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TV presenter Sian Welby has admitted she was scared she would lose her job at This Morning if she told them she was pregnant before she started.
The mother of one, 38, welcomed her nine-month-old daughter Ruby with her fiancé, Heart Breakfast producer Jake Beckett, last June.
Welby has now revealed that she was 20 weeks pregnant when she started co-hosting This Morning alongside Dermot O'Leary and kept her pregnancy a secret because she felt she had “something to prove”.
Speaking in the latest episode of Giovanna Fletcher's Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast, Welby said: “When you first start a job, you think ‘Nobody knows what I'm actually like, that I'm trustworthy’ and you have to prove yourself.
“I felt like I had proven myself, that I can do this and that. When I got that first This Morning cover with Dermot, I knew I was pregnant but I didn't tell anyone.”
The presenter explained that she didn’t tell O'Leary or the This Morning team, and had only informed friends and family ahead of her 20-week scan.
She said: “In the back of my mind I was thinking ‘If I tell them I'm pregnant, will this put them off getting me in again?’ And will they think ‘Oh she's gonna be off for ages?’”
“I am sure so many women must feel in any job, especially if they are starting a new one they must think ‘I have just got this new job and I can't tell them that I'm pregnant’.”
“It's the fear that you're going to be immediately judged or dropped or they'll go ‘Oh why you didn't tell us because that is really inconvenient for us now.’”
“You feel like that, you're like, this is so natural and normal why and I feeling so bad of it and so bad about it?”
Welby said she found it difficult to keep it hidden at work, especially during fittings with stylists while she was 20 weeks pregnant.
She remembered doing a fitting for a photoshoot for a newspaper and realising “you can’t breathe in a baby bump”.
“It was a new stylist… I didn’t know anybody, and I thought, I can’t tell all these strangers.”
“So I’m doing all of these poses, I was doing all of the angles and I was just about getting away with it because I hadn’t popped out at that point yet. It was doable.”
However, she remembered the stylists gave her a pair of gold trousers to put on, which made her feel like “Humpty Dumpty”.
Welby, who described herself as a people pleaser, said that she didn’t want to upset the stylist, but ended up blurting out that she was pregnant in an emotional moment.
She “ended up cracking” two hours into the shoot, and said to the stylist: “This is a massive overshare because I don’t want you to think I don’t think you’ve done a good job – and I’m pregnant.”
“This poor woman was the first stranger I told,” she said. “We went through the clothes and found stuff and she was lovely.”
Welby announced her pregnancy live on air on Capital Breakfast, jokingly recalling the lengths she went to to hide her pregnancy.
“The lies, the deceit. The mocktails. The stress I’ve gone through trying to pretend not to be drinking,” she said.
After impressing the This Morning team co-hosting alongside O’Leary in January last year, Welby is now part of the weekly set-up alongside main hosts Ben Shephard and Cat Deeley, plus Alison Hammond, Rochelle Humes and Craig Doyle. She presents a regular showbiz slot as well as covering when other presenters are away.
Alongside her role on This Morning, Welby hosts Capital’s Breakfast show with Jordan North and Chris Stark.
English (US) ·