Fearne Cotton: ‘I lost myself hosting Top of the Pops’

Fearne Cotton started presenting Top of the Pops in 2003 (Picture: Nils Jorgensen/Shutterstock)

‘At least once a week, I ask myself, how could I make money without being in the public eye? But I’ve never done it, so I don’t know what to do.’

Fearne Cotton has been on television since she was 15 years old. Her equivalent of a paper round was being the face of GMTV’s The Disney Club, which eventually became Diggit.

It wasn’t long before she became one of the most recognisable faces on British television, inescapable for the next 20 years, before she’d had enough of being told she was ‘annoying’ over and over again by a British p...