Davina McCall has opened up about her experiences with drug abuse as she admitted to taking substances with her late mother as a teenager.
The presenter, 55, recalled her painful childhood spent with her “troubled” mother Florence Kock as she appeared on the latest episode of the Diary of a CEO podcast, hosted by entrepreneur Steven Barlett.
McCall revealed on the podcast that she was just 12 years old when she took drugs for the first time, smoking weed with her mum, and later tried cocaine at 15 years old with her.
The Masked Singer panellist shared that she was raised by her grandmother Pippy McCall, after her mother left her in her care and moved back to her native country of France, and only saw her mother on holidays there.
It was during these visits that McCall admitted she did cocaine with her mother, who died in 2008, and her late sister Caroline Baday.
McCall confessed: “Drugs at 12 with my mum. Smoking weed at 12. [...] I did coke with my mum at 15. I did it with my sister at 14.”
She added: "Me and my mum only did drugs twice. I mean, I know that’s twice times too many in my book, but I don’t want to give this impression that she and I were taking tonnes of drugs together cause that would be a false impression".
McCall said she felt “safe” when she returned home to her grandparents, and added that they would “reground” her after seeing her mum.
The TV star shared that her determination to become a presenter sparked from her need to prove her mother wrong, saying: “‘Mum, you made a mistake. Look how great I am,’ - that’s at the back of everything.”
Elsewhere during the podcast episode, McCall described losing older sister Caroline in 2012 to lung cancer as “the most difficult thing that ever happened to me”.
Tearing up, she said: “I was trying to be really strong for her and I kept saying to her, I’m going to be fine.
“Don’t wait for somebody to say that you’ve got six weeks to live, because the best seven weeks of my life with my sister were the last seven weeks of hers.”
