Loose Women star Denise Welch has revealed how her then-teenage son Matt Healy defended her from criticism when he was at school.
Welch, 61, said that The 1975 frontman secretly stuck up for her when a teacher said that it was “embarrassing” that she had appeared in a furniture advert.
“We try to sort out our things as privately as we can in quite a public arena sometimes,” she told her Loose Women colleagues during today’s show.
Discussing how her two sons have been affected by having parents in the spotlight, she said: “It’s funny because I’ve made my mistakes over the years which have been quite well documented, and it was perhaps a little easier for Louis [Welch’s 18-year-old son] because he’s grown up with less press. The press gave me a hard time over the years, some deserved, some not so deserved.
“I lived quite naively thinking that nobody was saying anything to Matt at school and of course they were, he just wasn’t telling me.”
Recalling the backlash over the advert, she added: “I used to be the front figure of a furniture commercial and I had this campaign for a few years and it paid me a few bob, thank you very much.
“And this teacher said to Matt, ‘It must be really embarrassing for your mum to be doing the furniture commercials. When she’s in an advert it kind of shows you’ve fallen on hard times.’
“Can you imagine if he’d come home and told me that? I was absolutely spitting feathers.
“He completely stuck up for me. And friends told me later on that he’d been absolutely passionate in his fervour of sticking up for me, when we were getting a bit of bad press about the marriage break up and stuff.”
Loose Women airs weekdays on ITV at 12.30pm.
