WHO DARES GRINS
Ex-Loose Women host on how being broken by SAS tough guy helped her build back up to new career BY RICK FULTON r.fulton@dailyrecord.co.uk
APPEARING on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins caused Andrea McLean to have a breakdown but she has described being on the show as “the best thing that’s ever happened to me”.
Viewers are relishing watching the latest bunch of celebs being broken by the elite force’s training methods.
Glasgow-born Andrea, 52, knows just how tough it can get.
At the start of the 2019 show, she and the other celebs were kidnapped and a bag put over their heads.
When it was taken off and the show’s instructor Mark “Billy” Billingham – a former SAS leader – looked at her, she felt he “hated everything he saw”.
On her regular TV gigs, she donned a different sort of mask to hide previous trauma but while she carried on with Who Dares Wins – falling backwards out of a helicopter and abseiling – she crumbled mentally and later had a breakdown, contemplating suicide.
But nearly two years after quitting her well-paid job on Loose Women where she’d been a co-presenter for 13 years and selling her home – she couldn’t be happier.
She said: “The best thing that ever happened to me was being shouted out by Billy. And I will tell him that.
“Because it forced closure on things. And I think that, especially as women, we will keep plodding and plodding and plodding and going and going and going.
“We’re like donkeys in the heat, we just keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other.
“And actually, falling down was great, because it meant that I had to just stop and look at things that weren’t working for me and then think, ‘Right, I never want to feel like this again. What steps can I take?’
“And it led me to where I am now. So I’m really glad it happened.
“I was very lucky that me falling flat on my face and all the other things that I’ve been through in my life have actually led me to a place where I have a lot of empathy for people who struggle, because I’ve struggled.
“Also I empathise with people who have failed and got back up again, because I failed and got back up again.
“It also means I can say to other people, while they’re lying face down in the dirt, ‘it’s all right’.”
The current series of Who Dares Wins features Fatima Whitbread, Maisie Smith and Calum Best. Already, former Brookside actress Jennifer Ellison seems to have gone through the same epiphany as Andrea had and revealed she has finally come to terms with her violent past and called the show “the best therapy ever”. It certainly seems to be for Andrea. In December 2020, she quit Loose Women two years after setting up an online self-help community, This Girl Is On Fire, which now includes an app and a podcast.
She’s also published a book this year, You Just Need to Believe It, and plans to move out to America, where she is becoming popular.
But her dream has meant selling her Surrey home for a reported £1million so she and third husband Nick Feeney could invest in the business.
She said: “It would have been scary if we didn’t know what was happening.
“When I made the announcement to leave TV it was a shock to everyone but not to me – we’d already planned everything.”
They’ve only moved a mile away because her youngest daughter Amy, 15, with her second husband, is still at school. She also has an older son, Finlay, 20, from her first marriage.
Now that she and Nick are business partners – with her creating the content and him making sure everything is up and running on the technical side – they see a relationship coach.
But not because anything is going bad in twice-divorced Andrea’s private life.
She said of when she decided to quit Loose Women and work with Nick: “I would say pretty much everybody said to us, ‘That’s a really bad idea’.
“So we see a relationship coach.
Nothing’s broken but how can we make sure that it works better?” The first thing the coach told her to do was to make sure the married team didn’t work together in the same room. She’s quiet. He’s loud. So Andrea took over her son’s bedroom as he’s away at university. “We needed to find a way that worked without driving each other crazy.” With the website and the app going well, the next plan is to spend winters in Florida. Andrea, who turns 53 next month, said: “I’m in my 50s now, and people might think this is quite a maudlin way to think, but if you do the maths and think, ‘Right, how many summers do I have left?’, it can be quite scary. I may live until I’m 90. “So OK, I’ve got 37 summer left and how many of those do I want to spend in the freezing cold, moaning about the weather?” The pair work online and rent their home so they can go anywhere. They’ve talked to Amy about looking for a college in America.
Andrea said: “Having a crazy dream requires you to actually be very practical. And that’s all we’ve done. We’ve been planning this for years.
“And interestingly, our second largest audience on our website is the US, and we’ve never done anything to promote that, it’s just been an organic thing. They just like what we do.”
While Andrea would love to take her self-help ideas into a TV show, it doesn’t seem she misses much about her old media life.
She added: “I miss someone else doing my hair and makeup, and the lovely clothes I used to pinch!
“But I get my buzz from doing the live events for my platform and interviewing people.”
She admitted she hasn’t seen much of her former Loose Women colleagues, because she left during the pandemic. She added: “But there’s texting and keeping in touch that way. That’s quite normal.”
Andrea has been a household name since the 90s. She was a weather presenter for GMTV from 1997 to 2008 before co-presenting Loose Women from 2007 to 2020. Being recognised for her new work rather than just being on the telly is another new thrill.
She said: “What’s lovely is people are now interested in me for what I’m doing rather than how much I’m seen.
“For me, what’s amazing now is that I walked down the street and I’m used to people doing a double take and going, ‘That’s that woman’.
“I’ve worked in TV for a really long time, so I’m used to it.
“But what I love now is that I get the double take and then it’s ‘I love what you do. I read your book. I’m one of your Girls On Fire’. I get that now. That’s amazing.”
● andreamclean.com
Being shouted at by Billy led me to where I am ANDREA MCLEAN ON REALITY EXPERIENCE