Emma Willis: “It’s
 great that women in 
their 40s on television 
are not being got rid of”

“As a
 woman that’s getting 
older it’s nice [to work
 in television] especially with what
 they say about
 Hollywood not
 having parts for 
older women. It’s
 great that women in 
their 40s on television 
are not being got rid of.”

Does she feel more confident now than she did in her 
20s? “Yeah… but I’m waiting for my luck to run out, do you know what I mean? I’ve been very lucky and there’s part of me that thinks: ‘When are they going to figure out I’m a bit of a fraud?’ But then Big Brother keep me and The Voicekeep me, so then you think, ‘OK, I must be doing something right.’”

She has never encountered sexism and describes herself as a feminist. Having grown up in a female-dominated household – she has an older sister, Sharon, who is a financial adviser, and a younger sister by 13 years, Becky, who is a stylist on ITV’s This Morning– she clearly likes and supports other women.

“Feminism now, it’s not about hating men, it’s about loving being a woman and loving men and wanting equality and why not? So, yeah, I believe in equality so I guess I’m a feminist.”

Willis and her husband share the childcare duties equally – and when he is on tour with his band, her parents step in to help. They have been a couple since 2004, but it has not always been easy. Matt has struggled with drug and alcohol abuse and has had three stints in rehab – in 2005, briefly in 2006 and then in 2008.

“We dealt with quite a lot quite early on,” says Willis. “We’re not big thinkers, we don’t plan, we just do and it’s only afterwards we look back with a bit of perspective and think, ‘Bloody hell!’ We’re quite similar in that respect and I think that helps. We just kind of get on with things and we’re both quite patient. I think we have a lot of belief in each other, so even when it got hard, we both knew that it could get better and were willing to do what it took to make it better.”

These days, she describes her husband in glowing terms. He is: “just a brilliant person. He’s my best friend, incredibly good fun, extremely charismatic, very loving, very thoughtful, he’s selfless. I’ve never met anyone that has a bad word to say about him. Ever… And I fancy him still. He’s getting better with age.”

The couple have two children: Isabelle, five, and Ace, three. Partly because of Willis’s fascination with medical procedures, she prepared for the arrival of her first child by watching endless birthing videos and episodes of One Born Every Minute. What was she like when she gave birth?

“High!” she replies, laughing. And then the laughter fades and her voice drops. “I was kind of all over the place actually. It was really quite a tricky one and there was a lot of trauma – not mentally but physically.” The baby “got stuck… and at that point, you kind of, you just want to get her out”.

Both Matt and her mother were in the delivery room with her. “Matt was OK because my mum was there. Had my mum not been there, we would have panicked much more. But she has worked on delivery wards for 20 years and she’s seen everything. We knew that if she wasn’t panicking then things were OK.”

Willis opted for a caesarean the second time round. “The easy option,” she calls it. Not easy, I say: it’s major surgery. “Trust me,” she says, grinning, “it’s easier.”

These days, her children are just about old enough to understand a little of what she does for a living. They watch The Voice and insist on re-enacting it at home. “It’s: ‘Mummy, Mummy! Tell me what Rita thinks!’” She giggles. “I always have to be Rita [Ora] because they love her. So they know what I do and that I’m on the telly but it’s just a job to them.”

Just a job, maybe. But it’s one that Willis clearly adores – even taking into consideration the sad lack of blood and guts.

Prized Apart airs on BBC1 on Saturday nights from 7pm