Category Entertainment News

Talents actress and podcaster Joanna Page has talked about the rollercoaster ride mixing acting and marriage

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Joanna Page has revealed her “heart was breaking” and she was miserable in life at the same time her career took off with Gavin & Stacey. The actress loved playing Stacey Shipman but as the BBC sitcom took off, behind the scenes Joanna’s home life was not going as smoothly.

She and actor husband James Thornton were struggling to cope with him living in Leeds working on Emmerdale from 2009 whilst she remained in London.

Looking back Joanna said at Cheltenham Literature Festival: “He went off to of Emmerdale for three years. And of course, when a job comes in, you know, your first thought is you’ve got to go and do it. Because that was before we had children. And so then you’re like, a job comes in, it’s yes, yes, yes. I mean, you know, the life of an actor, it’s tough. And when a job comes in, you’ve got to go and do it.

“And so suddenly we went from being so close, and, you know, having been with each other all the time, to him off living up in Leeds, and I’m all the way down in London, and it was just after Gavin & Stacey(became successful) as well.

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“So to the outside world, it looks like your life was so wonderful, and we were winning awards. And you know, it was really exciting and we were going to different things and different appearances and stuff, but inside my heart was just breaking.

“I just go back home, and I sit with Daisy our dog, and I just, you know, I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to do anything for a while, it didn’t really work as much as I could have, because I was just very miserable. I was really, really down, and I was very miserable and I found it difficult.”

Thankfully romance blossomed again when James left the soap and the pair remain in love now and have four children, Eva, 12, Kit, 10, Noah, eight, and three-year-old Boe, four guinea pigs and two dogs.

A packed house is one reason Joanna says she is not planning to do any stage work in the short term and may even cut back on acting in favour of podcasting and presenting.

Writing in her book Lush, she said: “I’ve decided that the root of what is next for me is being myself. The whole entertainment world is so different from when I first came out of RADA.

“I can wake up one morning and think, Yes, I’ve got my own platform. I can act, I can present, I can pod. That is the way that I see myself now – it’s exciting. Last year was so busy and hectic, with all the excitement, stress and secrecy of Gavin & Stacey, and then presenting Joanna Page’s Wild Life, that right now, I don’t fancy leaving the kids and going away to a film set for weeks on end. But maybe when they’re all older and in college, I’ll think, You know what? I fancy doing a play now.”

She added: “One day, I’ll belong to a theatre company again. But, for now, I don’t want to play someone else. I want to be me.”

Joanna also spoke in-depth in the book about the return of Gavin & Stacey for last year’s Christmas special, the finale of the sitcom. She recalls how emotional it was and had difficulty not crying during filming.

Gavin & Stacey: The Finale is the UK’s most-watched scripted show across all broadcasters and streamers since current records began in 2002, with ratings of over 19.3 million. It has smashed the show’s own record from the 2019 Christmas special which reached 18.5 million viewers in 28-days.

* Lush written by Joanna Page and published by Sphere is out now.

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Ian Watkins left his bandmates’ lives in tatters when his sickening crimes came to light, but the other members of Lostprophets had grown to ‘hate’ the disgraced star long before they were told of his crimes

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They were one of the biggest rockbands in the UK and sold millions of albums worldwide, but Lostprophets turned to dust overnight when the darkest secret that anyone could keep was suddenly exposed.

Ian Watkins, the infamous frontman of the Welsh group, turned out to be a dangerous paedophile. In 2013, the depraved singer was jailed for 29 years for 13 horrific sex offences, including the attempted rape and sexual assault of children under the age of 13. One of the infants was just 10 months old. Watkins used his frenzied fan base of young women to gain access to children, including babies.

The “determined” sex offender had a collection of child abuse photos and films almost five times the size of the police force that arrested him. A total of 27 terabytes of data storage from computers and devices found in Watkins’ possession. His heinous online library was encrypted, and the sick pervert used a reference to child abuse as his password.

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For the other five members of the band, Watkins’ crimes came as a horrendous shock and the aftermath turned their lives upside down. Lostprophets parted ways immediately after their former lead singer was found guilty and for years, the betrayal was too unbearable to speak about for many of the musicians – now they refuse to utter his name.

The disgraced singer was allegedly killed in his jail cell at HMP Wakefield on Saturday after narrowly surviving other earlier prison attacks. Two inmates have been charged with his murder.

Once Watkins was put in cuffs in 2012, some fans asked how the other band members couldn’t have known something was going on. “How could you know? How would you know?” Lee Gaze, former guitarist and joint-founder of the band, said at the time.

“Who would disclose such a thing to five people, who between them have eight children? You just wouldn’t because they would be killed on the spot.”

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While no-one in the band could have known the depths of depravity that Watkins sunk into, destroying multiple lives in the process, the group had become disturbed by his increasingly erratic behaviour long before his unthinkable crimes came to light.

Ian Windwood, a music journalist and friend of the band, spent time with Lostprophets just months before the sex offender’s arrest. And he says other members of the band “had grown to hate him”.

Watkins was a prolific drug user at this stage – police only discovered his horrific sex offences while on a drug raid in his home – and the band tried to call an intervention.

When the frontman failed to turn up for a concert in Pittsburgh during their North America tour that year, he was replaced with keyboardist Jamie Oliver on vocals. Tensions boiled over after the gig, the Telegraph reports, and the band’s bassist Stuart Richardson “punched Watkins in the face for what seemed like five minutes”.

“Some of the guys came on the bus and pulled me off him, but the next day his face looked like the Elephant Man,” he told Windwood, who wrote a book about the music industry. The band had reportedly already found and chucked out crystal meth in Watkins’ bag.

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The bassist told the author that Watkins “bawled his eyes out” the next day and kept saying sorry. “I told him that I was sorry about what had happened afterwards,” Richardson said. “But he just kept saying it: ‘No, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’ At the time I thought, ‘What the f— is that all about?’ Now I think it was the closest he came with us to an admission of guilt.”

The ex band members have also previously revealed how before Watkins committed his crimes, he was becoming increasingly distant from the band.

“He was doing his own thing,” Gaze told Newsbeat. “That just grew worse over the years, the more he was using drugs. He could be in the same city as me and I wouldn’t hang out with him, even if we weren’t playing shows.”

The back-up singer was left devastated when Lostprophets were forced to disband in the wake of Watkins’s heinous crimes. Earlier this year, he took to X to share his heartbreak.

He wrote in July: “It’s been 13 years since my band ended in the most unimaginable circumstances and it’s still painful to think about. Things could’ve been so different.

Joanna Page is sad and emotional to be leaving the character Stacey Shipman behind after Gavin and Stacey aired its final ever episode last Christmaas

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Joanna Page had admitted she broke the strict secrecy rules around Gavin & Stacey’s finale – and let her husband and mum read the scripts before becoming a blubbering wreck on set.

The actress loved playing Stacey Shipman opposite Mat Horne who was Gavin Shipman on and off for 17 years. The Christmas finale scripts were sent on email with the subject ‘Toffee Apple’ so as not to draw attention, but instead of keeping it quiet, Joanna told her beloved mum everything and even asked her to help with learning her lines.

Joanna, 48, said: “This last one the finale, it was James(Corden) who called me out the blue. I just thought, oh my god, it’s happening. And I was excited. Then they said ‘Don’t tell anybody’ and I said, Oh my god, James, of course I won’t, you know, can’t wait. I’m so excited’.

“I put the phone down and called my my mum straight away! ‘Mum we’re doing the finale’. And then told my James, my husband. And then when the script arrived, oh my lord, I just showed it to mum straight away.”

The script actually arrived when she was waiting for a burger at a service station and she read it in the car park sending voice notes to Ruth Jones along the way.

“I managed to read half of it in one service station, then had to drive to another service station to avoid getting a ticket. I voice-noted Ruth all through the second half. I was laughing and I was crying. Ruth heard it all in real time as I was actually experiencing it. She was playing my voice notes to James.”

She added that she “lied to everyone and said that I hadn’t let anyone read it” but thankfully the script secrets did not leak.

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Gavin & Stacey: The Finale is the UK’s most-watched scripted show across all broadcasters and streamers since current records began in 2002, with ratings of over 19.3 million.

In her new book Lush, Joanna also admits from day two of filming onwards of the finale she cried every day of filming, making it difficult sometimes to get scenes finished,

She said: “I was crying from the second day of filming. My first scenes were Nessa and Stacey down the slots in Barry Island, riding in the back of Nessa’s rickshaw. We filmed all day. It was a riot. I was excited to be back on-set, huge crowds had come to watch and cheer and I was filming with Ruth, which I loved. I laughed all day long. Then they said, ‘That’s a wrap on Nessa and Stacey in the slots.’ I burst out crying, and I think I cried every day at some point from that moment until the end of the shoot. Ruth was crying, Chris Gernon our director was crying and I was a state.

“There were a few times, before takes, when I’d have to go into the bathroom and pull myself together. This is really embarrassing, I told myself. You’re out of control on-set and you can’t stop crying. It was difficult.”

And the emotional wrap party for the finale was so boozy Joanna had “the worst hangover I’ve ever had in my life” and needed help packing her bags in the hotel. She “was in such a state” she couldn’t face a train home or carrying any bags so splashed out £380 for a taxi home.

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Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where she was wearing a pair of Stacey’s earring she took from the prop department along with some clothes, she admitted she would have been devastated if anyone else had got the role of Stacey as she felt it “was her” and there are so few good Welsh parts in TV shows. At this point in life she was close to quitting acting and was working in a shoe shop where her agent sent her the script.

Joanna said: “I got the script and I remember turning over the first page and reading it and going ‘Oh my God’.

“I’ve never read anything like this before in my life. This is my voice. This is me. This is my family’. “Because in RADA, you had Trainspotters Scottish thing. You have everything Northern, and then you have the Irish thing. And if you were Welsh, you were lucky to get one character in a show who was a bit dollally and simple and didn’t really say very much.

“You were lucky if you got that. And suddenly, it’s like this whole world and my family and I remember thinking, if some f**ker gets this who has famous parents or is famous from a reality show then that is it.”

Joanna also spoke about her marriage being tested when she and fellow actor James had to live apart whilst she was in London enjoying the initial G&S success and he was starring in Emmerdale for three years from 2009 to 2012.

She explained: “In the book, I talk about how difficult it was when he went off to of Emmerdale for three years. And of course, when a job comes in, you know, your first thought is you’ve got to go and do it. Because that was before we had children. And so then you’re like, a job comes in, it’s yes, yes, yes. I mean, you know, the life of an actor, it’s tough. And when a job comes in, you’ve got to go and do it.

“And so suddenly we went from being so close, and, you know, having been with each other all the time, to him off living up in Leeds, and I’m all the way down in London, and it was just after really Gavin & Stacey as well.

“So to the outside world, it looks like your life was so wonderful, and we were winning awards. And you know, it was really exciting and we were going to different things and different appearances and stuff, but inside my heart was just breaking.

“I just go back home, and I sit with Daisy our dog, and I just, you know, I didn’t go out. I didn’t want to do anything for a while, it didn’t really work as much as I could have, because I was just very miserable. I was really, really down, and I was very miserable and I found it difficult.”

Now, Joanna is living in Oxfordshire with husband ex-Emmerdale actor James Thornton and their four children, Eva, 12, Kit, 10, Noah, eight, and three-year-old Boe, four guinea pigs and two dogs.

Page says she’s at a different place in her life and hopes to write more books after finishing her memoir. Acting will take more of a back seat whilst she spends time at home with the kids, especially as it is the last year before Boe will head to school.

She said: “I’ve decided that the root of what is next for me is being myself. The whole entertainment world is so different from when I first came out of RADA.

“I can wake up one morning and think, Yes, I’ve got my own platform. I can act, I can present, I can pod. That is the way that I see myself now – it’s exciting. Last year was so busy and hectic, with all the excitement, stress and secrecy of Gavin & Stacey, and then presenting Joanna Page’s Wild Life, that right now, I don’t fancy leaving the kids and going away to a film set for weeks on end. But maybe when they’re all older and in college, I’ll think, You know what? I fancy doing a play now.”

She added: “One day, I’ll belong to a theatre company again. But, for now, I don’t want to play someone else. I want to be me.”

*Lush written by Joanna Page and published by Sphere is out now.

Actress Cheryl Fergison is best known for playing the role of Heather Trott on EastEnders between 2007 and 2016

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EastEnders star Cheryl Fergison has detailed the side effects she’s now going through after shedding three stone using weight loss jabs. The actress is best known for her role on EastEnders as she played Heather Trott between 2007 and 2016.

The 60-year-old has opened up about she was prescribed the jab after being diagnosed as diabetic and “clinically obese”. However, she has now said that she has been left questioning whether using the jabs was worth it as now she’s going through devastating side effects.

Cheryl has said that she has now has hair falling out in clumps which could be down to being prescribed a “big dosage”. She has been using Mounjaro to lose weight but thinks she might stop using it.

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Speaking on the Secure the Insecure podcast she said: “I’m on Mounjaro. It doesn’t really agree with me, so I think I’m going to probably come off it. I was on quite a big dosage. The doctors put me on it because I’m diabetic. I was clinically obese, as they would say. They said this was this wonder drug, and I took it and then they upped [the dosage] again.”

Cheryl explained that the jab worked how it was meant to at first and suppressed her appetite which mean she shed the pounds. She found that she used to be able to eat a whole pizza but can now only eat a slice before getting full.

However, she’s experienced several side effects which have put her off. Cheryl said: “The side effects are, I think, worse.

“There are fluids coming out from both ends a lot of the time. I’m sick, I’ve got diarrhoea with it. My hair… I can pull it out in clumps. Luckily, I’ve got a lot of hair. But there’s a lot of stuff I’m not sure about with it. I’m not sure it agrees with me.”

Mounjaro is the brand name for tirzepatide and has become one of the most used weight-loss jabs alongside Ozempic and Wegovy. The medication mimics the naturally occurring GLP-1 hormone which helps lower blood sugar and can increase feelings of fullness.

Cheryl said she had managed to lose almost three stone but her health issues impacted her progress. She was taken to hospital in May of this year after suffering a stroke.

Cheryl has been recovering from her home in Blackpool where she lives with her husband Yassine Al-Jermoni and her son Alex. She has revealed that since her stroke she has put a stone back on due to not being able to exercise as much anymore.

Beforehand she would go swimming and cycling as well as go on walks. However, Cheryl is now using a walking stick and says she is slower than she was. In order to recover, Cheryl said she has “got to listen to my body at the moment”.

Sam Gardiner, who starred in the BBC series alongside his mother Jo, died earlier this year after losing control of his VW Golf car in terrible weather on a busy road

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Tragic Race Across the World star Sam Gardiner died when he lost control of his car while driving in “appalling” weather, an inquest into his death has heard.

The 24-year-old suffered a catastrophic head injury when his “high-powered” VW Golf veered off the northbound carriageway near Cheadle earlier this year. He had been driving on the A34 on Monday 26 May when his car left the road and rolled before landing on its side

An inquest at Manchester South Coroners Court has heard how Sam – who graced our screens on the BBC travel series with his mum Jo in 2020 – had been travelling home to celebrate his aunt’s birthday bash after working as a landscape gardener up in Scotland.

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In a tribute, Coroner Christopher Morris said: “Sam was truly a remarkable person who lit up the lives of many…He loved his sport, he loved his cars, and he loved being outdoors. “He was one of life’s adventurers,” adding that he was “caring, generous, with a great spirit and a big heart”, reports the Manchester Evening News.

The court heard that witnesses saw Sam’s car “overtaking and undertaking” in heavy rain before it collided with the central reservation and left the road. Detective Constable Simon Venguedasalon, of Greater Manchester Police’s Serious Collision Investigation Unit, told the inquest: “Several witnesses said that Sam was undertaking and overtaking slow-moving vehicles.

“A lot of the witnesses had slowed down due to the lack of visibility and the standing water on the road. His driving was not consistent with the conditions at the time.” DC Venguedasalon revealed that there were defects or potholes on the road, and some of the grids were blocked, contributing to the wet road surface. However, there was no CCTV or dashcam footage of the incident.

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He added: “Sam unfortunately wasn’t driving to the conditions of the road. Due to the lack of tread on the tyres he lost control on the carriageway due to speed. He unfortunately left the carriageway and the collision then occurred.”

Police Constable Adam Dixon, a forensic collision investigator at GMP, told the inquest the road surface was “very wet” due to “bad weather” and that the tyres on Sam’s car had insufficient tread depth, which was a likely contributing factor to the crash.

He couldn’t estimate the speed Sam was driving on the 50mph road, but Mr Morris concluded that he was driving at a “significant estimated speed”.

Dr Naisbitt, a consultant in intensive care at Salford Royal Hospital, told the court Sam was placed in an induced coma due to severe head injuries. Doctors concluded that “he had sustained a devastating head injury in the crash and that there was no realistic prospect of any meaningful recovery”.

Tragically, Sam passed away in hospital on May 29. His cause of death was ruled a devastating brain injury due to a road traffic crash. Concluding that Sam had died in a road traffic collision, Mr Morris said he had been “weaving in and out around traffic” in “appalling” weather conditions before he “struck a kerb on the central reservation”.

He further stated that both the ‘insufficient’ tyre tread depth and his manner of driving were significant factors in his loss of control of the vehicle. Sam’s adoptive mum Jo concurred that her son was “generous, big-hearted and caring”, adding that he had a passion for cars. She revealed he had “chopped the exhaust off” his VW Golf R to make it “really noisy”.

Sam appeared alongside his mum Jo in the 2020 series of the BBC show when they journeyed across South America. They were unable to compete in the final leg of the race after they ran out of money.

In a heartfelt tribute following Sam’s death in May, his parents Jo and Andrew expressed their devastation, stating: “Sam left us far too soon, and while words will never fully capture the light, joy and energy he brought into our lives, we hold on to the memories that made him so special.”

Sam’s parents said he was ‘adored by his family’ and described him as ‘loyal, funny and fiercely protective’. They added his time on the BBC show ‘opened Sam’s eyes to the wonder of adventure’. Jo Gardiner told the Manchester Evening News: “Following the inquest, we want to thank all the witnesses who stopped to help Sam and all the emergency services involved.

“Whilst we are heartbroken over the loss of Sam, the generosity of people towards helping others with FASD is inspiring.”

A JustGiving page, set up in his memory by his family to support National FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder), has already raised over £28,500.

Nicola McLean, who has always been open after suffering from anorexia and bulimia since she was 11, says online body-shaming abuse got too much and she took the jabs as a reaction

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Former glamour model Nicola McLean has said the fat jabs she had in retaliation to online trolls left her seriously ill.

The mum of two, who appeared on Celebrity Big Brother in 2012 and again in 2017, has been married to former footballer Tom Williams since 2009. The couple have two children, Rocky, 18, and Striker, 14, – but she says she was left too unwell to care for them after being left bedbound.

With more and more people paying for the injections, she has spoken of her experience a few years ago. After being offered them for free by someone on Instagram, she suffered excruciating headaches and was unable to leave her room. She said yes after being hounded by low life social media users who bombarded her with body-shaming remarks.

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Speaking about her experience to draw attention to the issues with the jobs, Nicola detailed what she went through and said: “Every morning I’d inject myself with it, but after about a week of using it, I started to feel really ill. I was violently sick, and Tom was like, ‘That is so odd for you’.

“I have got the strongest stomach you’ll ever know from being bulimic for years,” she told The Sun. “Then I started getting headaches, but I brushed those off. Tom kept saying, ‘It’s this skinny jab, ’ but I would brush him off, too. I was obviously in denial. My weight was more important to me.”

Nicola has been open about the cosmetic procedures she has had, including three boob jobs taking her to a 32GG. Admitting this made it more difficult for her to keep on top of checking her breasts. The 43-year-old discovered a lump there last November and admits she automatically thought the worst.

Nicola candidly says, “I found a lump on my breast while I was moisturising and immediately I broke down in tears and thought, ‘What if it’s cancer?’ “Straight away I thought, ‘I’m going to die,’” continues Nicola, who has suffered with severe anxiety for several years. “Something like this makes my mind go into overdrive. As someone who has anxiety anyway, this was just awful.”

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While she informed her husband straight away after finding the lump, Nicola says she couldn’t face telling their sons. “Tom was amazing – he’s so supportive and we talk about everything. He’s the calm one and was telling me, ‘We don’t know what it is yet,’ and being really rational.

“I didn’t tell the kids. I would never tell the kids something like this – I wouldn’t want to worry them. They know I have anxiety, and I’ll tell them when I’m feeling anxious because I think it’s good to talk about it, but I’d never worry them with something like this.”

Thankfully, doctors confirmed that the lump was benign and not cancerous, something Nicola was more than relieved to hear. “I went to the GP, who referred me to the cancer unit. They were great – really quick with everything,” she told the Mirror.

“It was a massive relief. But being referred to a cancer unit is scary in itself. The doctor said if the lump had been larger than 4cm it would have had to be removed, but it wasn’t, thankfully.”

Following the traumatising experience, Nicola says she’s feeling grateful for her health and looking forward to the year ahead. “I feel a good energy this year. I’m feeling really positive and happy at the moment. I think it’s going to be a good year and I’m ready to face everything head on now.”

*For help and support on eating disorders contact Beat Eating Disorders on 0808 801 0677.