The Repair Shop star Jay Blades was in tears after being able to read a letter from his daughter for the first time since learning how to read.
Jay, 51, never learned how to read as a child and was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 31.
He was brought up by his single mother on a Hackney council estate and left school at 15 with no qualifications and nothing to his name - except a reputation as a great fighter.
The star recently set himself the task of learning how to read using the same techniques young children use to learn.
Jay has slowly been learning the basics of reading and even received his first-ever letter from his daughter Zola, 15, who lives in Turkey with his ex-wife Jade.
"Reading is something most people do every day and I didn’t know it would mean so much to me. It grabs you emotionally," he said, recounting how he teared up reading the letter.
"It was the first letter Zola had ever sent me — she had never sent one before because she knew I couldn’t read it."
He added to The Sun : "Reading her letter gave me everything I’d ever wanted but didn’t think I would ever experience."
Until now, the TV presenter got the people around him to help him read letters, scripts, forms etc.
He once even asked a stranger in the street to read him an important letter from the hospital.
“I’ve had to share everything with everybody!” he recently said to Mirror. “I just tell people, ‘Yeah, I can’t read, read this for me’. And they’re just like, ‘What?’ People find it amazing that somebody can’t read."
Fans of the star will be able to follow his impressive progress in a one-off BBC One film called Jay Blades: Learning To Read At 51.
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He explained how the letters on a page look like moving ants that he tries to 'hold down'.
Jay gets help by using coloured overlays (a plastic reading sheet tinted with colour and placed over text, that he describes as a “personal trainer for words”).
Often used by dyslexics, it is not seen as an effective long-term treatment.
The lessons were shot over a period of six months and saw him learning everything from sounding out the letters to reciting words.
By the end of it, he hopes to be able to read a book to his 15-year-old for the first-ever time.
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