Loose Women host Kaye Adams has admitted that she is so obsessed with her age that she even lied about it to her own daughter. The Scots presenter decided to invent a fake date of birth, cut 10 years off her age and kept up the pretence for more than a decade before finally coming clean.
Kaye, who turns 60 later this year, says Charly was unaware until she confessed the truth when her girl turned 12. And the Loose Women panelist revealed that she really hates her age so much that she hasn’t even had a proper birth-day celebration since she turned 30, writes The Mirror.
She admits: “It’s pathetic but I lopped off 10 years and merrily lied away, including a fake date of birth which I had. I’m generally an honest person but I’ve always been a good liar and parents lie all the time to little children.
“At the time I did it without thinking – it’s just a stupid habit you get into and think it’s funny. But now when I look back, I think, ‘Oh my God, you were sick’.”
Kaye, who was 40 when her daughter was born, adds: “By the time she got to around 12, I was beginning to feel uncomfortable. So I broke the truth to her in a coffee shop, which was a lot more traumatic than I thought it would be.
“I thought she’d think it was funny but she was genuinely disappointed in me. I’ll never forget her little face, I feel terrible, she was so shocked.
“She had it in her head I was the same age as her friends’ parents and suddenly I wasn’t and that rocked her.”
Kaye has even tried to hide her age from her Loose Women colleagues.
She says: “They all think I’m absolutely pathetic. Nadia [Sawalha] stole my driving licence at one point. Inside I was thinking, ‘I’ve got to be a good sport about this’, but I struggled to smile.”
Neither does Kaye particularly like the nickname panellist Frankie Bridge has come up with for her.
Kaye laughs: “She calls me Nana, which she’s going to get a slap for! Last summer a bunch of us went to a Grease sing-along on a boat. We’d such a good night and at one point I slipped and Frankie said, ‘Oh come on Nana’.”
Kaye - who lives in Glasgow with her partner Ian Campbell, a tennis coach, and their daughters Charly, now 19, and Bonnie, 16 - recently launched the podcast How to Be 60 to confront her issues.
She says: “Ian was about to turn 60 and was very relaxed about it and it made me wonder how he could be so cool about it while I thought it was awful. I know I’m very weird about my age and wondered if other people were weird about it too, or whether it was just me.”
Kaye believes she inherited her age-phobia from her mum, who would never tell anyone her date of birth.
She says: “She got stopped by police for speeding once. My brother and I were quite little and in the back of the car and we all got taken to the police station because she wouldn’t tell the police officer her date of birth.
“All she would say was that she was over 21. My dad had to come and get us out by quietly revealing her age to the desk sergeant.”
Kaye first began hiding her age after hitting 30. She started her media career at Central Television where her first coup was bagging an interview with then PM Margaret Thatcher.
At 26, she landed a role on TV news show Scotland Today and she was one of the first journalists on the scene of the 1988 Lockerbie plane disaster.
She recalls: “Then I was proud of my age. I got into television quite early, so I was very smug for most of my 20s. Then, when you hit 30, all these other smart young things start coming up behind you.
“I realised I wasn’t the whiz kid anymore and by the time I got to 40 I was a dyed-in-the-wool liar. The last birthday I celebrated was my 30th and since then I’ve largely avoided my birthday.”
Kaye, who started on Loose Women in 1999 aged 37, is the ITV chat show’s longest-serving presenter. The lunchtime programme has won many awards as the panel discuss a host of topics from current affairs and celebrity gossip to their own relationship and health issues.
Kaye says: “Obviously it’s gone through different groupings but the essence of it is conversation.”
With opinionated presenters from Coleen Nolan and Nadia Sawalha, to Janet Street-Porter and Brenda Edwards, it has been hit by rumours of bust-ups.
Kaye explains: “We are a group of strong women with different personalities so there are times we disagree but these things have always been resolved. And the show has brought me some very special relationships with people I would never have met. I’m very friendly with Nadia, Jane Moore, Judi Love, Stacey Solomon and Frankie.”
Just like Loose Women, the How to be 60 podcast features some very frank discussions about sex.
Kaye, who hosts the show with her friend Karen MacKenzie, says: “We didn’t set out to talk about sex, but it’s a subject that often comes up. We have the Disneyfication of sex in this country, where everyone pretends that they’re doing it more than they are.
“The truth is that in a long-term relationship, maybe a sex life isn’t happening, or has become mundane, but people feel like a failure admitting that so they skim over the reality. Maybe one day I’ll do another podcast, delving into that.”
Kaye has appeared on several reality shows, including Celebrity MasterChef, Total Wipeout and The Celebrity Circle. And she would not rule out others if the right offer came along.
Kaye, who is to appear at the Edinburgh Fringe next month, says: “I’m quite tempted by I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! because I think I’d be good at being stoical. I’d prefer that to Strictly. A huge part of me would be tempted to do it but a huge part of me is just too uptight to pull it off.
“I couldn’t handle the sexy stuff. The thought of my own face contorting into an Argentine tango pout would wake me up in the middle of the night and give me a heart attack.
“The poor soul who got me as their partner would need therapy!
“And no way would I do Celebrity SAS. They asked me to but you have got to be realistic. I don’t want a broken hip… at my age.”
Or even if you were 10 years younger, Kaye…
- Kaye Adams: How to be 60 is available on podcast players now. You can join Kaye live at the Edinburgh Fringe on August 23 and 24. Tickets at www.edfringe.com.
Celebrity gossip and telly news sent straight to your inbox. Sign up to our weekly Showbiz newsletter here .
