Stacey Dooley has revealed she was "warned" of the backlash she would receive when she began her television career. The presenter, 39, was in her late teens when she was working as a shop assistant and BBC producers asked her to appear in the documentary series Blood, Sweat and T-shirts, which explored the rise of fast fashion.
Since then, Stacey has gone on to front more than 100 hard-hitting documentaries and also bolstered her career with Strictly Come Dancing, as well as multiple appearances on other celebrity-based programmes.
Warning before debut
Just before her initial TV appearance was aired in April 2008, Stacey received a phone call from a television boss, who told her that there might be a negative reaction to the way she came across on screen.
She said: "I started young. I started as a contributor and it was only ever meant to be a one-off. They just thought oh there's this girl, she works at Luton Airport and she's into fast fashion so we'll take her to India."
"20 years later I'm still making documentaries. It's painfully predictable and now I know how telly works, they must've just been rubbing their hands in glee. I was soundbite, soundbite, soundbite, this uneducated, curious, fairly pleasant little girl who had never left Europe."
Mixed reactions
She recalled: "I remember the guy in charge of the Beeb ringing me up before it aired to warn me that I might get hassled, people wouldn't get me. We were doing current affairs but I'd left school at 15 and wasn't a journalist."
"I think I split the camp, some people were like 'Why on earth has this girl been given a platform?' which is fair enough, and others thought I was a breath of fresh air."
Career reflection
The star, who competed on and won Strictly Come Dancing with Kevin Clifton in 2018 and went on to begin a relationship with him, then acknowledged that a career in showbiz can be short-lived but is amazed that she is still enjoying success all these years later.
Speaking on The Romesh Ranganathan Show, she added: "By some miracle, they haven't sent me back to Luton Airport. At some point you are gonna be pushed out the fire exit door so enjoy your time while you're here."
Elsewhere in the chat, Stacey expressed her relief that Romesh had introduced her by her actual name, and had not mixed her up with a certain former Loose Women panellist. She said: "It's always lovely to be called Stacey Dooley because this often happens. It literally happened yesterday, they go 'Stacey...Solomon,' who we love but I get that a hell of a lot."
