I hosted The One Show an hour after being told I’d lost my baby

Heartache of BBC’s Alex Jones

ALEX Jones has revealed she hosted The One Show an hour after learning that she had suffered a miscarriage.

The BBC presenter said she and her husband Charlie Thomson had been thrilled when they learned she was pregnant when their first child Teddy was ten months old.

But it hit them ‘like a ton of bricks’ when they discovered several weeks later that she had lost the baby.

‘We learnt the baby didn’t have a heartbeat,’ she said. ‘I was around 14 weeks, which is a decent amount of time. The baby had stopped developing at about nine weeks. That was really hard. It hit us like a ton of bricks. I didn’t realise for a long time because I had been breastfeeding and your periods don’t come back straight away.’

Miss Jones, 42, who is now seven months pregnant, said she went on air an hour after learning of the miscarriage in 2017 despite her boss telling her she didn’t need to. ‘I said, “What else am I going to do?” It’s a horrible feeling because it is so empty,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to say. It’s done.’ She had been in New Zealand visiting her 40year-old insurance broker husband’s family when she discovered she was pregnant again. ‘It was so unexpected, but we were thrilled,’ she told Stella magazine.

‘In hindsight, when I was very ill in New Zealand, that’s probably when everything was falling apart.’

They discovered Miss Jones had had a missed miscarriage – a symptomless or silent miscarriage – weeks later at a checkup when they had returned to the UK.

She said: ‘It’s really odd. You’re in that room looking for answers that you’re never going to get. You’re thinking, “Have I done something wrong? What did I do differently? Was it because we flew a long way? Was I too stressed? Was I putting too much pressure on myself?” ’

Miss Jones added: ‘I’m not saying it’s easier or harder if you already have [a child]. The sense is at least you have a healthy child, but you remember how it felt at that Shock: Alex with co-host Matt Baker point, you know what it’s like to hold a baby and the potential is very real.’

The broadcaster said that when she became pregnant six months later it was ‘completely different’. ‘You don’t let yourself relax. I couldn’t enjoy it for a long time and didn’t tell anyone for ages’, she said.

Miss Jones, the BBC’s second highest paid female presenter on up to £450,000 in 2017, will take an extra month’s maternity leave when she gives birth later this year.

She took three-and-a-half months off after Teddy, now two, was born and said she had been eager to get back to work because she was concerned about her job security.

‘The BBC was amazing. They were clear there was no pressure to come back. It was me who was thinking I’d lose my job,’ she said. ‘It’s so mad. It’s irrational. I suppose it’s because I really respect and treasure the job. I wanted to go back to it and inherently [the industry] is fickle.’

Miss Jones also spoke about how her mental health suffered after the birth of Teddy. ‘I certainly wasn’t feeling great when the breastfeeding was horrific over the first three weeks,’ she said.

‘I remember being in the shower very clearly, crying and thinking absolutely everything hurts. You have those thoughts of, “When is it going to end?” Everyone has a touch of the blues.’

‘It hit us like a ton of bricks’