Alex Jones has claimed her ex-boyfriend Steve Jones once pretended she was ill so he could steal an interview with a Hollywood star away from her. The One Show host was offered the chance to interview Angelina Jolie early in her career but the gig ended up being taken away from her after her partner swooped in to take it for himself, with the pair later breaking up on live TV.
The Welsh presenters dated for three years between 1999 and 2002, with Alex working as an entertainment correspondent on Channel 4 breakfast show RI:SE at the time. It was in this job that she was given the opportunity to speak to the Lara Croft star on the red carpet, but a sneaky move from Steve meant she had to watch him do the interview instead.
The 46-year-old opened up on the awkward situation on the Dish podcast, telling hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Harnett that Steve had claimed to a production company that she was ill when she was actually out shopping.
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"Normally they would call in the morning and ask to come and do an interview or a junket," she explained. "I was staying in [Steve's] flat at the time when I was working in London.
"He picked up the landline and said 'Al's not here. She's not feeling well, she's had to go back to Cardiff'. I was in Topshop. So he did the interview."
It's not the first time that Alex, whose new BBC series Reunion Hotel aired for the first time this week, has shared the story, but she had previously never revealed that Steve was the guilty party. Sharing more details with Angela Scanlon on her podcast Thanks A Million, she confessed that she and her boyfriend at the time "split up live on telly" after the alleged betrayal.
“I got back to the flat and was like, ‘where is he?’," she recalled. "Hours went past, nobody answering their phones and in the end thought, ‘Right I’m going to drive back to Cardiff, because I don’t know where you are, you’ve probably gone to the pub."
“And then the production company called, and they were like, we’ve got bit of a situation. Tomorrow morning, your boyfriend is going to the premiere with Angelina Jolie and it it would be really funny if you came on the line, live on the show and surprised him and said that you know exactly what he’s been up to.”
Alex accepted the offer, adding: "On live telly I'm like 'you lied to me, where have you been?'. So yeah, not surprisingly, we split up live on telly!"
The One Show host has of course since moved on from Steve, finding love with husband Charlie Thomson who she married on New Year's Eve in 2015. The couple have three children together, with Alex recently sharing some rare snaps of them together during a romantic city break in Amsterdam.
Steve, meanwhile, has gone on to present T4, The X Factor USA and Channel 4's Formula One coverage, as well as Let's Dance for Comic/ Sport Relief alongside Alex. Since their split, he had romances with fellow presenter Fearne Cotton, actress Hayden Panettiere and Baywatch star Pamela Anderson, but he met his wife Phylicia Jackson while working in America and the couple have been married for nine years, with Steve describing it as his "greatest achievement".
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