We’re happy to overshare – nothing is off limits including secret to our marriage, says BBC stars Chris & Rosie Ramsey
LOOKING out of the window at their plush London hotel, Chris and Rosie Ramsey contemplated getting steamy up against the glass.
It was a raunchy thought but a fleeting one, as the fear of being caught in the act quickly turned them off.
Together, the northern duo, stand-up comic Chris, 36, and bubbly wife, Rosie, 35, have become household names with their TV chat show and podcast Sh**ged. Married. Annoyed.
Rosie says: “I was sat looking at the windows thinking, ‘Would I like to have sex against this?’ Then I was like, ‘I probably couldn’t have sex against this because people would be like, ‘That’s Chris and Rosie Ramsey off the telly’.
“It would just be our luck that a Hollywood-level cameraman hap-pens to be across the road in the other room with a telescopic lens.
“It would look awful. It would be horrible. It would be like that moment in Friends when Ross and Rachel try to watch their sex video and they go, ‘Ahhhhhh!’, and they turn it off?”
As for sex up against a window, Rosie adds: “I don’t like sex stand-ing up, anyway. Horrible.
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think any woman enjoys it because it’s mightily uncomfortable. Or is that just because I’m short?
“I’m too little and I’ve always had tall partners so it’s like, ‘Is this worth it?’
“You go on your tiptoes and you get cramp in your calf — that’s happened before — and you just go, ‘What the f**k?!’.”
CELEBRITY GUESTS
While Rosie explains how she used to be a lot more energetic — presumably before their two boys, Robin six, and Rafe, two, came along — Chris is quick to interject and teases: “Are you just lazy?”
With a best-selling book and a sellout nationwide arena tour under their belts, there’s no stopping this power-house pair.
They have racked up nearly 150million downloads of their podcast since its launch in 2019.
They’re a couple used to juggling life in the fast lane and, away from hotel windows, they still manage to keep their marital spark alight.
So what’s their secret? “Just getting drunk,” laughs Rosie — and Chris agrees: “Couldn’t have put it better myself.”
Rosie adds: “It might not be the best to be laughing about because we’ve got two young kids — but it’s having nice times together, realising we’re so lucky, just laughing at the stress, and making a bit of an effort with each other. We make each other laugh, and that’s key.”
Chris adds: “We’re affectionate, too. We’re always hugging and kiss-ing. Hey, we held hands walking around London the other night.”
Yet despite their success, they consider themselves just a normal couple, from South Shields, Tyne and Wear, who regularly rely on their parents to care for their boys while they’re working.
They’ve just started a second run of their TV chat show, The Chris & Rosie Ramsey Show, and see work trips as mini-breaks.
Chris says: “Honestly, it’s our best nights out. We don’t really have many nights out at all because we have so many nights away in London and on tour for work.
“We kind of save our childcare for this. So it’s like when you see that moment in a movie, they check into a hotel and the receptionist would go, ‘Business or pleasure, sir?’ And they’d go, ‘Bit of both’. That’s basically our life.”
The show launched on BBC Two last year and became an instant hit thanks to celebrity guests including Martin and Shirlie Kemp, and Strictly judge Craig Revel Horwood and partner Jonathan Myring, revealing saucy secrets from their home life.
It was so successful it’s been promoted to BBC One for this year’s outing, which began last night.
Asked whether they have let the success go to their heads, Rosie says: “This guy picks our wine for us. That’s quite showbizzy, isn’t it? What have we become?”
She adds: “There was one little thing that I’m quite a diva about. I can’t bear the smell in the studio — we’ve got these diffusers in there, I make them take them out.”
Chris then interrupts: “By ‘them’, she means me. I have to go in and take them out and put them outside in the corridor and go, ‘Look, can someone put these somewhere else? Sorry if it smells’.
Rosie adds: “Anyone who’s listening to the podcast for more than five seconds knows that if the bin smells, she can tell from the other side of the house and it does me nut in.”
While it might sound like Rosie is the biggest diva of the duo, they both agree that if one of them was to let the fame go to their head, it would be Chris.
Rosie says: “Sometimes when Chris goes away on tour, he comes home and I call him Tour Chris because he’s just been kind of looked after from morning until night — all of his meals are ordered for him, he’s driven everywhere — so he comes back with a little bit of an attitude.
“I’m like, ‘Excuse me, just pack it in. Here’s a list of things that need doing’.”
Chris says: “It hasn’t happened big-time, us getting all showbizzy, but if it did it would be Rosie reeling me in, I guarantee it.”
But the pair have a strict rule to protect their time with each other and at home with their boys.
Rosie says: “We can’t talk about work after five o’clock in our house or before nine o’clock in the morning. Like, at all.
“Because we used to sit there at six in the morning and we’d be going through emails, and I was just like, ‘Why are we doing this now? Don’t. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it’.
PELOTON BIKE
“We’ve got really, really strict, because it was just bleeding too much into all of our life.”
But Chris admits he often needs reminding: “Sometimes it’ll be half- six in the morning on a Tuesday and the kids will be watching Despicable Me and I’ll just be sitting in my pyjamas drinking coffee and be like, ‘Hey, Rosie . . . ’
“She’ll be like, ‘No, nine o’clock. Speak to us at nine o’clock’. And at first I’m annoyed, but I totally get it and agree with it.”
Fans who tune into the podcast every week might feel like the couple are their best mates, thanks to their honesty about all aspects of their life, from work and parenthood to what happens in their bedroom.
The pair confess they are “over-sharers”, but when it comes to cancel culture, they can’t care less.
Chris says: “A lot of people say, ‘Oh, you’re not worried at all? You say whatever you want, you say so much. Nothing’s off the table’.
“Stuff is off the table and there’s stuff that we won’t discuss, but the difference is, we are just so much more open than most people that it seems like there’s nothing that’s off limits. It seems like, ‘Oh my God, anything goes in here’.
“If we get a laugh or it entertains someone, we will overshare it and we will tell it.”
Rosie adds: “Oh, yeah. That’s just us in general. I’m terrible for it, I’ll tell anyone anything.”
But like all couples, they have their gripes — whether it’s Rosie’s obsession with buying new lamps or Chris’ love of his Peloton bike.
And they say they relish their bickering, as their podcast is the perfect outlet for their “beefs”.
Chris says: “Some things are real issues we’ll have had real arguments about. There’s a time limit on them. You go, ‘Right, I can’t bring it up on the podcast this week because it’s too raw, but in two weeks time I can bring that up and we’ll laugh about it’.
“So that’s always fun. It’s like therapy.
“The amount of couples who we have spoken to who have turned around and said, ‘Oh, I have a beef now with my husband every Monday and it really helps with our relationship. . . ’.”
The pair say that oversharing with the nation has done wonders for their relationship but when it comes to plotting their future, they admit they’re “winging it”.
Chris says: “The best way I can describe it is we’ve jumped on a rollercoaster and we’re riding it, and we’ll see what happens.
“If we’d sat down at the beginning when we were recording the first episode of the podcast and said, ‘Oh, the plan for this podcast is all of these things . . . ’ people would have thought we’d lost our minds. But it’s all happened, it’s crazy, we’re just going to enjoy it.”
And Rosie gets the last word — which Chris has no doubt come to accept during their nine-year marriage — as she says: “I don’t think many marriages have as many highs as we have.”
- The Chris & Rosie Ramsey Show is on Fridays, BBC One at 10:40pm. Catch up on BBC iPlayer.