TELLY’S FIONA
WEEK after week under the Strictly Come Dancing glitterball, Fiona Phillips failed to remember her steps as a dark, suffocating cloud began to descend.
Watched by millions of viewers she smiled for the cameras but her frazzled mind was miles away.
Her mother was in a nursing home in Wales, scared and confused in the final stages of Alzheimer’s, while her father was in its early stages.
On top of her job on the GMTV sofa with its 3.30am starts and caring for her two young children, it built up the chronic stress that she now recognises had tipped into depression.
Her breakfast show co-host Eamonn Holmes saw the signs of her breakdown but Fiona refused to acknowledge it.
“Eamonn always used to say, ‘You are clinically depressed’ and I was saying, ‘I’m not’. But I really was.
“I didn’t seek help – I didn’t have time. I kept telling myself I would be fine and kept blaming myself, saying, ‘Why can’t you manage all this?’”
Fiona says she felt “pressured” to take part in the third series of Strictly, in 2005, to help her career.
“I was asked to do the first series and the second,” she says. “Then my agent said, ‘If you don’t do it now you can say goodbye to big gigs at the BBC’, and what have you. There was real pressure.”
FI kept telling myself I’d be fine, and kept blaming myself, saying ‘Why can’t I manage all this?’
iona adds: “So I did it but I wasn’t well enough to be doing it, mentally. I was doing GMTV and had the children and my parents and I threw that into the mix and I just felt this enormous guilt. Why am I doing this when my mum is in a home?
“I remember that as a really traumatic episode. It’s an amazing privilege to do it but I just had too much going on in my head.
“I was a mess during that, I was on the verge of tears mainly.”
She admits she should have talked to the team, at least dance partner Brendan Cole, who was “quite a hard taskmaster”.
But she felt too embarrassed and instead grimly stumbled on, described as Brendan’s worst partner yet, until she was voted out in week four of the series.
Today Fiona, 56, is finally talking in full about that difficult time after exploring the issue in a BBC documentary, The Truth About Stress.
Chronic stress is believed to reduce