Paddy McGuinness reveals his secret depression battle during Take Me Out stint
Paddy McGuinness became "mentally burnt out" during his time as host of Take Me Out due to his family's struggles with autism.
Paddy McGuinness secretly battled depression during his time on Take Me Out.
The 52-year-old presenter fronted the ITV dating game show from 2010 to 2019, and has now revealed he was "mentally burnt out" behind the scenes due to his family’s autism struggles.
During an appearance on Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place podcast, Paddy said: "Sometimes I’d be in the dressing room with something on the phone at home and stressing about it.
"Then you’d go out there and you’d do the show and you’d come off, and I’d be knackered because I’d mentally burnt out."
The former Top Gear host added his mind could make "everything worse" and "magnified" all of his problems.
He said: "I think your mind is a powerful tool. It makes everything worse. Every problem is magnified a million times, and I was always going ‘worst case scenario’ of everything."
Paddy’s ex-wife Christine McGuinness - who split from the TV star in 2022 - and their three children Leo, Penelope and Felicity have all been diagnosed with autism, and Paddy admitted it was "little things" that "helped depression come to a front".
He explained: "They’re all little chinks in the armour that were slowly being eroded that I didn’t realise."
Paddy said it was "brilliant" he had the chance to address something that so many other people struggle with.
He added: "But again, on the positive, the job is brilliant for then talking about things because you’re going to reach more people and you’re going to make more people aware, so I take the positives out of things like that."
After Take Me Out ended in 2019, Paddy said he hoped the show would return in the future - though admitted the programme’s format could now be problematic.
Speaking on the Table Manners podcast, he said: "I think the way things are at the world now, we live in a very strange time where if you're saying something jokey or something not serious or whatever, it gets taken out of context, put online, and there's a spin on everything.
"And I think Take Me Out, because it was so kind of pure and lovely and fun and Saturday night, and we had a laugh. That was of its time.
"I hope I'm wrong, but I think if you didn't know, there'd be that many bloody things going, ‘Oh, you can't do that, you can't say this’, and taking things out of context and what have you."
