‘I WAS CONSTANTLY ON THE VERGE OF TEARS’

Fiona Phillips speaks frankly about the crisis that led hoer letave GMTV, and how she finally got the better of stress

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 Birmingham New Street 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