She rose to fame as the loveable, bubbly blonde on Big Brother in 2010 – and 12 years later, Josie Gibson is now fronting one of the most-watched TV shows in the UK.
Josie, 37, presents, alongside TV royalty Holly Willoughby, Phillip Schofield, Alison Hammond and Dermot O’Leary, ITV’s much-loved This Morning, cracking up viewers in her role as competition announcer. And as Phil and Holly take their eight-week summer break, viewers can expect to see more of Josie on their screens.
And Josie admits her job is a dream come true. She says, “It’s like being part of another family! I work with the most amazing bunch of women – and amazing men too – but we all champion each other. Every single person at This Morning has helped me progress. When I started presenting the show with Phil, I learned so much. It’s quite an art. Phil said, ‘I never want to overtalk you, and I don’t want you to overtalk me. So what we’ll do is we’ll just take a little breath if we want to ask the next question, and the other will hear.’ Even if you went and had a proper training course on this, you’d never get those techniques.”
After winning Big Brother in 2010, Josie rode the wave of her success by launching a spin-off reality TV show with her BB co-star, and then boyfriend, John James Parton. A year later, she fronted her own reality TV show, There’s Something About Josie, and since then she’s starred on The Jump, Cooking With The Stars and Loose Women as a panellist.
But This Morning is definitely her biggest gig to date – and Josie reveals that while she gets nervous before presenting, she’s always got BFF Alison Hammond – another Big Brother star turned TV presenter – to lean on. She says, “Alison has always championed me. Sometimes I phone her up before the show and say, ‘I’m so nervous!’ And she just goes, ‘Josie, you deserve to be up there as much as anybody else. Everybody deserves a chance, so you sit up there and you own it!’”
Bristol-born Josie’s personal life has also seen big changes since she found fame. After splitting from John James, she dated plumber Luke Sanwo until 2013, before finding love with long-time family friend Terry in 2017. Josie gave birth to their son Reggie-James, now three, in 2018 – but the pair sadly split the following Christmas. While she has kept the reason for the split private, Josie said of the break-up, “I never wanted to be a single mother, obviously, but there are things you can’t let go.”
While the couple briefly reconciled in 2020, Josie is now single and admitted earlier this year she’s looking for love again but that son Reggie is her number one priority, saying, “It’s hard because if you meet someone, you want to bring them into your life. But I can’t show them my life because I don’t want to put Reg at risk like that.”
And she now says that she loves motherhood more than anything, adding, “I’ve come into myself as a mum. I came into the woman I am. I know that sounds a bit weird. Some people say your life stops when you have a baby, but my life sort of just began again.
“Reggie’s a handful, but he’s growing up really fast. Some people say your life stops when you have a baby, but my life just sort of began again.”
Looking to the future, Josie says that it’s not her career that’s a priority, as she’s so focused on her son. She says, “This sounds bad, but I live for today. I never think about the future. It’s all about Reg. It’s not about where I see myself, it’s about where I see my little boy. I know it sounds strange. I just see myself trying to develop a nice little human being.”
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