This Morning’s agony aunt, Deidre Sanders has been awarded an MBE for her services to charity and mental health in the New Year’s honours list.
Chatting to hosts Andi Peters and Josie Gibson on today’s show, Deidre exclaimed: “I am really, really thrilled. I absolutely love the work I do. I love helping the viewers at This Morning as much as I can and I loved all my years at The Sun, and that’s absolutely great… but it is lovely if somebody, especially The King can issue you a tick and say well done!”
Explaining how she found out, she said: “I actually happened to get a phone call from the Cabinet Office, I think usually you get an email straight away but I think they’d got in a muddle with my email address so somebody actually phoned.”
Emotionally adding: “A special thing for me, a lot of you know my husband died just before Christmas on 16th December but this call came through a week before he died, so that was really really special for me. I went and got the email and I could share it with him and say what had happened.
“I was with Rick for 55 years so it was really great. He was always a great tease, so he had to get in a few digs first but he did the next day tell my daughter and tell me just how proud he was so that was really, extra special.”
She continued: “It was lovely that we could share that, I think had he died before I got that news, it would have always just been a bittersweet thing so it’s lovely that we could share that.”
Deidre advised viewers: “I think the important message I want to get across is that we’ve all got problems at some point in our lives. Nobody is immune to problems and it’s ok to ask for help, it’s really important to ask for help. You do those around you a favour if you ask for help so that’s one of the great messages I’m happy to get across…”
On when she will receive the MBE, Deidre said: “This Morning is a family, so it feels like sharing it with family. The investiture will be ages. Because of the pandemic, all the investitures are running behind but it doesn’t matter. It’s not actually getting the thing itself is it, it’s just lovely… It’ll be a special day but it’s down the line somewhere!”
Deidre Sanders is best-known for her long running daily ‘advice’ column in a tabloid newspaper, and across the 1990s was the agony aunt for BBC daytime magazine show Good Morning with Anne and Nick – hosted by Nick Owen and Anne Diamond, the latter who was also awarded an OBE. Anne began her TV career with ATV News in the 1970s before moving over to Central News and then TV-am in the 80s.
This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV, STV and UTV
