Fiona Phillips’ husband Martin Frizell has opened up about the painful moment the TV presenter failed to recognise their eldest son during her ongoing battle with Alzheimer’s disease.
The Kent-born journalist, 64, announced in 2023 that she had been diagnosed with early onset dementia, after initially thinking she was having menopause symptoms when she first started experiencing “brain fog and anxiety”.
Alzheimer’s is described as the most common cause of dementia, which is the name for a group of symptoms associated with an ongoing decline of brain function, according to the NHS website.
In her upcoming memoir Remember When: My Life With Alzheimer’s, Frizell, 66, recalls the moment Phillips became “terribly distressed” after not recognising Nathaniel, 26.
In an extract published in The Mirror, Frizell penned: “One weekend, Nat was home from the Army and making tea in the kitchen while Fiona and I sat watching television.
“She became terribly distressed. ‘Who’s that man in the kitchen?’ she asked me. ‘That’s Nat’, I said gently. ‘Our son. He’s home for the weekend’.
“She was in such a state that she didn’t even seem upset that she had asked the question.”
He wrote that while Nat would have been “devastated” had he heard it, he thankfully wasn’t present at the time.
The couple have previously spoken about their fear that the illness could be inherited by their kids; Nathaniel and Mackenzie, 23.
When the presenter was first diagnosed, both she and Frizell were deeply concerned that the disease might be genetic and could potentially affect their sons in the future.
However, after undergoing genetic testing, they were relived to learn they weren't in danger of inheriting the disease.
Recently, Frizell recalled how the former GMTV presenter thought he had kidnapped her because of “delusions” brought on by Alzheimer’s disease.
Speaking on ITV’s This Morning, Frizell said: “She’d love to be here, but she’s got anxiety.
“She’s got a kind of a secondary problem that causes her to be in pain, a lot, a lot of pain, which adds to the confusion. So it’s difficult.
“In the book, there’s a picture of her at the end of our road, picking the most recent picture I took, only a few weeks ago, and she’s looking great, and she’s kind of smiling, and she’s got a coat on and what you don’t know is, she thought I’d kidnapped her.”
He explained that the condition causes “all sort of delusions”, adding that Phillips would get “kind of worked up”.
Frizell added: “She does recognise me most of the times. Doesn’t quite know that I’m her husband, but she knows who I am.
“On these occasions, and it’s not frequent, but every now and then, she’ll want to go home to her parents. I haven’t got the heart to say they aren’t here.
“What you do is, you say, ‘Let’s get our coats on, let’s get our shoes on’, we go up around the block a couple of times and come back in. And she says, ‘Oh, I’m home now’.”
Frizell announced in November that he was stepping down as the editor of This Morning, after a decade in the post, saying he was expecting “family priorities to change” and needed to free up time for them.
He oversaw the long-running morning show as it won numerous awards, including a Bafta and seven National Television Awards.
Phillips is best known for presenting GMTV from 1993 to 2008, before going on to head up a number of documentaries and episodes of Panorama.
She quit TV in 2018 after she started to suffer from anxiety and was also one of the Mirror’s longest-serving columnists.
Phillips cared for her parents after both of them were also diagnosed with the condition and has made two documentaries about the disease, one in 2009 called Mum, Dad, Alzheimer’s And Me, about her family’s history of dementia, and My Family And Alzheimer’s in 2010.
She has also served as an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society.
