was always getting colds and sore throats.’ She suffered a kidney infection, a bout of shingles and a miscarriage at nine weeks which began as she was preparing to go on air.
Fiona’s younger son Mackenzie had terrible eczema as a baby and had to be wrapped up in bandages because he bled. ‘I worried whether I was transferring my anxiety on to him – you blame yourself.
‘I didn’t realise quite how bad I was until I looked back; I became agoraphobic.’ Fiona used her early mornings as an excuse not to go to social events, so Martin went to dinner parties on his own for several months. Her colleague Eamonn told her she was ‘seriously depressed’ and needed ➤
We still do everything, don’t we? Men get stressed at work, but not at home
➤ to see someone. ‘I was constantly on the verge of tears. Martin said, “You’re not right.” And I said, “I know I’m not right.” I was constantly on edge.
‘I was pulled in four different directions – work, keeping food in the house, children, parents… five if you count my husband. I felt angry seeing the mums at school who didn’t work, because I had so many people relying on me. I just sat in my office one day like this…’ She puts her hands around her face and starts rocking. ‘It was like Munch’s The Scream. I thought, “I’m really breaking down.” That takes a long time to mend and I think it’s always there in some form.’
Fiona still feels guilty that she wasn’t with her mother when she died, having left her two hours earlier, and that she didn’t do enough while she was alive. ‘I still wake up at night with that,’ she shivers. ‘All the emotions are right here.’
Her father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s after Amy’s death; Fiona took him to make a new will and the solicitor said, ‘Your dad can’t make a will – he doesn’t know your brother’s name. Are you sure he’s all right?’ She discovered he was living in squalor surrounded by books on how to preserve your memory. ‘I scooped him up and took him to live near me.’
So, for the sake of her family – and sanity – she resigned from GMTV. There were offers to go into politics but instead, she poured her energies into a more personal mission, writing a memoir Before I Forget: A Daughter’s Story – a moving but unvarnished portrayal of her parents’ illnesses and disintegrating relationship.
‘In those first few chapters, when I look back, I’m so angry. I was angry at my dad. I still couldn’t let go of the fact that he didn’t look after Mum when she was ill. But he was also ill and we didn’t know; it was the most horrible situation. I was angry at myself.’
How did her own marriage survive? While she held it together for work, her parents, her children, ‘Martin got none of me.’
Fiona met Martin when he was GMTV chief correspondent. She never wanted to get married and when he proposed after just four weeks of dating, her reaction was, ‘Why would I want to do that? My dad always joked, “Don’t do what I’ve done, get married and have children.” He was a free spirit and I’m very like him.’
So why did she say yes to Martin? ‘I saw his heart sink and his eyes teared up and I thought, gosh, it really means something.’ They married in Las Vegas in 1997. She had doubts on the day and even now thinks marriage is a ‘ridiculous institution’.
One of their boys has Martin’s surname, the other hers. ‘I just don’t believe in being tied legally to someone. I remember filling in the details for the licence and thinking I could have put I’m marrying Mickey Mouse or Eamonn Holmes and no one would have been the wiser. I’m not sure if it’s legally binding. Don’t know, don’t care. [Vegas marriages are in fact recognised in Britain.] The fact is, we’re still together.’
Their 20th wedding anniversary is this week. Any plans? ‘Oh, I didn’t know!’ she gasps. ‘I know it’s 1997 and that it’s May – 20 years, that’s true. Oh my God! I can’t tell you what date it is!’ They always forget their anniversary, she says, apart from once when the boys were small and she tripped over a package on her way out to her early morning GMTV car: ‘Martin had bought me this lovely Prada purse, and he said, “I know you don’t know when it is, but happy anniversary. I love you very much.”’
Did they ever have to consciously mend their relationship? ‘I don’t think we consciously thought it was broken, because Martin had been so brilliant at putting up with me being mentally and physically involved elsewhere all the time.’
The couple often pop out for impromptu drinks now that their children are older. (The children she never thought she wanted ‘just happened. I didn’t tell anyone until I was about five months pregnant because I wasn’t wildly excited, but that first night on my own in hospital with him [Nathaniel] I just fell completely in love. They are the loves of my life now but I still enjoy my own company; I’m very much like my dad in that respect.’)
Now focusing on her career post-sofa and post-parents, life is much less stressful, although she still gets bouts of the blues now and then, which she puts down to the menopause.
‘I have the stress that all women have: washing, thinking we’ve got nothing in the fridge. Martin’s brilliant – he will put a wash on – but it’s never the whole job is it, never followed right through to the end.
‘I still have the stress of responsibility for family life, but I don’t have that constant stomachlurching feeling that I used to have, the emotion right in my throat, where one more thing could send me over the edge.’
Work isn’t stress-free, but that’s how she likes it. ‘I’m the sort of person who loves deadlines and work my best like that. But I can manage it now and it helps because I sleep properly and have time to unwind over coffee with a friend.’
The Truth About Stress programme points to studies that show people who perceive stress to be bad for them are more likely to get ill. In a bid to reframe our thinking, the filmmakers
My children are the loves of my life now but I still like my own company
had Fiona jumping off a treetop platform on a zip wire – ‘my worst nightmare’ – while being given an empowering technique to alleviate stress.
‘You have to tell yourself, “I am excited” and then jump. I actually felt excited; it was weird.’ Studies also show that saying ‘I’m excited’ before a stressful event makes us perform up to 22 per cent better.
‘I thought, I must remember to do that in stressful situations. Before a big speech, you can look at all those people and say, “Oh God” or, “I am excited – right, get out there and do it.”’
Knowing what she knows now, what interventions would she stage on her younger self if she could? It’s a question she wrestles with. She finally says she would have been more hands- off with their brilliant nanny who could quite clearly cope without her daily briefings. ‘I would still find it hard. But I would just deal with one thing at a time. If I was going to see my dad, I’d say I’m not going to deal with anything from home until I get back.’
But even now, with her life on a more even keel, there’s always the nagging worry that when she loses something, it’s not just because she’s so busy. She’d previously refused a genetic test for dementia when taking part in another programme, The Killer In Me. ‘What is the point of knowing? You can’t do anything about it but there would be a cloud over the rest of my life. There are lifestyle changes you can make: eating lots of fruit and vegetables, nuts, seeds, and having the odd glass of red wine, which is supposed to be good.’
On the plus side, she notes, her frenetic lifestyle seems to have counteracted the genetic predisposition towards obesity that she was found to have. She is a neat and toned size eight.
Fiona has always been an advocate of exercise (which helps the feelgood neurotransmitter serotonin to kick in). She also discovered that mindfulness would not only help her manage stress, but improve her ability to focus. She was sceptical about it, but was persuaded by the difference in brain scans between a ‘mindfulness brain’ and a busy ‘Fiona-type’ brain in the course of filming. ‘I haven’t had time to practise it yet,’ she says, aware of the irony. Somehow, I can’t see her sitting beatifically and neither can she. ‘I’m not good at chilling out. I always have to be doing something.’
The saying ‘If you want something doing ask a busy person’ has Fiona’s name all over it. And there’s now science behind it, too. A 2016 study found that being busy increases motivation and reduces the time it takes to complete a task. Not that Fiona ever gets to the end of a to- do list – where would be the fun in that?