She was the golden girl of ITV, and now Holly Willoughby could be the BBC’s queen of Saturday night.
Former BBC One Controller Peter Fincham claims the former star of Dancing On Ice and This Morning is being lined up to host Strictly Come Dancing after Claudia Winkleman and Tess Daly announced their departure at the end of this series.
Fincham was tipped off by a top media source, in the hair salon of all places.
‘My hairdresser also cuts the hair of a well-known channel controller,’ Fincham reveals. ‘What’s said in Harry’s the hairdresser stays in Harry’s. But he says with great confidence that Holly Willoughby will take over.’
If the ‘well-known channel controller’ is correct, it would herald a dramatic return for Holly, 44, who quit This Morning in 2023 after 14 years, following intense public scrutiny. Earlier that year, her long-time co-presenter Phillip Schofield resigned after admitting that, before leaving his wife, he had carried on an extramarital affair with a young male co-worker and had lied about it to ITV’s management, his colleagues, lawyers, agents and friends and family.
Former ITV This Morning and Celebrity Bear Hunt presenter Holly Willoughby
Since then, Holly has hosted Celebrity Bear Hunt with Bear Grylls, on Netflix, but it was not commissioned for a second series.
She was first linked to the Strictly job by The Mail on Sunday in 2023. She is close to some of the corporation’s most senior executives courtesy of her husband Dan Baldwin, who produces major BBC programmes including Saturday night fixtures The Wheel and Gladiators.
BBC chiefs are said to have long been keen to have Holly and Bradley Walsh presenting together, as they did a pilot back in 2019, Take Off With Holly & Bradley. A series was commissioned but was never made due to Covid.
DJ Calvin and Vick’s very grand designs
Having given birth to her first child, Micah, in the summer, broadcaster Vick Hope is making sure that her son will have plenty of space to crawl around in.
Vick, 36, and her husband, the superstar DJ Calvin Harris, 41, are putting the finishing touches to their mansion in the Cotswolds and landscapers are creating a horticultural masterpiece at the
£3.5 million-plus home. It includes a green space the size of three tennis courts, described in newly published plannning documents.
The splendid home will also have a kitchen garden, rose arbour, walled garden, a campfire pit, a ‘summer tippee’ and a reflection pool, plus indoor and outdoor leisure pools.
Broadcaster Vick Hope with her husband, the superstar DJ Calvin Harris
Val’s heart surgery drama
Here’s a twist that wouldn’t be out of place in one of her best-selling crime novels: Val McDermid’s life has been saved by the eagle eyes of her wife, Jo Sharp, Geographer Royal for Scotland.
Val, 70, has revealed that she’s recovering from open heart surgery. ‘Jo saved my life,’ she says. ‘We were lying in bed one night and she said, “Your heart keeps skipping a beat”.’ The novelist had tests which revealed acute aortic stenosis – a narrowing of the aortic valve.
‘I had open-heart surgery at the end of August and it was a big deal. It is three and a half hours on the operating table; a valve replacement and two coronary bypasses.’
The Princess of Wales’s brother, James Middleton, was distraught when his cocker spaniel Ella died in 2023. He’s since had the pet immortalised in a framed picture which he carries at all times.
‘My friend, the artist Holly Frean, painted a tiny portrait of her, no bigger than a postage stamp,’ says the entrepreneur, 38, who has a two-year-old son, Inigo, with his wife, Alizee Thevenet, 35.
‘I bring it with me to meaningful occasions: she’s been to the King’s Coronation and Wimbledon and was even present at Inigo’s birth.’
Acting great Susan Hampshire blasts young co-stars for ‘not learning lines’
Susan Hampshire, who starred in the original The Forsyte Saga in the late 1960s
Susan Hampshire has criticised her co-stars on new Channel 5 drama, The Forsytes, also starring Tuppence Middleton, 38, and Poldark’s Eleanor Tomlinson, 33, as she says some of them didn’t know their lines.
The 88-year-old, who starred in the original The Forsyte Saga in the late 1960s, says: ‘Some of the actors doing the lines never knew them and, in a way, the rhythm of the story doesn’t work when you don’t have the other person saying their lines properly.’
She adds: ‘I do think it’s every actor’s job to know what to say next, because otherwise your letting down the writer, for a start.’
In August, I reported Hampshire had claimed Downton Abbey creator Lord Fellowes, with whom she starred in Monarch Of The Glen, was ‘very angry’ that he was never able to make a career as a film star.
Hats off to duke and his cap…
With King Charles having decreed peers couldn’t wear their coronets at his Coronation, one duke is determined to find headwear of which the modernising monarch might approve.
The Duke of Rutland sported a baseball cap emblazoned with his title for a party at his ancestral seat, Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. The 11th duke, David Manners, 66, was joined at the party by the Duke of Marlborough, 69, whose own stately pile is Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, where Winston Churchill was born.
The 11th Duke of Rutland, David Manners, 66, in a self-styled baseball cap
More than two years since the death of her husband Mel Coleman from stomach cancer aged 60, Annabel Croft has touchingly discovered that he gave his blessing to their daughter Lily’s forthcoming wedding. With sports presenter Lily having recently become engaged to Felix McCorquodale, a relation of Princess Diana’s stepmother Raine Spencer, former tennis star Annabel now reveals: ‘He gave permission to my youngest daughter Lily’s boyfriend – they just got engaged, actually.
‘Felix told me the other day that one of the things Mel said to him was, “You definitely have my permission to marry Lily.”’
