Archive May 14, 2025

TV star Fearne Cotton, 43, has avoided one common injury for her entire life—until yesterday

Fearne Cotton told fans she suffered a painful but common injury for the first time yesterday. While the 43-year-old initially thought people were overreacting about its severity, she now realises just how wrong that was. “So somehow I have managed to walk around on planet Earth for 43 years without ever being stung by a wasp or a bee,” she told her fans in an Instagram Story.

“I’m not sure how, like, I remember my cousin, Jess, being stung multiple times in his back garden in Pinner back in the day. I somehow avoided it. Until today. I got stung by a wasp.” The TV star explained that she accidentally trod on the wasp while barefoot. It stung her on the toe next to her little toe.

She continued: “F*** me, it hurt. It was like someone had taken a lit match to my toe. It was so bad, and I now get it because before I thought, ‘Are people being a bit dramatic?’

“Oh my God, it really hurt, and yes, I am listening to Tracy Chapman, don’t judge. Oh my god, it hurt, so I’ve ticked that off the old life list.” Adding to her troubles, Fearne’s beesting incident occurred just a week after she had a cartoonish fall while running.

In a separate Instagram post, she admitted she felt completely ‘overwhelmed’, but a wonderful stranger came to her aid and shared a crucial piece of advice. “I just went on a run and I fell over,” she said at the time.

“I do not know how I fell over. I was running, and then one minute I was just on the floor. Sort of landed on my shoulder, it was like a proper cartoon fall. I’ve managed to also cut my knee like a sort of kid in the playground and I basically sort of fell into this poor woman who was just walking by.”

Despite the mishap, Fearne said this stranger took a moment to help. She continued: “She said, ‘Sit on the wall, you are in shock.’ And then she said, ‘Just go home and have a cup of tea.’ And I thought, ‘Do you know what? Yeah. What the f*** am I doing?’

“Like, all of you lot, I am overstretched, overwhelmed, overtired. And, there’s so much out there about motivation, like, ‘Push a bit harder, you should be doing more, get out of bed and do this and do that.’

“And actually, I think most of us need the opposite. We are all so full to the brim, and we just need to go home and have a cup of tea.” Although Fearne cut her leg, she confessed she was most upset about the big hole in her ‘brand new leopard print Peloton leggings’.”

This honest revelation also comes just months after Fearne discovered two tumours in her jaw. Thankfully, these tumours were not cancerous, but their position near a nerve required them to be removed.

In December, Fearne said: “I’ve got a benign tumour just in my jaw here, below my ear, another little tiny one above it. I’m very grateful they’re benign, but they do need to come out because they’re on a nerve.

“So I’m gonna have that surgery, and then I’m gonna be resting to get better before Christmas. Not very good at resting, so wondering how that’s gonna go. But I’m feeling OK about it. I’m going into the operation feeling good and well.”

Cleveland Clinic explains that benign tumors are clusters of abnormal cells that ‘multiply more than they should and don’t die’. Types of benign tumours include adenomas, fibroids, and lipomas, which can develop in various parts of the body.

A British doctor who presided over inhuman experiments to cure patients of ‘illnesses’ from eating disorders to unsuitable love affairs may also have been involved with the CIA’s mind-control experiments says author Jon Stock

Former inmates of a secure psychiatric ward at a central London hospital have revealed the harrowing story of psychiatrist William Sargant’s brutally unethical treatments. Author Jon Stock met with a number of Sargant’s patients, including award-winning actress and Celebrity Traitors star Celia Imrie.

A disturbing majority of Sargant’s patients in the so-called “Sleep Room” were women and young girls, Jon Stock told the Mirror. More than once Sargant recommended a lobotomy, instead of divorce or separation, for unhappy wives.

The sick doctor once explained: “A depressed woman, for instance, may owe her illness to a psychopathic husband who cannot change and will not accept treatment. Separation might be the answer, but… we have seen patients enabled by a [lobotomy] to return to the difficult environment and cope with it in a way which had hitherto been impossible.”

Sargant’s callous disregard for the women under his care extended to parading them, nearly-naked in front of rooms full of medical students.

Celia Imrie was another victim of Sargant. The actress has starred in dozens of British movies from Bridget Jones’s Diary to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and is soon to be back on our screens in the BBC’s Celebrity Traitors. She told Jon how she developed an eating disorder as a young girl, after being told she was “too big” to pursue her dream of becoming a ballet dancer.

She explained: “I worked out every means possible to dispose of food, determined to get ‘small’ enough to be a dancer, and I was soon little more than a carcass with skin.”

She soon found herself in the hands of Sargant. Celia said: “The side effects were startling. My hands shook uncontrollably for most of the day, and I’d wake up to find clumps of my hair on the pillow.

“But the worst consequence was that everything I saw was in double vision. When Sargant came into the room, there were two of him. It was horrific and terrifying.

“Even simple tasks such as picking up a glass of water became impossible. I was injected with insulin every day too. Sargant was a big believer in fattening up his patients to get them well and you soon put on weight with insulin. I think I had what was called ‘sub-coma shock treatment’– you weren’t given enough insulin to induce a hypoglycaemic coma, but it was enough to make you drowsy, weak, sweaty and hungry.

“I will never know for sure if I was given electric shocks during my stay,” Celia added. “Some years back, I tried to find my hospital records, to see the details of my treatment. Unfortunately, Sargant seems to have taken away a lot of his patients’ records, including mine, when he retired from the NHS in 1972.

“Either that, or they were destroyed. I can’t remember ECT happening to me, but I can remember it happening to others.“

Sargant’s barbaric methods included regular electroshock treatments. “I vividly recall every sight, sound and smell,” Celia recalled. “The huge rubber plug jammed between her teeth; the strange almost silent cry, like a sigh of pain, she made as her tormented body shuddered and jerked; the scent of burning hair and flesh. It was a terrible thing for a fourteen-year-old to witness.”

Women were put in Sargant’s hands for the flimsiest of reasons. Jon told the Mirror that patient Mary Thornton was admitted to The Sleep Room after her parents suspected that her romance with an “unsuitable” boy. She told Jon that she also only has patchy memories of her treatment: “One is of the electrodes being attached to the side of my head. I remember the complete, utter terror because I didn’t even know who I was.”

Jon says this was a common cause of young women’s hospitalisation: “In the mid 1960s, for example, a wealthy businessman contacted Sargant, explaining that his daughter had fallen in love with an “unsuitable” local man in Europe and wanted to marry him.”

Sargant was employed to help cure the young girl’s love-struck “madness.” He explains: “A photo later emerged of Sargant, the father and a heavily sedated daughter standing at the door of the aeroplane that had returned her to the UK.”

One former student at the hospital told Jon: “Basically, Sargant brought this attractive young woman back at the end of a needle.”

According to some sources, Sargant is also associated with the CIA’s bizarre “mind control” program MK Ultra. Jon says that there are rumours that the US spy agency helped fund Som of Sargant’s work.

He explains: “ The minutes of St Thomas’ Research Advisory Committee meeting reveal that in September 1963, Sargant announced that an anonymous donor would fund the salary of a research registrar (£80,000 a year in today’s money) for two years. Sargant refused to reveal the donor’s identity.”

He certainly had some involvement with the intelligence community, Jon says: “Sargant did regular work for MI5 – in 1967, for example, he was called in to assess the mental health of Vladimir Tkachenko, a suspected Russian defector.”

Admitting that Sargant’s association with the CIA is one of the hardest parts of the story to prove. Jon says that Eric Gow, a former serviceman who had volunteered to undergo drug trials – under the impression that he was helping cure the common cold – was given massive doses of LSD. He says that he feels sure he recalls seeing Sargant overseeing some of this bizarre experiments at the MOD’s chemical and biological research facility at Porton Down.

Coronation Street star, Helen Flanagan, told her followers she’d ‘got her babies back’ after they returned to the UK following a holiday with their dad, Scott Sinclair

Helen Flanagan was in tears when she reunited with her three children this week. The Coronation Street star, 34, arrived at the airport wearing an elegant black dress, glam makeup and stilettos as she threw her arms around daughters, Matilda, Delilah, and son, Charlie.

The children had been on holiday with their dad, footballer, Scott Sinclair, who Helen split up from in 2022 after 13 years together. As Matilda came through the arrivals door at the airport, she ran to see her excited mum and was closely followed by her younger siblings, who Helen scooped up into her arms as she shared the adorable reunion on Instagram.

Captioning the happy snaps in which Helen and her three kids, all sporting holiday clothes, are beaming, the actress wrote: “Got my babies back” as her followers told her how ‘precious’ her children were and what a “great mum” she was.

Helen recently revealed that she was selling her family home, which had left her ‘anxious’. She explained that while she’s looking forward to the “fresh break” she was also worried about “downsizing”.

The Rosie Webster star bought the home in Bolton, Greater Manchester four years ago. She had initially lived in the eight-bedroom house with her now ex-partner Scott, 36, and their three children, prior to the couple’s separation in 2022.

Explaining she’d put ‘a lot of her savings’ into the property to make it ‘nice for her kids’, she said recently on the Declutter podcast: “It actually makes me sad that I’m gonna be leaving this house soon because I actually put so much effort into it. I put a lot of my savings into like doing the house up and stuff, and making it look really beautiful.”

Conceding it was a lot of work to manage, Helen continued: “It’s an eight bedroomed house which is obviously really hard to keep on top of. I mean, I feel really lucky to to live here – well, soon to have lived here – because it is gorgeous but it’s a lot to keep on top of.”

“But I think I’m gonna struggle to… Obviously when I do [move] because obviously I will be downsizing so much.”

Insisting that she’s “down to earth” and didn’t want to “sound a certain way,” she admitted it will “feel weird” living in a smaller property after being in her current home. She added: “Obviously, I will get used to it, I’m sure.”

“But it will feel weird to downsize everything because I’m gonna have to get rid of so much more because, for example, all my beautiful furniture that I’ve bought it’s designed for this house.” She concluded: “It won’t fit in my new house, y’know, which is fine.”

At the time of recording the podcast, Helen revealed that she hadn’t yet “chosen” her new house. However, she did say she was considering relocating to London, which would be “amazing for work”, but was yet to make a decision.

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TOWIE star James ‘Arg’ Argent was taken into custody after reportedly attacking his girlfriend, Nicoline Artursson, while on holiday in Spain

The Only Way Is Essex star James ‘Arg’ Argent was arrested on suspicion of domestic violence in Spain on May 5 after reportedly attacking his model girlfriend Nicoline Artursson while on holiday. The 37-year-old reality star was taken into custody and reportedly received a suspended jail sentence and must carry out a “resocialisation course in the field of gender violence.”

It was said he was also given a restraining order banning him from contacting Ms Artursson. Argent admitted to “mistreating” Artursson in the Court of Violence Against Women in Fuengirola. Shocked onlookers were “frightened” by what happened and told The Mirror that they “heard an aggressive man yelling” and “throwing objects from the terrace of a nearby house”.

One onlooker admitted to being “frightened” by the shouts, telling us: “We were frightened by his shouts. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing.”

They claimed Artursson, who was former Miss Sweden, appeared to be “physically and emotionally devastated” by what happened.

Meanwhile, a source close to TOWIE star Argent told The Sun he was “remorseful” about the attack but insisted “he never meany any harm.”

When approached by The Mirror, the Guardia Civil confirmed the arrest, saying: “We can confirm Mr Argent was arrested by ‘Policia Local’ of Mijas for an alleged crime of domestic violence on 5th May.”

Argent and Artursson met last summer after meeting by chance in Marbella and went public the following September.

He previously explained to OK!: “I was walking to my gig at Elliott Wright’s restaurant in Marbella. All of a sudden I see this woman coming towards me. I was like, ‘Wow, she’s beautiful.’ She was just in her gym clothes, wearing no make-up. She’d actually just fed a stray cat.”

Speaking about her, he added: “To have her beside me is like a dream. She’s absolutely beautiful. She’s a combination of Julia Roberts and Claudia Schiffer. What I love about Nicoline is, even though she’s very humble, she’s very classy.”

The TV personality rose to fame as one of the original cast members on TOWIE, appearing on the show from 2010 to 2018. Throughout his career, he took part in a number of shows including The Jump, Celebrity Super Spa, Sugar Free Farm and Celebs Go Dating.

TOWIE suspended Argent from filming in October 2014 when he failed a drug test. He later attended rehab before returning to the series. The reality TV star has regularly been an inpatient at centres due to his issues with drug addiction.

*For confidential support, call the 24-hour National Domestic Abuse Freephone Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or visit womensaid.co.uk If you or your family have lost a friend or family member through fatal domestic abuse, AAFDA (Advocacy After Fatal Domestic Abuse) can offer specialist and expert support and advocacy. For more info visit www.aafda.org.uk