Andrea McLean and Brenda Edwards to front anti-bullying campaign

16 November 2020

Andrea McLean and Brenda Edwards are set to front an anti-bullying campaign.

Andrea McLean

The 'Loose Women' panellists have teamed up with Nationwide Building Society for two 30-second adverts for Anti-Bullying Week, which begins on Monday (16.11.20), after fighting through their own experiences of bullying as children.

Andrea opened up about the time she was tormented by schoolchildren during her time in a secondary school in Scotland after she defended another girl who was getting bullied.

She recalled: “They ripped up all my artwork, all the stuff that was going towards my exams. They would threaten to kill me, they’d follow me home. I never went to the loo the whole time I was at school because they’d follow you in. It was truly awful.

"These girls were very, very viciously picking on another girl at school. She was quite vulnerable and very defenceless, and all I did was walk over and say, ‘What are you doing? Leave her alone’. They all went, ‘Now it’s your turn’ and that was for two years.”

Meanwhile, the 51-year-old presenter recently admitted she pretended "everything was fine" the day after she spent an entire night battling with suicidal thoughts.

She revealed: "Unless someone’s been there it’s impossible to describe. It lasted a night and it was the longest night, dark and horrible.

"I was on the floor, pacing the room and crying ... The next morning I got up off the floor and went to work. I spent a whole day pretending everything was fine.

"By the time I got home I thought, ‘It’s passed. I still don’t feel right but I don’t want to think about it anymore.’ So I never mentioned it.”

However, her husband Nick Feeney only realised how low his wife had been when she detailed her breakdown in her book 'This Girl Is On Fire'.

She added: "Subliminally, my brain knew it was my turn – I’d caught him, now he’d catch me. We’re best of friends.

“I said we needed to have a hobby that would force us not to talk about work. Before Covid we’d just started going to salsa classes. We need to find something else.”