Victoria Derbyshire

“For me, it’s a real issue,” she explains, “because I spend so much time with guests before I interview them making them feel comfortable, going through their story, just letting them know I’ll be there to look after them.”

Such compassion comes as no surprise from a broadcaster who has long used her platform to both sensitively question victims of injustice and forensically interrogate those responsible.

The announcement came during Sunday’s 20^th anniversary special that saw presenters Ant and Dec suffer the infamous Bush Tucker Trials for the first time.

Due to current lockdown restrictions, the producers have moved the series from the Australian outback to Gwrych Castle in Abergele, North Wales.

A far cry from the usual sweaty base camp, the following celebrities are bracing themselves for a royally cold Welsh winter.

The All New Monty 2019: Who Bares Wins, which follows on from The Real Full Monty, sees eight celebs learning extravagant dance routines, demonstrating the importance of carrying out intimate checks for cancer prevention and being body-positive in the process.

Former Love Island contestant Jack Fincham and Strictly Come Dancing professional Gorka Marquez are among the familiar faces ‘baring all’ for a cause close to their hearts, alongside Rav Wilding (Crimewatch) and Emmerdale’s Kelvin Fletcher.

"Working on Grenfell was… oh gosh, how do I even articulate that?” asks Ashley John-Baptiste, the 28-year-old reporter who led the coverage of the tower block fire and its devastating aftermath for BBC Two’s Victoria Derbyshire programme last summer. “It was hard to switch off,” he admits.

Originally dispatched to west London to find residents who would speak to Victoria Derbyshire live on the programme, he revisited the area multiple times, meeting survivors and building a rapport with the community.

Ashley had his first experience in front of the camera as an X Factor finalist with boy band The Risk shortly after graduating from Cambridge University.

After leaving the music show during the live finals, he was asked to front a documentary on life in the care system and his own experiences in care. It was this experience working on the BBC Three documentary that sparked his ambition to become a journalist.

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.

At the age of 24, James travelled to Syria to report on the early days of conflict and wrote for several UK newspapers including The Telegraph while there. 

A fluent Arabic and French speaker, Longman has worked as Beirut Correspondent for the BBC on the conflict in Syria and the Middle East and has reported on terrorist incidents across Europe, including two weeks of continuous live reporting during the terrorist attacks in Paris and Nice.

That was fewer than five months after her show, BBC Two’s Victoria Derbyshire first took to the air.

Throughout her illness Derbyshire made the decision to document her treatment on camera. “I didn’t know what chemo[therapy] was. I didn’t know what radiotherapy was. I didn’t know what a mastectomy was. It seemed like a good opportunity to document it in a sensible, moderate way.”

The response has been exceptional. “Thousands of people got in touch to tell me that it affected them in really good ways. They said it gave them courage.”