Inside I am A Celeb Star Richard Madeley’s youthful years from tragic baby abuse to infidelity

RICHARD Madeley left his fans heartbroken earlier this week when he was banned from returning to I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here.

The Good Morning Britain star was hospitalized in the early hours of Thursday morning after feeling uncomfortable in Gwrych Castle camp.

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The star had to leave I’m A Celeb camp earlier this weekPhoto credit: Rex

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Richard was beaten by his father as a child and suffered terrible abusePhoto credit: BBC

After 65-year-old Richard broke the show’s “Covid Bubble”, he had to withdraw from the successful ITV competition and return home just a few days after it started.

He opened up to his social media after he was “absolutely fine” and “gutted” when he left the castle after being “hospitalized as a precaution”.

The TV host left his fans devastated after only participating in a bushtucker trial and only a few minutes of airtime since entering the castle grounds.

But it’s not the first time Richard has gone through difficult times – he’s lived through tragedies all his life, from difficult parenting to tragic baby losses.

Here we delve deep into Richard’s behind-the-scenes life: his childhood, family, and the tragic secrets of his personal life.

Difficult childhood

Richard talked about his early years in his book Father and Sons – which tells how the problems in his life began when his grandfather was abandoned.

At the age of ten, Geoffrey Madeley was left without a family when he moved with his parents and six siblings from Worcester to Liverpool.

Richard claims his grandfather’s tragedy came “straight from Dickens” when he was left on his uncle’s farm after falling asleep there.

His parents had gone to take a ship to Merseyside and left the little boy in the house – he had been left behind as a laborer under a deal.

Geoffrey was “collateral” in securing the family passage to Canada – and he was forced to work the land while his family had to flee forever.

Richard explains in his book: “When I was a teenager, on one of my long walks with him, I asked, ‘Didn’t you even get a chance to say goodbye, Grandpa?’

“With complete serenity he replied, ‘No. No, I haven’t.’ He was not treated like a slave, he was a family after all. But he had become something of a possession. “

Richard blamed his grandfather’s tragic abandonment for how he would beat Richard’s father, Christopher, which started a cycle of abuse in his family.

Violent beatings from his father

The Good Morning Britain host has since announced that he has been violently beaten by his father, Christopher.

As a child, he was severely scarred for months by the “jerk stick” used to beat him for any behavior his father deemed unacceptable.

“I was seriously beaten,” Richard opened on the ITV show. “I’m still mad about it. I swore I’d never put a finger on my kids.”

Richard has two children with his wife and TV host Judy Finnigan – Jack, 35, and Chloe 34, and is a stepfather to Judy’s two children.

Telling The Guardian about his childhood beating, he said, “He thought it was acceptable and that was then. The beatings were learned behavior.

“When my dad hit me it was out of control – and now I know it was because he was dealing with a lot of buried anger.”

Christopher died of coronary thrombosis at the age of 49 – a tragic death that prompted Richard to quit smoking as he wanted to avoid the same death.

Richard wrote of his father’s death: “He managed to drive to his front door himself, fumbled desperately with the key, stumbled in and collapsed in the arms of my terrified mother. He had three minutes to live.”

He revealed that his last words were “disappointingly mundane” and added, “Not a final pearl of wisdom; not a comprehensive but succinct summary of forty-nine years of existence.

“He gasped, ‘Do you have to lean on me that damn strong?’ before his life died out with the sudden totality of a power failure. “

A near death experience

Richard almost died as a child after contracting pneumonia when he remembered asking his mother during the scary time, “Mom, am I going to die?”

He said, “The reason I remember it so clearly was because my mother brought my bed down into the living room, and the custom back then was that it was always one step before death.

“So when my father died of cancer, he refused to have his bed downstairs until the end.

“One day I said to my mother, very frightened, ‘Mom, am I going to die?’ It must have been my birthday because I remember my mother having a cake with candles on it and I was too weak to blow them out. “

Turn to crime?

The journalist was caught shoplifting in 1994 when he later revealed that he had become “overly confident” in his teenage years after a difficult childhood.

In 2008, he revealed that he had mistakenly taken a bottle of champagne through the checkout of his grocery store – but he couldn’t get away with it.

“I put the food through the register, I forgot to take out the champagne,” he told the Guardian. I can handle anything, I can juggle eight balls in the air, and I’m actually a terrible cropper. I can joke about it now. ”

He was taken to court and luckily acquitted – but admitted that the shoplifting advertisement was “humiliating”.

“If I was accused of robbing a bank, it has at least a bit of glamor, but damn shoplifting … It’s like w *** ing in a public toilet. Just awful, ”he concluded.

A number of matters

After his father’s death, Richard admitted that he had “about ten” affairs with his first wife Lynda Hooley during his marriage.

He told Piers Morgan’s life stories in 2009 about his behavior, stating that their marriage got off to a “bad start” and was “broken up”.

The star confessed to cheating on his wife “several times” during their five years together and estimated that he had been with ten other women.

“Although the marriage had some very happy moments, there was a lot of negative in it,” he told Piers of their relationship.

“I don’t use that as an excuse. It’s wrong to have affairs, but I was a very young man.”

Heartbreaking baby loss

Prior to the birth of children, Jack and Chloe, Richard and Judy, 73, suffered a devastating miscarriage with their first baby.

Richard opened up to The Telegraph during Baby Loss Awareness Week in 2018 and said, “Judy was 16 weeks pregnant when she went for a routine check-up.”

The couple, who married in 1986, remembered the day the nurse rushed up to tell him the terrible news about their child.

He said: “But I will never forget that the nurse rushes towards me with a pained expression on her face: ‘Mr Madeley, you have to come here …’

“I came to Judy in the exam room. Tears ran down her face: ‘It died Richard. It died’. The scan showed a perfect fetus with a non-existent heartbeat.”

Judy was put into labor to give birth to the fetus, which left the couple feeling “empty, cold, defeated and bleak”.

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He and his wife, Judy, suffered a heartbreaking loss in their early years of marriagePhoto credit: News Group Newspapers Ltd

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Richard is now presenting Good Morning Britain on ITVCredit: Rex Functions
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