Since appearing on the very first Strictly Come Dancing episode in 2004, Tess Daly has shared that she initially kept her pregnancy a secret from the show.
Strictly Come Dancing co-host Tess Daly has shared details about her early days on the show, revealing that she initially kept her pregnancy a secret.
Tess appeared in the very first episode when the BBC series launched in 2004 and has remained a familiar face ever since, co-hosting alongside Sir Bruce Forsyth until Claudia Winkleman took over in 2014.
Recently, as the latest series got underway, Tess spoke about discovering she was pregnant with her first daughter, Phoebe, just weeks before starting on the show more than 20 years ago.
Chatting to Giovanna Fletcher on a recent episode of her Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast, Tess recalled how she tried to juggle the early stages of pregnancy while also beginning filming on Strictly, admitting that she decided not to break the news to her new bosses: “I was newly pregnant with Phoebe in 2004 and I didn’t tell them that I was pregnant because I thought, well, there were two reasons why I didn’t tell them.”
Tess Daly explained her reasons for keeping her pregnancy a secret early on. “One, I thought they might not give me the job,” she said. Her second reason, she added, was that it was still very early—around eight or nine weeks—and she hadn’t even told her own mother yet.
Before her rise on Strictly Come Dancing, Tess worked as a model and later transitioned into television in the early 2000s, hosting ITV’s home-makeover show Home On Their Own.
Just a year after her early TV work, Tess Daly began co-hosting the newly launched Strictly Come Dancing, taking only a brief break after giving birth to her first child in October 2004.
Off-screen, Tess met Vernon Kay 25 years ago at a BBC Christmas party, where they were asked to recreate their own dance to Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time. A couple of years later, the pair married and went on to have two daughters: Phoebe in 2004 and Amber five years later.
Following Tess’s reflections on her early days with Strictly, the show has now returned for its 23rd series, with contestants competing for the Glitterball trophy.