Sykes also recounts how during the pandemic she was interviewed for a documentary she had helped set up about her friend Des O’Connor. She said she was horrified to discover when the show aired that it had been “edited it in such a way that they did not use the footage of him, only footage of me losing it … I just looked crazy”. He got up and I threw a drink all over him.

However, while she was filming, a colleague lay on the floor and stared up her skirt, “which he thought was funny.

This industry was a horror story.”Īnother time, she was persuaded to take part in a New Year’s Eve special by an agent who said he would protect her. But in the press release issued about the show being cancelled, “the line was that Mark and I had ‘failed to understand the concept of the game’. She alleges that she was often “thrown under the bus” by the TV industry, citing as an example a gameshow she and co-host Mark Wright had filmed that was cancelled as it fell foul of TV gambling rules. She recounts tales of press intrusion and coercive and abusive boyfriends, including one who allegedly choked her. In her TV career, Sykes struggled using the earpiece needed for producers to talk to her due to the heightened sensitivities from her undiagnosed autism and drank to try to cope. She claims in the book that the man pressed himself against her in bed but she had a stomach upset so he eventually left her alone and she “buried the experience until recently”. Sykes also recounts being deceived as an 18-year-old by a much older photographer into staying overnight with him on a shoot in Africa. Melanie Sykes working for The Big Breakfast in 1998. He was grabbing my breasts and being a complete pest. Handwritten by Sykes, Illuminated: Autism & All The Things I’ve Left Unsaid describes incidents including how collecting a Royal Television Society award was “tainted” as she “kept being touched up by a TV personality, who would not leave me alone. Her book offers a fresh perspective on the woman from Greater Manchester who rose to fame in the 1990s as the face of Boddingtons beer. “I want to help protect children and women and anyone who’s vulnerable … I’m just a tool in order to facilitate it.” She said she hoped her book and two films she is making would “shine a light” on autism, especially as her son was diagnosed autistic as an infant, and issues affecting vulnerable women, such as coercive control. Sykes said she would no longer be, “tap-dancing for corporations who couldn’t give two hoots about my wellbeing”, telling the Guardian that mainstream TV “just doesn’t interest me … I’m out of that game”.

The book charts Sykes’s experiences of sexism, abusive relationships and racism, while providing an insight into the often toxic culture that she claims pervaded the fashion and showbusiness industries during her career.

The Royal Delivery by Melanie Summers