Jayne & Holly: Dark secrets of the DOI stars
Some of the Dancing On Ice stars are haunted by more than a fear of the contestants falling
After four years away, Dancing On Ice is back with a whole new look. Torvill and Dean have returned as judges, boy Ashley alongside ‘panto villian’ Jason Gardiner and new But three of Banjo. It’s perfect Sunday night family viewing. move… our favourite faces fear more than just a nail-biting
Afraid of dying in a plane crash
While this year’s fresh batch of celebrities are flying through the air, the daring ice stunts will, no doubt, leave Holly Willoughby – along with the rest of us – feeling anxious.
But the 36-year-old has for years battled with the far greater fear of dying in a plane crash. The mother-of-three often shares posts of her family on exotic holidays and has even had treatment from This Morning regulars The Speakmans to try to cure her phobia.
Ironically, Holly’s mum was an air hostess, and she had no such fears when she was young, even accompanying her mum to work. But, after taking part in the TV show Fear Of Flying at the start of her career, where she was filmed nose-diving in a plane, she developed anxiety over flying, confessing, ‘ When I go on a plane, I feel like we’re going to go towards the ground.’ Recalling that terrifying flight, she explained, ‘It wasn’t the plane’s fault, it got me down safely, it did its job. It was me that pegged on that I was going to die.’
For someone who often has to hop on a plane, that fear is something poor Holly must contend with regularly. And, as she revealed in an interview recently, she’s more fearful as a person than last time she hosted the show four years ago.
‘I’m scared of everything now,’ she confessed. ‘I think it’s just getting older and being a mum.’
Suffers crippling asthma attacks
She won Olympic Gold in 1984, making her the undisputed Queen of the Ice, but Jayne Torvill, 60, harbours a secret health fear. She suffers from asthma, a common, yet potentially dangerous, condition.
A simple skate around her local rink, which must feel like second nature to the mum-oftwo (she has adopted children Kieran, 15, and Jessica, 11, with husband Phil), could provoke a terrifying attack.
Jayne didn’t have asthma as a child. It developed in her late 20s, and she remembers her first attack with clarity.
‘I was suffering badly with hay fever and the pollen count was particularly high when I suddenly began to wheeze,’ she said.
After visiting the GP, she was diagnosed with asthma, and found in the years that followed that skating was a trigger – linked, she thought, to the sudden drop in temperature.
During the mid-90s, poor Jayne contended with at least one attack a month. When she gave up skating professionally in 1998, the asthma abated, but she had trouble again around the time she was doing Dancing On Ice in 2007.
These days, she uses inhalers to keep the condition at bay, but appearing on Dancing On Ice – without even stepping on the ice – puts Jayne at risk. It must be terrible, knowing that what you love could be the very thing making you ill.
OCD makes life a living hell
He seems perfectly at ease in his role as the harshest judge on British TV. But Jason Gardiner, under that catty, cool-as-ice demeanour, is battling internal demons that he has revealed have made his life an utter misery.
Australian Jason, 46, lives with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), a mental disorder where people feel the need to repeatedly check things, perform certain routines, or have particular thoughts – and they just can’t control it.
He confessed in 2016 that his OCD, which he describes as a ‘daily struggle’, once got so bad that it was almost taking over his life, and – hard as it is to believe – stopping the gregarious TV star from functioning socially.
‘It gets to the point where it’s so crippling and suffocating that you just think, “If this is how I’m going to spend the rest of my life, I’d rather not, quite frankly,”’ he said.
All you need to do is recall his abject torture on Bear Grylls: Mission Survive, when he was forced to deal with getting his hands dirty. And Jason’s OCD side truly kicks in as judge, he says, because he’s focusing on the smallest details of contestants’ performances. He said of his first run on Dancing
On Ice, ‘On the one hand, my personal life was kind of a living hell, but my professional life was doing really well because of that ability that I have with it.’ Let’s hope he’s since managed to get it under control off-camera, too.