TV host Angela Scanlon has revealed that a celebrity guest asked her a 'creepy' question that left her with a 'weird raging internal conflict' just moments before going on air.
The 41-year-old mother of two did not name the celebrity or the programme she was presenting at the time, though she is best known for co-hosting the BBC’s The One Show.
The Co. Meath woman made the shocking revelation on the podcast Where There’s A Will There’s A Wake, hosted by star of the Great British Bake Off, Mel Giedroyc.
Mel asked Angela to recall her trickiest situation as a presenter. Ms Scanlon said: ‘I was doing a live show one day and before we started recording… it was myself and a male co-host and there was a male guest who’s very, very well known.
‘He was sat opposite me, and I’m a busy woman, I was learning where we were going, I was understanding when the VTs [pre-recorded segments] were dropping and whatever else. I welcomed him in with and did what I had to do, which is my job, which is what he was there to do, presumably.
‘Anyway, just before we went live, he turned around to me and he said…. I was wearing jeans and a blazer, not that that should matter, but he said “Are you wearing panties underneath those?” ‘And then, boom, we are live on air and I thought, “Oh my God, he’s just tried to tip me over the edge”.’
Angela revealed she was torn over how to respond with the cameras rolling and was feeling ‘ready to burst’. She added that the ‘dream’ would have been to call the guest out, by saying just as the cameras began rolling: ‘To answer your question, pet, I am wearing pants!’
She refused to be drawn on the identity of the star, but said she felt that the behaviour was the ‘tip of the iceberg’. She also criticised his ‘creepy’ use of the word ‘panties’, adding: ‘It was too much, it was too much.’
She said the incident caused her to feel a ‘weird raging internal conflict’, because while she felt she is ‘a woman who stands up for herself’ it would have been ‘unprofessional’ to do so while on live TV.
Mel’s podcast focuses on death, with the presenter asking guests how they’d like to die and what they would want their funerals to be like.
Angela joked that ‘the little cloud of shame never stops following you around’, in relation to being raised Catholic in Ireland. ‘Some of the language that you hear now as an adult is just… like, “we’re going to wash away your sins”… Confession is a strange thing to go through,’ she said.
Earlier this week, the mother of two girls told listeners on her own podcast with Vicky Pattison, Get A Grip Love, that she previously had ‘unrealistic’ expectations about her abilities raising daughters Ruby, seven, and three-year-old Marnie.
Angela said that she was mindful not to show any sign of frustration with one of her daughters, but found that the child appeared to prefer her husband, Roy Horgan.
She explained: ‘My husband had much more natural ebbs and flows where he would lose his temper or give out or be frustrated openly and outwardly, and I kept thinking: “hang on, I’m very controlled.”’
She said this bothered her for years until she had a realisation one day. ‘I remember thinking, “Oh, that trust and emotional intimacy and all of the good human stuff is built on imperfection and muddling through and the messiness of figuring it all out.’
