Richard Bacon has said that being sacked from Blue Peter after being caught doing cocaine ‘changed his life’ but added that he thinks people should remember him as Britney Spears’ ‘first husband’
Richard Bacon shares how Blue Peter axe changed his life(Image: Dave Benett/Getty Images for Fortnum & Mason)
Former Blue Peter presenter Richard Bacon has said that he thinks his career was helped after the children’s show sacked him for doing cocaine.
The 50-year-old was just 21 when he was offered a presenting role on Blue Peter in 1997. Just a year later, he was told to leave amid the drugs scandal that emerged around the time of the show’s 40th birthday celebrations.
But rather than disappear, Bacon went on to join Channel 4’s Big Breakfast, which he has joked he wouldn’t have gotten if he hadn’t been sacked. Bacon explained that he thought he would have gone on to be “the host a holiday show” instead. “I’d have been going, ‘Two nights in Lanzarote will set you back £99’.”
“It’s changed the whole course of my life. When I got thrown off that show, the Big Breakfast came calling. The host Johnny Vaughan had been to prison for dealing cocaine, so it just seemed like a natural home. It made mine look like nothing,” he told the Daily Mail’s Tales From Celebrity Trenches podcast.
This comes only weeks after he admitted that he felt a “deep sense of shame” over being fired from Blue Peter. In an interview on podcast How To Fail with Elizabeth Day, he confessed: “The biggest shame about it is, some time later, I don’t know how much time later, my mum told me it was the only time that she’d heard my dad cry, ever. He’s just from that generation that doesn’t. His own dad came out of World War 2 and didn’t show emotion.”
He added: “Even to this day, she said It’s the only time I’ve ever heard him cry. So when she told me that story, I felt a deep sense of shame.”
Whilst talking with the Mail, Bacon said there was something else he felt like he should be remembered for. The former presenter declared that he should go down in the history books as the first husband of global pop star Britney Spears.
Bacon and Spears met in 2002, shortly after her very public breakup with Justin Timberlake. She was going on Big Breakfast to be interviewed and Bacon thought it would be funny to bring along a vicar, who could legally perform marriage ceremonies. Telling her he was “available”, the Bacon proposed to Spears – and she said yes.
Whilst still on set, Bacon produced “an actual marriage contract”, which Spears signed. Backstage, her security guard ran after Bacon and tore the contract up.
The presenter joked that he didn’t think marriages ended because the contract was ripped to pieces, and therefore, “in strict legal terms, I was married to Britney Spears”.
Two years after ‘marrying’ the Bacon, Spears married Kevin Federline. At the time, Bacon joked on his Xfm radio show that she was a bigamist due to their impromptu nuptials. He told the Daily Mail that he found it funny when news outlets ran with the story, calling her a bigamist too and saying she was married to him.
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