‘Cruel’ real lives TV gave Fay cold feet

Star faked a nervous breakdown to get show axed

Fay Ripley says she gave the performance of her life – faking a breakdown to get out of a telly job.

The Cold Feet star admits lying about her mental state so she no longer had to front Channel 4’s Sofa Melt – a “cruel” 90s relationship chat show.

Fay, 54, explains how she hatched her escape plan after a jilted woman was humiliated on the show.

She recalls: “Once we had three women who’d been going out with their partners for years, and their partners had never asked them to marry them.

“So on the show we got them to propose. Two of the chaps said yes, and we got a vicar on immediately.

“Out he came to marry them – we’d got all their friends and family there.

“But one poor woman, he said no. We made her, in her ill-fitting wedding dress, go to the other two’s weddings. She cried all the way through both of them. And it was cruel. I got out of the show.”

She says: “My agent told me, ‘ They might want to commission another 60 of these shows, and they might want to call it Faye Ripley’s Sofa Melt’.

“It was all going to ramp up. I said, ‘OK, just go with whatever I do. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. Just go with it’.

“I went in and just literally had a nervous breakdown, and went, ‘ I’m unstable, I can’t do it. All these people’s lives mean too much to me’.

“And because I showed that, they took it off the slate.” Speaking on food critic Jay Rayner’s Out To

Lunch podcast, Fay says she was proud of her convincing performance.

Asked if it was the performance of a lifetime, she replies: “Absolutely. I always want a round of applause. My agent thought it was marvellous.”

Sofa Melt, screened in 1999, lasted for one 60-episode series. One critic at the time said: “It’s just unmissable because the people on it are hilariously stupid.” By then, Fay had made her TV breakthrough as Jenny in ITV’s Cold Feet.

But she originally wanted to play the Helen Baxendale character, Rachel.

She says: “I thought I’d read for the part of Rachel, which was the pretty, love interest everyone fancies.

“I was shocked when they said ‘Can you read for Jenny?’ I was like, ‘ What? The mouthy northern one?’ Now I’m very pleased I played Jenny.”