TV Presenter Who Made Her Bed in a Park

Gail Porter, from Edinburgh, became a familiar face on British television as a model and presenter, working on programmes including The Big Breakfast, Top of the Pops and Fully Booked. She has said that she lost her hair to stress-related alopecia in 2005 and that TV work became hard to find after that.

In January 2017 she told the panel of ITV's Loose Women, and papers including HuffPost UK and The Scotsman, how her finances had collapsed. About six years earlier she had spent time in hospital under mental health legislation, following a breakdown and the recent loss of her mother. She said she did not open her bills and just put them away. Her money problems, she said, snowballed and she had nowhere to turn.

At one point she ran out of money for accommodation and spent a couple of nights on a bench on Hampstead Heath in London, with a rug and a rucksack. She described it as cold and terrifying. She said she told nobody, out of embarrassment, and described herself as homeless for about a year. She told the Loose Women panel that her problem was that she ran away from everything, and broke down in tears during the interview.

At the time she was renting a one-bedroom flat in London and said she lived week to week on about £200. She had been declared bankrupt at the High Court the week before and owed a six-figure sum in tax arrears. She saved most of her money to feed her 14-year-old daughter, Honey, who stays with her three days a week. She told the Scotsman she wanted to work so much that she was writing an autobiography, and that she had to stay positive.