Miquita Oliver has issued an emotional apology to Fearne Cotton over an incident she said she has felt “ashamed of” for a long time.
The Miss Me? co-host spoke about her regret over calling Cotton a “she-devil” back in 2005 on a recent episode of her podcast with Rizzle Kicks star Jordan Stephens.
“Basically when I was 20 I did something really awful that I was really ashamed of for a long time,” Oliver, 42, said, explaining that she’d given an interview to NME in which she made disparaging remarks about Cotton.
At the time, Oliver was known for hosting Channel 4’s Popworld as well as T4, while Cotton fronted popular shows such as Top of the Pops and on Radio 1, having started out as a children’s television presenter.
In 2005, Oliver was sacked from her BBC Radio 1 gig after being asked by NME how she would improve Top of the Pops, to which she responded: “Get rid of the she-devil Fearne Cotton.”
“I wasn’t very nice about her at all, I was awful about her, and I was fired from Radio 1 because of it,” Oliver told Stephens. “We didn’t like each other – I don’t even think she didn’t like me, but because I’d been so awful about her, I think she stayed away from me.”
A few years later, Cotton began dating Oliver’s T4 co-host Steve Jones, meaning they would see each other often: “We were civil,” Oliver said. “It was a little bit uncomfortable but it was OK.”
The pair then apparently went for some time without speaking, until Oliver received a message from Cotton in response to an episode of Miss Me? with former co-host Lily Allen.
During the episode, Oliver recounted how she had been treated by the press during her television career, revealing that media outlets frequently compared her negatively to other female presenters, using insults such as “fat” and “dirty”.
Cotton apparently told Oliver that her comments had resonated with her and that she had gone through similar experiences: “Having awful things written nearly took me down completely and I’m still trying to overcome the aftermath today.”
Reading Cotton’s message, Oliver continued: “I just wanted to say thank you for opening up about it, I guess you always assume it’s only you who they picked on but there’s so many of us. Powerful clip all round for me to see. Sending love, Fearne.”
Oliver said it made her realise that the press played a role in her feelings towards other women: “They used to call me ugly and dirty and fat, and I saw [Cotton] as what a TV presenter should look like, clean, thin, groomed, and she scared me… She made me feel like I wasn’t in the right job and I shouldn’t be there.”
Growing emotional, Oliver said that this wasn’t Cotton’s fault, but “that s*** makes you turn on each other, so it was really good for me to realise why I did that, why I felt that way about her. It was unkind and it wasn’t me.”
Oliver said she had thanked Cotton for her kind words and joked that fans would see her on the presenter’s podcast, Happy Place, next year: “Me and Fearne Cotton are fine.”
The Independent has contacted Cotton’s representative for comment.
In a candid interview in 2024, Cotton said she would not return to live TV or radio for “any money in the world”, citing the anxiety her earlier career had given her and comparing the entertainment industry to “a pit of lions”.
“I’d get a week down the line and go, ‘I feel ill — I can’t do this,’” she told The Times. “I got to the point where I just thought, ‘Why am I doing this to myself? Am I that desperate to be seen or heard?’”
“I’ve learnt that I couldn’t do live radio or TV today for any money in the world,” she said. “The thought of going on to someone else’s platform [with] that level of risk and judgment, and that element of the unknown? My nervous system can’t take it — it’s absolutely shot. Putting myself in that is like putting me in a pit of lions.”
Cotton, 44, has gone on to release a number of self-help books, as well as hosting her Happy Place podcast, which she launched in 2018.
Meanwhile, Oliver now hosts former BBC Sounds podcast Miss Me? with Jordan Stephens and still regularly appears on the BBC, recently contributing to Backlash: The Murder of George Floyd and presenting The Caribbean with Andi and Miquita alongside her chef mum Andi Oliver.
