Carol Vorderman admits she didn’t see the point of meeting her father for the first time at the age of 42.
The Countdown icon, now 62, was born on Christmas Eve in 1960 to a single mother and has now spoken up about the difficult period her family was going through when she arrived.
She discussed her “modest beginnings” with RuPaul’s Drag Race judge Michelle Visage on her Rule Breakers podcast.
Carol revealed during their talk that her father, Tony, was having an affair when her mother, Edwina – commonly known by her middle name Jean – was pregnant.
Tony didn’t tell Carol about his affair until after Carol was born.
‘My mother and father were married, and I had an older brother and sister, but my father had an affair when my mother was pregnant with me,’ she told former Strictly Come Dancing contestant Michelle.
‘He told my mum, once she’d given birth to me around Christmas time, and then she left and went back home to Wales, where she was brought up.
‘So, I was brought up in North Wales in a single-parent Catholic family – which was very, very unusual – in poverty.
‘I was surrounded by my relatives and I never met my Vorderman family because my father, who was very close to my brother and sister, refused to have anything to do with me, which was quite strange. Until I was 42 years old.’
Carol went on to explain that she hadn’t reunited with her dad until she 2002, when she was a mum-of-two herself.
She said: ‘He was an old man by then, it was like what’s the point? I know who I am, I’m a good person, I look after my mother, I look after the kids, all that kind of thing. I just thought, “Oh, really?”
‘He was in the Dutch resistance in the Second World War. When I was born, the Second World War was still very much part of your parent’s everyday, really, because they’d lived through this terrible trauma and that had only finished 15 years before I was born.
‘To me, in my head when I was growing up, he was either this romantic hero, or he was a villain. He was never just a normal Joe, he was one or the other.’
Carol’s mother, who died in 2017, remarried an Italian POW, Gabriel Rizzi, when Carol was nine years old.
Carol also discussed her hectic love life, which includes dating five men at the same time, on Michelle’s podcast.
She said: ‘I’m having the best time. I’ve spoken about this once. I have a system which I’ve had for 10 years. They’re called “special friends”.
‘I spoke a couple of months ago about having “special friends” and it was like, again, the world had fallen in for some people but actually what I found was there was an awful lot of women who said “I’d never thought about it like this”.’
The post Carol Vorderman recalls ‘pointless’ first meeting with dad when she was 42: ‘I just thought, “Oh, really?”‘ appeared first on My Celebrity Life.