Tess Daly: 'I threw cushions during pregnancy'

Tess Daly: 'I threw cushions during pregnancy'
Tess Daly: 'I threw cushions during pregnancy' (Image credit: EMPICS Entertainment)

Tess Daly has revealed how she struggled with extreme mood swings during her first pregnancy. The Strictly Come Dancing host felt "alone and insecure" when husband Vernon Kay was absent, and would cry easily while she was expecting elder daughter Phoebe. "I'd never been a particularly confrontational person, but now that my hormones were all over the place I felt totally erratic... I was sad one minute, deliriously happy the next," she wrote in her pregnancy book The Baby Diaries, reported in the Daily Mirror. When Vernon went to the US for work, Tess said: "It felt like he was a world away. I felt quite alone and insecure. I think I just wanted my hubby back and for someone to make me a cup of tea and tell me to put my feet up. "When he was back and we had an argument about something and nothing, I would throw cushions around the house in unwarranted fits of anger, and then feel ridiculous, as I had to pick them back up." Tess added: "I would cry at anything that involved children or small animals on the TV, so the news was out of bounds, as was daytime TV where the RSPCA seem to be big on advertising between Jeremy Kyle and Loose Women." The Baby Diaries is out on February 18.

Patrick McLennan

Patrick McLennan is a London-based journalist and documentary maker who has worked as a writer, sub-editor, digital editor and TV producer in the UK and New Zealand. His CV includes spells as a news producer at the BBC and TVNZ, as well as web editor for Time Inc UK. He has produced TV news and entertainment features on personalities as diverse as Nick Cave, Tom Hardy, Clive James, Jodie Marsh and Kevin Bacon and he co-produced and directed The Ponds, which has screened in UK cinemas, BBC Four and is currently available on Netflix. 

An entertainment writer with a diverse taste in TV and film, he lists Seinfeld, The Sopranos, The Chase, The Thick of It and Detectorists among his favourite shows, but steers well clear of most sci-fi.