Davina McCall has opened up about the ‘dark’ family reason behind a ‘weird’ TV decision she made while facing potentially life-threatening brain surgery
After discovering that the cyst in her brain would need immediate – and potentially life-threatening – surgery, Davina McCall chose to record what might have been her last ever TV appearance.
The presenter, who was working on ITV’s The Masked Singer at the time, received her colloid cyst diagnosis in November 2024.
It’s an extremely uncommon condition, accounting for just over one hundred of all brain tumour cases, and without treatment, the slowly developing growth near the brain’s centre can be deadly.
However, Davina revealed, the operation to extract it carries equal dangers.
She explained to The Guardian: “They cut like a hairband into my head, peeled the front of my head down, then went through the two halves of my brain.”
The celebrity confessed “nobody at The Masked Singer knew” about her condition until she broke down in front of an ITV colleague, confiding she felt “good and terrible all at the same time” about her upcoming surgery.
Understanding there was a chance she might not survive the operation, she made the distinctively eccentric choice to perform a few Christmas numbers on The Masked Singer: “I pretended to everybody on the judging panel I was sick. And then I actually put on a costume and performed.
“It was quite weird,” she continued, before becoming emotional as she revealed: “I wasn’t thinking this in a dramatic way, but I did think ‘If I don’t make it, this will be amazing for my kids to watch.’ I know that sounds a bit dark…”
Davina remembers fretting about how her passing might impact her three children, Holly, Tilly and Chester. She has strived tirelessly to provide her youngsters with a steady upbringing – vastly different from the turbulent existence she experienced with her own mother.
“I can now, in hindsight, appreciate that she was a pretty f*****g exciting person,” she previously told The Observer magazine. “She just wasn’t a brilliant mother.”
Davina emphasises that her own children enjoyed “a solid childhood. I was with their dad for 18 years,” she stresses, “We were together, they were under one roof, they had food on the table.”
It’s a stark contrast to her younger years when Davina would witness her mum exposing herself to complete strangers on the street – wearing nothing except shoes and a coat as she would “flash” pedestrians.
Davina was just 12 when she first experimented with drugs alongside her mother, launching her onto a perilous journey that eventually led to cocaine abuse and, subsequently, heroin dependency.
However, these days her sole obsession revolves around health and fitness, preserving her remarkably toned physique through Pilates, weighted squats, boxing and yoga.
She disclosed that following her operation, she needed to restart her fitness routine from scratch, explaining: “After my operation I have had to start from the beginning and go back to couch to 5K, which has been humbling but I’ve really enjoyed it.”
