The former ‘This Morning’ presenter stepped away from the public eye after undergoing a frightening ordeal. Now she’s returning to the spotlight. Katie Rosseinsky takes a closer look at her comeback. It’s been a tough one.” Holly Willoughby’s recent summary of what has surely been the most difficult year and a half of her life was an understatement, to say the least. In October 2023, the queen of daytime television stepped down from her role as the host of ITV’s This Morning, after a disturbing plan to kidnap, rape and kill her was foiled. The impact on Willoughby, who bravely waived her right to anonymity at the start of the trial, was “life-changing” and “catastrophic”, according to her barrister.

The horrifying ordeal came during an already difficult time in her professional life, as Willoughby had only just been caught up in the workplace drama that engulfed This Morning that summer. Phillip Schofield, her co-star and close friend for almost 20 years, left ITV after admitting to an “unwise but not illegal” affair with a younger co-worker. The fallout was huge, and, perhaps unfairly, seemed to tarnish Willoughby by association.

No wonder she chose to retreat from the spotlight for a while. But in recent months, Willoughby has made a slow but assured return to our screens, returning to her longstanding role as the host of Dancing on Ice and also helming ITV’s primetime reboot of game show You Bet! Now, she’s taking on her biggest job yet, as the host of Netflix reality show Celebrity Bear Hunt, which will be available to stream across world. Somewhat aptly, it’s all about survival. It could hardly be further away from the staid world of UK daytime television – but Willoughby has always been good at reinvention.

Her warm onscreen manner and breezy way of styling out gaffes make it easy to assume that Willoughby was born with easy confidence. But speaking to the nation on camera would have been a nightmare scenario for teenage Holly, who grew up in Sussex, where she attended private school with her older sister, Kelly. “I was not a big talker at school – I never liked people seeing my braces so I walked around with my sleeves pulled over my hands and my hands over my mouth in case anybody saw me smiling,” she told The Guardian. She was also ashamed of her dyslexia, which wasn’t diagnosed until her late teens, and caused her to struggle with spelling.

This diffidence meant she wasn’t a natural candidate for a career in the spotlight. Her first brush with fame came in the time-honoured Nineties fashion, when she was scouted as a model on a trip to the Clothes Show Live. Aged 14, she signed to Storm, the agency that discovered Kate Moss, and then appeared in teen magazines. Modelling, she said, helped her confidence grow, because “I suddenly had to talk, there was no one else to do it for me”.

Her TV debut came about by accident, when she arrived at the audition thinking it was just another model casting. Instead, she was hired to appear in the slightly head-scratching S Club TV. She and six other presenters (including actor Ben Barnes) stood in for the real S Club 7 in a Sunday morning kids’ show for ITV, vaguely themed around the band. “I spoke in a posh telephone voice, and I was so unnatural,” she reflected on those early efforts. “I fixated on remembering lines rather than just speaking.”.

She then briefly stepped behind the scenes, doing a stint as a receptionist for a production company and then as a runner for an auction channel. A chance meeting with a producer, while working at a pub in Chelsea, helped her land some more presenting gigs on CBBC, before she was snapped up to host CITV’s Saturday morning show Ministry of Mayhem, alongside Stephen Mulhern. This job, with all its ridiculous challenges (often including gross combinations of food and that kids’ TV staple, “gunge”), was a steep learning curve. If things went off-kilter, she and Mulhern would have to make them work. “When you knocked out hours and hours of telly live and things went wrong left, right and centre but you just had to pull it together, it [was] just a really good training ground,” she told The Guardian. The chaotic onscreen atmosphere seemed to permeate behind the scenes. “There were times when we went straight from the hotel bar to going live on air,” Willoughby recalled to the Daily Mail – having “to drink anchovies in custard with some eight-year-old” didn’t exactly help with hangovers. Around this time, she met Dan Baldwin, a producer on the show, who she married in 2007. They are parents to Harry, 15, Belle, 13, and Chester, 10, and have worked together throughout their marriage (Baldwin produced Celebrity Juice, the unruly, lewd game show that Willoughby appeared on for 12 years).

When Ministry of Mayhem wound down in 2006, Willoughby got her call-up to ITV’s major league when she was hired to present Dancing on Ice, her first primetime show. She was cast alongside Phillip Schofield, who had decades more experience, but the pair quickly built up a rapport. They got on so well, in fact, that when Fern Britton left the famous This Morning sofa in 2009, Schofield recommended that his new friend replace her. “Holly was the only person I wanted to replace her,” he told The Sunday Times in 2019. “And at the time, it was a tough sell. But I knew it would work.”.