At Papa’s funeral I read a poem. It was an emotional moment in a day that was a strangely sad and cold affair. My sister had flown home but she and I were still not talking. When I went to sit on the family side of the church Debbie and her friend had taken the last seats, so there was no space for me. I had no choice but to sit on the other side of the church with all the friends. Chris was really upset for me but I told him it was fine. In my head I told myself, ‘I’ve got Chris, I’ve got Lexi and that’s all I need.’ Just the three of us.
Chapter 16
To Have and to Holden
Now we had our gorgeous Lexi, there seemed no reason to wait any longer to make me and Chris ‘official’. He, however, wanted to hold off getting married until she was old enough to remember it, as he had wonderful memories of his aunt getting married when he was three. Instead, Chris gave me the most amazing surprise Christmas present. Totally straight-faced, he told me, ‘Security say there’s a package outside for you – and apparently it’s bigger than a shoebox.’ (This immediately got my attention!)
We went outside together and there, in the garage, sat the Morris Minor 1000 I’d always dreamed of: a cream convertible with a red leather interior. It had apparently taken months for Chris to source the right one, which he’d eventually found in Southampton. I couldn’t believe it. I love it so much – we take it out in the summer with blankets and the roof down. (‘Is it bigger than a shoebox?’ has now become the standard family response to any surprise or gift!)
I also wanted us to add to our little family with another baby – but knew in my heart this would have to wait until after we were married. But with a wedding and another child in the not-too-distant future, a fabulous job on one of the biggest shows on television, and a role in a hit TV series filming on location in South Africa for six months of the year, obviously the sensible thing would have been to take the chance to kick back for a bit. So I did (kind of) – by entering the London Marathon.
Running the marathon is something I’ve always wanted to do – another box ticked! – and it was the perfect opportunity to raise money for Born Free. As soon as Mum found out, she said, ‘Well, I’m doing it too, then.’ She was fifty-nine! Doing gymnastics for all those years means I have a pretty good core fitness, but even so, at thirty-eight and with a personal trainer, I was finding the training tough – let alone my poor mum, pushing sixty, with her arthritic toe, doing it all on her own by walking the dog up and down hills in Cornwall. In the end, she ran for 16 miles and walked some of the rest, coming in at 5 hours 12 minutes, only an hour after me – it was amazing.
For my part, I took the training really seriously. In winter up in Norfolk I even ran in snow and hail – it was like having a bloody face peel! To keep up my morale, Chris cycled alongside me for one 15- or 16-mile run (it was nice to have someone to talk to). Back in London, I trained with Gareth Traves, my personal trainer, along a towpath up to Kew.
One freezing morning I saw a man in a hooded sweat top hunched over on the ground. We both ran past but then I stopped and turned back. It was cold and something wasn’t right. I just wanted to check that the man was warm enough, so we ran back and I noticed some Night Nurse, a bottle of spirits and a packet of cigarettes on the ground next to him. There was a thin piece of cable around his neck – the other end was tied to a low branch of a nearby tree – and I felt my blood run cold. I couldn’t look any closer.
‘Oh my God – I think he’s dead!’
I didn’t want to see his face as I knew that it would haunt me for life, so I stayed behind him while Gareth went round the front to see if there were any signs of life. When he gravely nodded confirmation that the man was indeed dead, in shock, I ran to Richmond Lock bridge and knocked on the lock-keeper’s door. When he did, I couldn’t get the words out fast enough.
‘We’ve just found a dead body!’
He looked at me closely. ‘Aren’t you that woman off the telly?’
I stared at him in disbelief (it really wasn’t the moment!). ‘Erm, yes! But did you hear me? We’ve just found a body. Can you call the police?’
Once he’d got over recognising me, I took him back to the scene and he radioed the police. Before long, squad cars appeared, and Gareth and I both gave statements, which the officers took very sympathetically – they could tell we were both in shock. The way the man had been found, and all other signs, were pointing to ‘death by deliberate act’. Apparently a common form of suicide is to put a noose around your neck and then drink or take enough drugs to get totally out of it, when you slump forward and strangle yourself. I just couldn’t take it in. It was so surreal – and so sad.
Of course, the story that I had found a body was all over the papers the next day, and not long afterwards I received a letter from his widow – it was such a warm, gracious letter, in which she apologised to me for being the one to find him. It turned out they had a young son, and I couldn’t have felt worse for her.
I ran the marathon a few weeks later, and it was one of the best things I have ever done. Everyone says that having kids is the best thing you can do but for me, the London Marathon is right up there too! I loved every minute – from getting to the start on a Virgin Limousine Taxi Bike (my mum got one too!) to sprinting down the Mall. No one watching could work out where I got the energy from – but I was listening to various tracks but constantly to Robbie Williams Let Me Entertain You and Take That’s Rule The World that Chris and I planned to walk out of church to after we married. I’d been tagged by the BBC so I could be interviewed on Tower Bridge, but by the time I got there I didn’t want to waste time talking to them, so I just ran on. I’m very competitive!
I have never felt more elated in my life – as soon as it finished I felt like I could do it all over again. Friends who saw my TV interview straight after the race didn’t believe I had done it, and they joked that I looked like I’d just been for a shop round Harvey Nicks. I was so proud with my finish time: 4 hours, 13 minutes and 22 seconds, a respectable 2,771 out of 34,000. I came back down to earth with a bump, though, when I met up with Dad, who was meant to be taking me and Mum home. It took ages to find Mum after she’d finished and then it turned out that Dad, being Dad, hadn’t wanted to pay for parking close to St James’s Palace and had found a spot halfway across the West End. So after running 26.2 miles we had to walk another mile and a half to the bloody car!
When we eventually got home I cooked a four-course dinner and me and my Mum polished off a bottle of wine between us with our medals still on. It was brilliant. Two days later, so sore I could hardly walk, we moved house and I spent all day moving boxes up and down the stairs.
A new series of Britain’s Got Talent had begun in January with the usual two days here, three days there spread across a month (I’m never away for more than ten days in total) and then in June I was to start filming my last series of Wild at Heart. After three years, I had decided it was high time for me to leave. However much she loved the giraffes and elephants, I couldn’t keep taking Lexi away for months at a time – it wasn’t fair on her or Chris.
As it was their last chance to visit, I decided to fly Nan and Mum out to South Africa with me in July. As a surprise I booked a cruise for them all for that coming December. My Nan had wanted to go on one her whole life. She was feeling lost after losing Papa – they had been together for sixty-four years, after all – and I wanted to do something to try and take her mind off her loss.
I was adamant that I didn’t want to just walk out of Wild at Heart, or leave my story open-ended – for a start, my character deserved a more dramatic end, and I didn’t want to have any chance of being lured back. I quite fancied getting eaten by a lion but in the end I burned to death in a bush fire created by special effects. It was really hot and I was surrounded by gas pipes while trying to save a cheetah – you couldn’t make it up. I made sure all the black make-up was glamorously placed across my face, and I was still wearing lipgloss, obviously! It did, however, tick the dramatic bo
x and I got to scream and scream. I watched my own funeral being filmed, which was a bit weird. I’m not sure I’d want to do that again.
Back home, there was lots to keep me occupied. We had finally fixed a date for our wedding (our invitations featured a cartoon showing me dragging him to church on a lead). We booked the private chapel at Babington House in Somerset for a candlelit ceremony, which we’d fallen in love with at my friend Angela Griffin’s wedding, and as 10 December 2008 approached I asked Mum, Nan and my future mother-in-law Polly to come with me to Harrods to help choose my wedding dress.
It started off as a really fun day – we all had champagne and I tried on dress after dress while they told me what they thought. It was a bit like a wedding-themed Britain’s Got Talent, only with more outspoken judges. I was in my element – and so carried away with the moment – until, wearing a gorgeous dress and standing on one of those round plinth things, I looked at my nan and said, ‘What do you think, Nanny?’
She looked up at me and said, ‘As long as you’re happy, dear?’ (Her expression said, ‘Should you even be doing this?’)
I was stunned. They were all very keen on Chris, and my mother had even described him as my soulmate. I didn’t know how to respond. So I said, ‘Yes. YES!’ That response itself made me cross with myself. Only seconds before, I’d never been so happy, and suddenly I was trying to justify it. It was normal for Nan to be outspoken, but this had sounded loaded and I was so upset. I thought, ‘Why would you even say that to me?’
Meanwhile, Debbie hadn’t seen Lexi in nearly three years – she hadn’t even sent a Christmas or birthday card – and it was that that had bothered me more than our fallout. So I sent her an e-mail which said, ‘If you can be happy for us then you are invited. If you can’t, then don’t come.’ (Chris said it was a bit mean, but it was how I felt. I was devastated.) But Debbie never replied. Nan then refused to come because my sister ‘wasn’t invited’ and, for a while, my mum said the same.
Jane flew over from California in time for my hen weekend. To be honest, at this stage I was so upset over the family rift that I didn’t even want a hen. But Sarah Parish insisted on organising one for me, and it was fabulous. Chris went off to Monaco and did a proper stag weekend, whilst us girls went to Norfolk for a weekend. We had spa treatments and went for bike rides. (On one we stopped off at a pub, had too much to drink and had to get the lovely bike-hire man to come and pick us and the bikes up in his van because we couldn’t be bothered to ride them back!)
After that, on the Saturday night, we got a coach into Norwich, had teppenyaki and then went to a nightclub where they’d cordoned off an impromptu VIP area for us all. During the meal, I had to fry an egg on the teppenyaki hot plate, slipped in some cooking oil and bruised my coccyx (the glamour!). The best bit, though, was on the way in to Norwich on the coach. We were listening to a request show on the local radio station, so one of the girls called in and made a request for ‘Amanda’s hens’ – she didn’t give my surname so they had no idea it was me. Moments later, we got a mention – I was so excited. It made my night to get a shout out on Radio Norwich!
As our big day itself approached, on the face of it, everything was perfect. All our close friends were coming. The press made a really big deal of Simon Cowell not being there, but the truth was, we didn’t invite him. (There’s just no point in inviting Simon to weddings; they’re not his thing. He didn’t even go to Piers’ wedding party – so we saved him the bother of not turning up.) I asked Paul Whittome to make a speech, but there was a huge hole in my day. My sister told me later she regretted her stubborness, she had never felt so depressed about not being there, and got drunk on whisky.
In spite of that, we had a lovely day. I wore a stunning crystal-encrusted Elie Saab dress; my ‘old and borrowed’ was a garter from my friend Shara who started out doing my nails on Cutting It and became one of my dearest friends; my ‘blue’ was a blue bow on my knickers, and my ‘new’ was a beautiful diamond bracelet Chris bought me for our wedding day. My bridesmaids – Jane, Jess and Lexi – were in mink-coloured dresses, and Nobbie and Fudge were there in matching ribbons. The chapel looked beautiful and Escala, the female violinists from the previous year’s Britain’s Got Talent, serenaded our guests as my dad walked me down the aisle.
Rose Keegan read from The Good Wife’s Guide circa 1955, which included the advice:
Your goal is to make sure your home is a place of peace, order and tranquility, where your husband can renew himself in body and spirit. Don’t complain if he is late home or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he may have gone through that day. Remember, he is the master of the house and you have no right to question him. A good wife always knows her place. [How we laughed!]
I’d always wanted it to snow on my wedding day so we had hired a company called Snow Business to create fake TV snow all around us. As we came out of the chapel it was like a scene from Narnia and I cried, ‘Oh my God – it’s snowing!’ Then I reminded myself! Stupid Mandy.
Everything was decorated with silver and white roses – even the arch we walked under as we left the church. We had a room for the children, set up as a Snow Queen adventure, and Father Christmas and his reindeer put in an appearance. Just over a hundred of us sat down for the wedding breakfast, and we feasted on a menu of sharing plates which included pesto pasta, shepherd’s pie (with HP sauce), sea bass and lamb.
The speeches – Dad, Jess, Chris, Paul Whittome and our best man David Coulthard – were all heartfelt, hilarious (and eventful). Dad was only a minute or so into his when there was suddenly a huge crash as one of the floral displays toppled over, breaking all the glasses and plates on the table below it. A stunned silence fell over the room, with everyone looking at each other awkwardly and shuffling on their seats. I couldn’t believe it. I was also – very uncharacteristically – speechless. Seconds later, another one fell, wrecking everything in its wake. It was like some kind of wrecking sequence in a sitcom – except not that amusing. Suddenly, though, I saw the funny side and burst out laughing. At that point everyone else fell about too, and my dad could continue.
His was a brilliant speech. Chris’s speech went down a bomb, despite him being so nervous he didn’t touch his shepherd’s pie, by mentioning the running joke we have with my parents about the fact that they drive a Skoda. Then he told everybody that we’d bought them a new mode of transport. Mum’s eyes lit up – until Chris produced a broomstick for her. He finished: ‘To quote from Jerry Maguire: “I love my wife, I love my life, and I wish you my kind of success!”’
After Chris’s speech, Piers apparently put the wind up David by telling him the rule of thumb was that there had to be one rubbish speech at every wedding, and so it had to be his. David wasn’t fazed though – not only was his speech a touching reminder of how much Chris means to him (he and David are like brothers and still a big part of each other’s lives), and full of one-liners, but he also brought in a barber’s shop quartet to help deliver it!
Despite the notable absences in the room, I was so happy. We had the most wonderful friends, family and each other, and as we flew off to the Maldives on honeymoon, I felt calm, as though, once and for all, I was drawing a line under all the drama in my life.
Chapter 17
Boyle in the Bag
The next series of Britain’s Got Talent was unforgettable in more ways than one and proved how this business can make or break you in an instant. That series first featured a very public ‘break’ and then perhaps the biggest instantaneous ‘make’ in television history. I was centre stage for both of them.
The Britain’s Got Talent calendar used to start with the contracts being signed towards the middle of December, which meant we celebrated Christmas and then started the new year really looking forward to starting on the new series (now they tend to get all the contracts sorted for the following year straight after the latest series, which makes much more sense).
I’ve always made
it clear how much I love doing the show, and how happy I am to be asked back every year. I consider myself very lucky to be a part of it. I always tell Simon, ‘If you ever sack me, you tell me to my face!’ The thing is, I know he’d never have the guts to do it himself – he always gets his executive producer Richard Holloway, aka The Grim Reaper, to deliver bad news – and so I’ve told him if that ever happens I’ll just keep turning up regardless!
But in January 2009, I came back from my honeymoon with an awful feeling of dread. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the gut instinct that has never failed me was telling me something was wrong. Then, just before I got in the car to go to Manchester for the first round of Britain’s Got Talent auditions, I received a phone call. It was Richard Holloway, and my heart dropped to the floor. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Richard hasn’t ended some of Simon’s relationships in the past.)
Richard began by saying, ‘I do hope you had a nice holiday. I just wanted to let you know that there is going to be a fourth judge.’
I laughed. ‘Oh, very funny!’
‘No, seriously,’ he said. ‘We’ve booked Kelly Brook.’
I was gutted. I had nothing against Kelly – I didn’t even know her – but I was really upset. The dynamic between we three judges was unbeatable. I thought we were the dream team. I was the only girl, sandwiched between ‘my boys’, and I liked it that way. We had all been friends from the start, but we had become even closer as the series continued. Simon, Piers and I were like The Three Musketeers. All for one and one for all. It felt as if Simon had adopted a stranger into our family on a whim, and I didn’t understand why he had to change things.
It was only when I met up with everyone else that I realised I wasn’t the only one who’d found it a shock – in fact, the whole team was furious. It seemed the thing people were most upset about was that there had been no warning. Richard Holloway told me that Piers didn’t know yet. He was only to be told when he arrived and we all met for drinks. (Of course, I rang him and told him myself – he’s my friend!) He was just as annoyed. We were all pissed off because we had no warning and were not consulted, and the show would be filmed in 24 hours.
No Holding Back Page 18