TV presenter Sian Welby, known for her work with Channel 5, BBC, ITV and Channel 4, has revealed she once fell on hard times after being rejected from multiple jobs and struggling for money.
In 2018, she told This Is Money that she struggled to make ends meet after leaving school at 18. She explained: "After I left school at 18. I did three auditions for drama school but did not get in so I got a part-time job at retailer New Look. Then someone said I looked like Cat Deeley so I started thinking about trying to get a job as a presenter in my spare time. Sometimes I felt like I was leading a double life. I would go off and audition for a cool presenting job, then the next day I would be back at New Look. It was hard."
Lucrative work and maternity leave
However, when work came, she was paid very well. Once, she received "thousands" for a few minutes' worth of work. When asked if she had ever earned "silly money", she replied: "Yes, for a voice-over that only took ten minutes. It was amazing. I do not want to say how much I got paid, but it was in the thousands of pounds. It took such a short time – it felt like millions."
Sian recently took time off for maternity leave after welcoming her daughter. She now has an 18-month-old daughter with her fiancé Jake Beckett. The star gave birth to Ruby in June 2024, but has since said she would have liked more time off with her baby, in an ideal world.
Balancing career and motherhood
She told The Sun's Fabulous of her short maternity leave: "That's the reality, isn't it? You have to make decisions in life. I had momentum, and I thought: 'I can't totally let this drop because what a shame, I've finally got these shows that I want to do'."
This isn't the only time Siân has spoken about her pregnancy, admitting on Giovanna Fletcher's Happy Mum Happy Baby podcast that she chose to keep the news of her pregnancy a secret from many. As to why, Siân explained that it was driven by her fears over losing her job and a desire to prove herself: "When you first start a job, you think 'nobody knows what I'm actually like, that I'm trustworthy' and you have to prove yourself.
"I felt like I had proven myself [on This Morning], that I can do this and that – when I got that first cover with Dermot, I knew I was pregnant but I didn't tell anyone. In the back of my mind I was thinking, 'If I tell them I'm pregnant, will this put them off getting me in again? And will they think I'm gonna be off for ages?'
"So many women must feel [the same way] in any job, especially if they're starting a new one. It's the fear that you're going to be immediately judged or dropped or they'll ask why you didn't tell them."
