The Chase star Anne Hegerty has opened up about her childhood struggles.
The quizzing pro, who was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome in her 40s, revealed that she had very few friends growing up and suffered bullying at school.
Speaking on the What Makes Us Human podcast with Jeremy Vine, the telly genius, who starred in the 2018 series of I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here! explained what her life was like as a child.
"Not really. I had cousins that I was fond of, they didn't live near me," she said when presenter Jeremy asked if she had many pals.
"Well I didn't like it. My poor parents, in their muddled way, were probably doing their best," she said.
"I never really had friends at school. Because the whole concept of friends didn't make a lot of sense to me.
"There was a girl next door who was four years older than me and would play with me. We would do make-believe games.
"I never really, you know, entirely understood what friends were for. They were instrumental, you used them to play a game."
Anne also explained that her sociable mother was confused by her withdrawn ways.
"My mother couldn't understand anything about me... why I wasn't more sociable and popular and good with people. She was very much a people person, she was a social worker."
Speaking on her time at school, Anne went on, "I got bullied a fair bit because I was just a very obvious target, I was kind of out of my own."
Opening up about how she gained her famous levels of intelligence and general knowledge, Anne admitted it didn't come to her in the classroom, saying, "I didn't understand what anyone was explaining to me, [but] understood when I read about them in books, when I learned that way."
