BBC presenter Alex Jones has delivered a powerful and candid account of her experience supporting her husband through a severe depression battle, confessing she initially felt like a 'failure' for not understanding his condition.
The Struggle to Understand
The 48-year-old One Show host revealed the emotional turmoil on Jamie Laing's Great Company podcast. She explained how her instinct was to offer solutions like suggesting a walk or a drink, but she soon realised her husband, insurance broker Charlie Thomson, was in the grip of an illness that made such simple tasks impossible.
'You have to let go of judgement and I found it really hard,' Alex admitted. 'I had to bite my tongue so hard... I hadn't understood it and that's my own failing.' She described the profound difficulty of watching her normally fun-loving husband become a shadow of himself, unable to get out of bed.
A Vow to Face Challenges Together
Despite the immense challenge, Alex emphasised the couple's commitment to one another. 'I'd never run because we've made a deal and we don't run from each other, we face it all head on,' she stated. The mother-of-three reflected that this philosophy applies to both the 'fun stuff' and the 'really hard stuff' that life presents.
Charlie's mental health struggles began after he became seriously ill with Lyme Disease and viral meningitis. Alex had previously shared on The MidPoint podcast in 2023 that he went 'downhill fast mentally' following these physical health crises.
At one point, the situation became so severe that Alex confessed she felt she was losing the man she knew. 'I was looking at him and I'm thinking "I'm looking and hearing somebody who's not my husband",' she recalled on the How to Fail podcast.
From Magaluf Mayhem to BBC Stardom
In a lighter segment of the podcast conversation, Alex revisited her unlikely start in television on the raunchy 1998 Sky dating show Prickly Heat, filmed in Magaluf. She described the show, hosted by Davina McCall and Julian Clary, as a wild experience where 'everyone was having sex with everybody.'
The story took an academic twist when Alex, then a 21-year-old theatre, film and television student at Aberystwyth University, had to sit her final exams while filming. After the university initially refused, they relented and flew her papers out. In an extraordinary turn of events, Davina McCall acted as her exam invigilator.
Alex's journey from the sun-drenched chaos of a 90s reality show to becoming a beloved fixture on BBC's The One Show since 2010 highlights a remarkable career. The couple, who met at a party in 2011 and married four years later, are now parents to three children: Teddy, seven, Kit, five, and Annie, two.
While Alex acknowledges she still doesn't always know 'the right thing' to do, her understanding of mental health has deepened profoundly. Her message is one of patience, non-judgement, and recognising that depression is an illness, not a choice.
