Strictly Come Dancing’s Tess Daly has revealed she kept her first pregnancy a secret during her early days on the hit BBC show.
The beloved presenter, who first graced our screens in the very first episode of Strictly back in 2004, has been a constant fixture ever since, initially co-hosting with Sir Bruce Forsyth before Claudia Winkleman stepped into his shoes in 2014.
As the latest series kicked off, Tess shared a little-known fact about her personal life at the time of her Strictly debut over two decades ago.
In a candid chat with Giovanna Fletcher on her Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast, Tess reminisced about discovering she was expecting her first child, Phoebe, just weeks before starting on the dance show.
View 4 Images Tess was chatting on a recent episode of the Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast(Image: Dave Benett, Dave Benett/Getty Images)
She confessed that she chose not to share the news with her new employers, saying: “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.”
Explaining her first reason, she said: “One, I thought they might not give me the job.”
She then went on to reveal her second reason for keeping mum, adding: “Two, I thought, well, actually it’s really early on before you tell anyone. I’d not even told my own mother yet. It was sort of eight, nine weeks, I think it was.”
View 4 Images Tess was pregnant with her first daughter, Phoebe, when she first started on Strictly(Image: Dave Benett, Dave Benett/ Getty Images for Gin & Juice by Dre and Snoop)
After beginning her career as a model, she transitioned into television in the early 2000s, hosting ITV’s home-makeover show Home On Their Own.
Just a year later, she bagged a role co-hosting the newly created dance competition Strictly Come Dancing, taking a brief hiatus only after the birth of her first child in October 2004.
Off-screen, Tess and Vernon Kay’s romance began 25 years ago when they were asked to choreograph their own dance to Britney Spears’ …Baby One More Time at a BBC Christmas party.
View 4 Images Vernon and Tess exchanged vows in 2003(Image: Lia Toby, Getty Images for the NTA’s)
A few years after their initial meeting, the pair tied the knot and later welcomed their two daughters — Phoebe, born in 2004, and Amber, born five years later.
Following Tess’s recent revelations about her early days on Strictly, the show has returned for its 23rd series, with contestants vying for the coveted Glitterball trophy.