Countdown legend Carol Vorderman has opened up about meeting her dad for the first time when she was 42. The Clifton resident, 62, was a guest on Michelle Visage's Rule Breakers podcast earlier this week, in which she detailed everything from her impoverished upbringing to her five 'special friends'.
Ru Paul's Drag Race star Michelle invited the 'national treasure' onto her BBC podcast, which is dedicated to 'true originals who have ripped up the rule book to forge their own path to success'. She asked Carol, who became the first woman to appear on Channel 4 in 1982, to kick off the show by going right back to her 'humble beginnings'.
Carol was born in Bedford on Christmas Eve, 1960, with her family going through a very difficult period around the time of her birth. Speaking on the podcast, Carol said that her father, Tony, had an affair whilst her mother, Edwina (also known by her middle name, Jean), was pregnant, and did not tell her until after Carol had been born.
Read more: Carol Vorderman and This Morning stars in tears of laughter over Prince Harry revelations
Carol told Michelle: "My mother and father were married and I had an older brother and sister, but my father had an affair when my mother was pregnant with me. He told my mum, once she'd given birth to me around Christmastime, and then she left and went back home to Wales, where she was brought up.
"So, I was brought up in North Wales in a single-parent Catholic family - which was very, very unusual - in poverty. I was surrounded by my cousins and I never knew my Vorderman family because my father, even though he would have a lot to do with my brother and sister, refused to have anything to do with me."
Shocked, Michelle replied: "What?"
"Yeah, it was really weird," Carol said. "Until I was 42, so very odd. It was just me that he would have nothing to do with."
Michelle asked: "So then you met your father... what did he have to say?"
"Well, he was an old man by then," Carol explained. "I was like, 'What's the point, really?', I was living my life, I'm having a good life.
"I know who I am, I'm a good person, I look after my mother, I look after the kids, all that kind of thing... he was in the Dutch resistance in the Second World War. When I was born, the Second World War was still very much part of your parent's everyday, really, because they'd lived through this terrible trauma and that had only finished 15 years before I was born.
"To me, in my head when I was growing up, he was either this romantic hero, or he was a villain. He was never just a normal Joe, he was one or the other."
Jean remarried when Carol was nine years old. She wed an Italian prisoner of war, Gabriel Rizzi, who Carol 'adored' and says was 'her dad', who had been posted to a prisoner of war camp in North Wales during the Second World War.
Builder Gabriel's first language was Italian, his second was Welsh, and his third was English. According to Carol, he swore all the time. She told Michelle: "It was like life went from black and white to technicolour."
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