Richard Madeley reveals terrifying real-life row with furious GMB viewer who stormed up to him on holiday and jabbed him
RICHARD Madeley recalled one terrifying real-life encounter with a viewer on Good Morning Britain.
The ITV personality was confronted on his holiday by a viewer who couldn’t help but get into a row with the presenter.
Richard, 67, was best known for presenting the flagship daytime programme This Morning from 1988 until 2001.
He fronted the magazine programme with his wife and Judy Finnigan, 75, after they met in the early ‘80s when working together on Granada Reports.
Whilst Judy now lives mostly outside the limelight as an author, Richard has spent the last six years as one of the main relief presenters at Good Morning Britain, where his comments frequently spark online trolling.
But the star revealed how the abuse he received had spilled over into real life when he encountered an angry walker on a coastal path close to his holiday home in Cornwall.
Richard told the How to be 60 podcast: “He came right into my space, finger jabbing at my chest and he said, ‘I just want you to know that everything you’ve ever done, everything you’ve ever said or will say, I loathe and f****** despise, you c***.
“I just burst out laughing, because he was ridiculous. But honestly, I couldn’t give a f***.”
Despite the confrontation, the presenter insisted that most people who meet him in the street like him.
He said: “I don’t get that sort of stuff out in the street at all. People are very friendly, they often come up and talk. We have intelligent sensible conversations.
“A lot of people are very nice to me when I’m out. The very opposite of what you would expect if you thought that Twitter was real.
“It’s not. The numbers of people who go on Twitter to abuse people in the public eye are relatively speaking fractional; they’re tiny.”
He added: “You don’t see it in the real world. You have to remember that. I know there are some people who are badmouthed on Twitter and it really f***s them up and it shouldn’t.”
The longtime presenter also admitted that the keyboard warriors made him think differently which lead to a change in his persona.
He told host Kaye Adams “I do Good Morning Britain a lot now and I discovered that I only have to cough or sneeze in the wrong direction to get extraordinary abuse on Twitter. Really amazing stuff.
“If it affected the way I do the job, if it threw me off balance it would matter. If it had ever affected a contract I was being offered, a job that I was being offered.
“If it mattered, then those things wouldn’t have happened. In other words, it would be justified, it would be real. But it’s not, it’s just abuse and I honestly don’t care. The worse the abuse, the funnier I find it.
“And we all know that the abuse online, particularly on Twitter, comes from a tiny minority of people.”
