Loose Women star Andrea McLean 'fell apart' and felt 'feelings explode' while on tough reality TV show

The former weather girl was speaking about her time on Celebrity: SAS Who Dares Wins while chatting to Laura Hamilton on the Mile Fly Club podcast yesterday (Sunday September 22).

She explained how the show had impacted her health, and also said she asked for certain elements of her experience to never to be shown to the public - which Channel 4 agreed to.

McLean appeared on the show, which sees famous faces put throught the notoriously difficult SAS Selection process, in 2019 but she had to exit early due to hypothermia.

She has now spoken out, however, about how she also endured another traumatic experience during her short time on the show, involving a mock kidnapping. The 54-year-old mum-of-two had her hood pulled over her head and was taken to an unknown location on a boat.

Once she reached a mystery destination, she said someone took the bag off her face and stared into her "soul" as if they "hated" her. In that moment, she said the person appeared to be like somebody else from her past who'd previously looked at her in a similar way.

McLean went on to say she later "fell apart" during a "fighting part" of the experience, which was noticed by the show’s directing staff (DS). Explaining the situation in more detail, she said: "It was like feelings that just exploded out of me. What's interesting, when I look on the TV show now, I have no expression on my face. You would not know that's what's happening.

"Then we, as part of the programme, there's a fighting part to it where you have to. . . and I fell apart during it and the DS saw that, and they hauled me in for interrogation and basically really intensely interrogated me over my reaction to what had happened.

"Now, what I ended up talking to them about, I made it really clear this is not for public viewing so they've been very good and they never showed it, but I explained what my situation had been. And to be fair to all of them, they were actually very kind and very supportive.”

McLean did not give further details about that previous experiences she was speaking about.

She went on, however, to praise the reaction of the SAS officers. "And my experience after that, whilst it was brutal, and it was tough, and I ended up getting hypothermia, and I had to leave the show, actually, they were incredibly kind and supportive to me whilst shouting, whilst screaming, whilst doing all the things,” she said.

Speaking about the incident previously, the TV star said the experience forced her to confront things from her life she had previously "buried".

In a conversation with Chris Evans on Virgin Radio, she said: "It was because all of these experiences I had, I've done what so many of us do. I put them in a box and buried it in the garden." She went on to say that she'd put a "tree on top of that box" and it was no longer part of her life but to "have that happen" was "just so unexpected".