Holly Willoughby has given spoken candidly about life after almost 14 years of presenting ITV’s This Morning alongside Phillip Schofield.
Willoughby, 45, admitted that she became “so lazy” after she stopped working on the show and stepped away from the screens in 2023.
In an appearance on Alan Carr and Lee Peart’s podcast, Bottoms Up!, the presenter described herself as “half-woman, half-mattress”, and said she had become a “basic b****” who enjoys a soft Merlot from Echo Falls.
“Well, what I discovered was, once I stopped working was that I am so lazy,” she told the hosts.
“For somebody who worked a lot and was really busy and people were like, ‘ don't know how you do it, how do you keep so many plates spinning?’ - I was like, wow, I'm literally half woman-half mattress. I adapted like that.”
She joked that even appearing on Carr’s podcast was hard work, before revealing her favourite wine to drink.
“I like a - this is a basic b**** - I like a Merlot, soft,” she said. Carr asked: “Echo Falls?” To which Willoughby agreed that she enjoyed drinking the brand known for its sweet, budget-friendly wines.
Asked how she gets through a hangover, Willoughby revealed that her cure is simple - she “[doesn’t] stop eating”.
”I eat my way through the day. So it'll be like a fry-up, it'll be picky bits. I suddenly go really like eighties and I'm like scotch egg, pork pie, Marks and Spencer's picky bits,” she said.
”One of my favourite kind of guilty pleasures is those plastic cheese slices. Getting a square one, then you get a pork scratching, put it in the middle, fold it up like a little wonton.”
The interview comes shortly after Willoughby launched her brand new YouTube show, Together, at the end of July.
It marks her return to TV after almost three years of largely staying out of the public eye, apart from a handful of projects, including hosting the final series of Dancing on Ice and appearing on Netflix’s short-lived Celebrity Bear Hunt opposite Bear Grylls.
Speaking on The Sara Cox Breakfast Show on BBC Radio 2 last week, Willoughby explained that the idea for her new show was “born out of seeing how my kids view stuff”.
She said: “It’s basically all the things I love; fashion, beauty, cooking, showbiz and real-life stories, and I’ve put them together in one place.
“It was born out of seeing how my kids view stuff.
“It feels like there’s this whole new world of opportunity where you can create these mini-worlds and people can come and find you.”
Her first guest was Stanley Tucci, with Katherine Ryan, Joanne McNally, Emma Bunton and Nicole Appleton all set to be guests in later episodes.
Her departure from This Morning came several months after her co-host Schofield left the show as he had admitted to an “unwise, but not illegal” affair with a young male colleague.
This week, she celebrated her 19th wedding anniversary with husband Dan Baldwin, who co-owns Hungry Bear Media - the company that is producing her new show.
The couple share three children, Harry, 17, Belle, 15, and Chester, 11.
