Eight female celebrities are 'daring to bare' on ITV in the name of breast cancer.
The Real Full Monty: Ladies’ Night sees eight familiar faces come together for a show-stopping performance that will wow the audience and raise awareness of an issue very close to their hearts: breast cancer.
Victoria Derbyshire, Colleen Nolan, Emmerdale’s Sally Dexter and Megan McKenna are among the celebrities who will be pulling out all the stops to produce a show to rival the boys’ 2017 hit The Real Full Monty which raised awareness of prostate cancer.
“There is a certain element of the population who will never hear the message about breast cancer because they think it’s not for them because they’re too young, because they don’t fit the profile,” said BBC journalist and presenter Victoria Derbyshire in an interview with the RTS. “I think this is a brilliant way of making a noise about something and attracting a totally different audience who would not watch a documentary on breast cancer.”
Derbyshire was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 and was very public about her battle with the illness, covering it in detail on her daily BBC Two news programme. Her breast cancer diaries resonated with the public and she continues to campaign to raise awareness of the disease. Speaking to the RTS last year, she said: “Thousands of people have got in touch with me to tell me that [the diaries] affected them in really good ways. It gave them the courage to face a mastectomy, they were about to have chemo… That was so humbling.
In the ITV special, the women will attempt to overcome their fears and put on a jaw-dropping performance, and they’re pulling in the big guns to do it. Designer Julian MacDonald will be styling the group, and Ashley Banjo will be (two-)stepping in to choreograph the routine.
“It is such a laugh. It is making me happy” said Derbyshire. “There have been elements that have been pretty scary and you think ‘I don’t know if I can do this’, but in the end… I am in the very lucky position of still being here having been diagnosed with breast cancer, so I feel a bit like the baton has been passed to me and to anyone else who survives it, and we have got to do everything we can to get the message through.”
The boys will also be back later this year in an effort to raise the bar from 2017. Last year’s performance made a huge impact, with around 6m people watching the show go out, and causing the Prostate Cancer UK website to crash when the show when off air due to number of people flooding to the site.
Victoria Derbyshire has been nominated for an RTS Television Journalism Award sponsored by Guestbooker in the Network Presenter of the Year, Interview of the Year, Daily News Programme of the Year, and News Coverage - Home categories.
This interview is part of a wider interview to be published later in the week. All the nominees in the Network Presenter of the Year category have also been approached.
