How I went from Loose Women to lost woman (and back again!)
As she steps out of the spotlight and into a new life, Andrea McLean on the affair that destroyed her first marriage, her struggle with the menopause and the TV moment that left her on the brink of a breakdown...
ANDREA McLean stood in the dark, a black cotton bag over her head. She was exhausted, freezing, and a man was shouting in her face. In that moment, as she stood in the cold in a remote part of the Andean mountains in Chile, while filming last year for the Channel 4 show SAS: Who Dares Wins, something snapped.
‘I was terrified,’ she said later. ‘ And within micro-seconds of that black bag being ripped off my head, I knew I was in trouble.’
McLean, the bright, bubbly Scots television presenter who has been a stalwart on ITV’s Loose Women since time immemorial and once graced our screens as a GMTV weather girl, was falling apart.
‘The box in which I’d buried all the dark memories and emotions of my past flew open,’ she said. ‘I left the show suffering from hypothermia and in genuine shock.’
In the aftermath McLean suffered a nervous breakdown. ‘I couldn’t get the trauma back in the box again,’ she said.
‘I became bitter, angry, resentful and eventually exhausted and damn near friendless.’
Healing has been slow. There has been therapy and lots of talking with loved ones. And this week, McLean took the next step on her journey to recovery.
On Monday she announced, live on air and through wobbly tears, that she was leaving Loose Women, where she has been a presenter since 2007.
‘So many people have been talking about how they can’t wait for life to get back to normal,’ she told the viewers.
‘I, like many people, did that and thought, “Do I want my life to go back to the normal that it was before?”
‘It was a really big decision to jump and see if I fall or fly and I just thought, I will never know unless I try.’
McLean is l eaving Loose Women to concentrate on her website, This Girl Is On Fire, which she set up to support women like herself: those struggling with depression or the menopause, those who believe they haven’t fulfilled their potential, women who feel stuck in a rut.
It taps into some of the issues covered in her latest memoir, also named This Girl Is On Fire, which documents her breakdown a nd recovery, and has touched a nerve.
‘For the past few months, I’ve been getting loads of private messages f rom women who have reached out to tell me what a difference my book has made to their lives. Some of the stories have been incredible – literally LIFE CHANGING,’ she wrote on the site this week.
‘They have been asking me questions l i ke: “Is there a way to stay connected with you after reading it?” and “Is there a way to go deeper with the advice and support you give?”
‘This has made me think about ways I can bring the book to life, to support you through your own journey and to give you access to the mentors who have helped me.’ It all comes at a price, of course. Making This Girl Is On Fire ‘the best place to help women break through the fears that are keeping them stuck and give them the confidence and freedom to choose a life they love,’ means a paid membership. It can be no coincidence that a limited offer of £29, available only until the ninth of this month, has been launched in the same week as McLean announced that she was leaving Loose Women, after which the charge will rise to £40. But why not? As the smiley, vivacious woman who has been cheerily dispensing advice and gossip every lunchtime on ITV since 2007, sharing confidences, health issues and heartbreaks with a devoted audience, the 51-yearold is, perhaps, better placed than most to offer advice to those in a similar position.
Certainly, while she projects a glossy image on camera, her life has been anything but straightforward. As she wrote recently: ‘There’s much more to know about me, some of it darker than you’d think.’ Born in Glasgow, McLean was raised in Trinidad and Tobago, where her father worked as an engineer for sugar company Tate & Lyle. She described life in the Caribbean as being like that ‘of an army family’.
‘You were assigned a house – in our case, on a sugar plantation –
‘
It was a really big decision to ly ’ jump and see if I fall or f
and you’d be given the same company furniture in the same style of house as everyone else.’
Life was idyllic and sunlit, but when she moved back to the UK – including a period where the family lived in an Ayrshire village – she and her younger sister Linda stood out because of their deep tans and unusual accents, becoming the targets of school bullies. even now, she says that if she gets drunk, she speaks in a Caribbean accent.
‘It was a very sheltered upbringing, so coming back to the UK was a shock,’ she explains. ‘I wasn’t streetwise, I didn’t understand the money, how to catch a bus or do anything normal kids do.’
And yet she had such happy memories of her childhood, when her own children were younger she tried to recreate the sense of openness she experienced in the Caribbean. ‘During the summer the front door’s always open with kids running in and out, playing on the trampoline,’ she said. ‘I’m trying to give them the same freedom I had.’
At 17, McLean met childhood sweetheart Nick Green while the pair were still at school. the two went travelling, backpacking around the world, before deciding to embark on careers in broadcasting, McLean as a weather girl and GMTV star, Nick as a TV producer. they married in 2000 after 11 years together .‘ I gave him an ultimatum,’ she said. ‘ Marry me so we could start a family or I would leave him. I gave him six months. that was where I made my big mistake.’
Recalling the situation years later she says she felt ashamed of her behaviour. ‘It was immature and selfish of me. He wasn’t ready to get married or settle down and I pushed too hard.’ their son, Finlay, was born the following year, but the marriage was soon in trouble.
‘Once I went back to work, things changed. I was very tired, and with a baby I couldn’t look after Nick as well as I used to. I think he felt neglected. We both shut down and the love that had pottered along since we were teenagers ran out of steam. ‘We were simply existing – two people who used to love each other just living in the same house, not speaking, not touching, not talking.’ the marriage finally fell apart in 2003 when McLean had an affair with builder steve toms, whom she met while presenting the show Our House. ‘We became friends and made each other laugh. selfishly, I realised I wanted him to make me happy. steve and I got together after the show finished, when my marriage had reached the point of no return.’ still, she was deeply regretful over the affair. ‘My first marriage was already dying by the time I met steve but I am so ashamed of what I did then because I caused pain to people I loved and betrayed my husband in the worst way that a wife can. ‘I hated myself for a long time because of that.’ she and toms married in 2009, and had a daughter, Amy. But despite battling through so much together, the marriage eventually became rocky. ‘steve and I had grown apart and we both knew it. We’d tried so many times to make it work, but it was hopeless.’ they split in 2012, and the break-up hit McLean hard. ‘the build-up to my divorce was a very stressful time,’ she said. ‘When it all eventually happened I think my body just crashed because I’d been holding it all in and I got shingles. It completely wipes you out and it left my immune system depleted.’ For several years she was single, juggling being a mum to two young children with her presenting responsibilities. ‘It’s actually a very happy little unit,’ she said at the time. ‘I tell my kids that this is our “normal”. It might not be the mum, dad and 2.5 children, but it’s a very happy place. I’m blessed.’ she met her third husband, Nick Feeney, who works in the glamping industry, in 2015 after being set up on a blind date by a Loose Women make-up artist. they married in 2017 and she describes him as ‘the love of my life’.
But while she has finally found happiness in her personal life, elsewhere she was struggling.
In 2016, at the age of 46, McLean had a hysterectomy after suffering for years with chronic endometriosis, which triggered the menopause and, she said, ‘left me exhausted and anxious’.
she later channelled her experiences into a book, Confessions of a Menopausal Woman.
But it was nothing compared to the ‘box’ that was opened that day in Chile more than a year ago, which led her into a spiral of destructive behaviour and depression.
SHe revealed: ‘I was getting up at 5.30am to head to the gym before work and listening to go-getting, motivational podcasts telling me to push harder, stay focused, keep going! Quitting is for losers!
‘every day, these podcasts were making me feel like a failure, as if I couldn’t do it; and the fact I was becoming more and more exhausted clearly meant I was a loser and I obviously didn’t want it enough.’
At one point, after a trivial argument with her husband, she was so low she even contemplated suicide.
‘I wanted to end it all right then,’ she said. ‘I felt Nick couldn’t see my side of things at all – and if someone who loved me as much as he did failed to see it, what was the point? And yet I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to hurt my family.’
McLean says she will never reveal the exact nature of the trauma that sparked her breakdown, but has hinted that it lay in her personal life.
‘At one point, I was told to my face many, many times by someone who supposedly loved me: ‘I don’t know why you’re bothering. Why would anyone want you?’ If you hear that sort of thing often enough, it drips like acid into your subconscious and corrodes the part of you that believes in yourself,’ she revealed.
‘I hate using the word victim but after finally having therapy and saying out loud the experiences I’ve had at the hands of another human, I’ve acknowledged that in this instance, I was one.’
As she swishes her way out of the Loose Women studio for the final time and on to pastures new, she seems anything but. Instead, McLean has become a confident, happy, and independent woman. the type of woman, perhaps, that she has always wanted to be.
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Motivational podcasts were failure’ making me feel like a