Cold Feet star Fay Ripley says she faked a ‘nervous breakdown’ to get out of a ‘cruel’ telly job.
The actress and presenter admits she lied about her mental health to escape relationship chat show Sofa Melt.
The 54-year-old decided she wanted out after a jilted woman was humiliated on the show.
She told food critic Jay Rayner’s Out To Lunch podcast: “Once we had three women who’d been going out with their partners for years.
“And their partners had never asked them to marry them.
“So on the show we got them to propose. Two of the chaps said yes, and we got a vicar on immediately.
“Out he came to marry them – we’d got all their friends and family there.
“But one poor woman, he said no. We made her, in her ill-fitting wedding dress, go to the other two’s weddings.
“Cruel” TV
“She cried all the way through both of them. And it was cruel. I got out of the show.”
She added: “My agent told me, ‘They might want to commission another 60 of these shows, and they might want to call it Faye Ripley’s Sofa Melt’.
Read more: When is Cold Feet coming back?
“It was all going to ramp up. I said, ‘OK, just go with whatever I do. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown. Just go with it’.
“I went in and just literally had a nervous breakdown, and went, ‘I’m unstable, I can’t do it. All these people’s lives mean too much to me’.
I went in and just literally had a nervous breakdown, and went, ‘I’m unstable, I can’t do it.
“And because I showed that, they took it off the slate.”
Asked if it was the performance of a lifetime, she replies: “Absolutely. I always want a round of applause. My agent thought it was marvellous.”
Sofa Melt, aired on Channel 4 in 1999, lasted for one 60-episode series.
Fay Ripley as Jenny in Cold Feet
Fay went on to have enduring success playing Jenny in ITV’s Cold Feet.
Read more: Cold Feet fans in tears over emotional Jenny scenes
In the most recent series her lovable motormouth character has battled cancer, had to reveal to her daughter that Pete, the man she believed was her dad, was not, and unexpectedly lost her mother.
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