Alex Jones has admitted she felt like a ‘failure’ amid her husband Charlie Thomson’s crippling depression battle.
The TV personality, 48, who opened up about Charlie’s mental health last year, shared advice on Thursday about how to support a partner going through depression.
Speaking on Jamie Laing’s Great Company podcast, she said: ‘You have to let go of judgement and I found it really hard, I had to bite my tongue so hard from saying “just come on… Come on let’s go for a walk… Let’s go for a drink.”
‘Don’t be so ridiculous, this person could not get out of bed, let alone put some clothes on and go for a drink. I hadn’t understood it and that’s my own failing.’
She added: ‘I’d never run because we’ve made a deal and we don’t run from each other, we face it all head on.
‘We have faced a lot of fun stuff and we’ll face really hard stuff. That is life, it’s up and down.’
Alex Jones, 48, has admitted she felt like a ‘failure’ amid her husband Charlie Thomson’s crippling depression battle
The TV personality, who opened up about Charlie’s mental health last year, shared advice on Thursday about how to support a partner going through depression
The mother-of-three confessed she still finds it hard knowing what ‘the right thing’ to do is, but she grasps the condition better now than she did.
She added: ‘The other thing is if you know that person it’s an illness, it’s not them. If I saw it again in a family member, a friend, I still don’t know whether I’d do the right thing, but I now understand it better than I did.’
The Welsh BBC One Show host previously divulged that insurance broker Charlie went ‘downhill fast mentally’ after becoming seriously ill with Lyme Disease and viral meningitis.
She opened up in a 2023 interview on The MidPoint podcast: ‘He suffers with his mental health and we’ve just been through a really bad period.
‘Charlie’s super fun, but he became a shadow of himself. He was so ill, he really went downhill fast mentally.
‘And again I found myself at a loss thinking “Oh my God, I don’t know what to do here”. We all talk a good game, but do we actually know how to help people?’
The couple met at a party in 2011 and married four years later, and went on to have children Teddy, seven, Kit, five, and Annie, two.
Alex said while Charlie is ‘coming up the other side in peaks and troughs’ there was a time where she couldn’t recognise her bubbly, fun husband.
Alex also shared in the emotional interview that she felt like she had failed Charlie when she struggled to full understand him
The couple met at a party in 2011 and married four years later, and went on to have children Teddy, seven, Kit, five, and Annie, two
She said on the How to Fail podcast: ‘I thought I was losing him, as in not actually losing him. But I thought “Oh my God, where is he? I can’t see him”.
‘I was looking at him and I’m thinking “I’m looking and hearing somebody who’s not my husband”.’
Elsewhere in the interview, Alex spoke about the time she appeared on raunchy 90s Magaluf dating show Prickly Heat where ‘everyone was having sex’.
The One Show host appeared on the Sky series which aired in 1998 and was hosted by Davina McCall and Julian Clary, while Alex was studying theatre, film and television at Aberystwyth University aged 21.
And in an unlikely turn of events, after the shows raunchy challenges and a wild booze cruise, host Davina helped her sit her exams after agreeing to be an invigilator.
Alex told Jamie Laing on his Great Company podcast that after begging the university to send her exam papers aboard, she had to squeeze her studies in between filming.
‘I had been a contestant on this dating game show, which was filmed in Magaluf, Davina was the host with Julian Clary’, she said.
‘It was called Prickly Heat. Something like 40 people between the ages of say 19 and 23 in Magaluf, everybody was having sex with everybody, and it was just really good fun.’
Alex confessed she appeared on raunchy 90s Magaluf dating show Prickly Heat where ‘everyone was having sex’
Jamie asked: ‘Does Davina remember?’ To which she replied: ‘Oh my god completely. I did my finals for my degree in Magaluf.’
‘The university was like, “absolutely not, you’re not doing your finals in Magaluf”, and I was like “please let me go and do this”, so they flew my papers out and Davina was the invigilator.’
Alex endured some drama the day before her exam, as one of the contestants allegedly picked up her revision and is believed to have thrown it into the sea.
During the podcast, Alex also revealed that Davina had sent all the contestants a little card afterwards with a personal message, something which she still has today.
Often described as a precursor to shows like Love Island, Prickly Heat involved contestants staying in a villa in a holiday resort setting and participating in various challenges.
Since her first appearance on reality TV, Alex has become a household name in the entertainment industry. She is now best known for hosting The One Show since 2010, when she took over from Christine Lampard.
