Michaela Strachan’s heartbreaking admission ahead of ITV Dancing On Ice final

star has dazzled fans alongside her professional partner Mark Hanretty, topping the leaderboard with their incredible skates and charming viewers with her personality. The beloved presenter is now hotly tipped to beat fellow finalists Sam Aston and Anton Ferdinand and take home the Dancing On Ice trophy.

However, before she began her stint in the competition, Michaela, 58, made the heartbreaking confession that she would typically fear a show like Dancing On Ice because she is “not very good” at hearing criticism about herself.

She said in an interview with the Express and other press in 2022: “We are really lucky with our audience because I think Springwatch is the sort of programme that people only watch if they like wildlife, it’s not like so many other programmes that people tune into whether they like it or not and then they just seem to really enjoy abusing it.

“I would say at least 90 percent of our social media is very positive which is good because I’m not very good at not being liked, I like to be liked! I would be absolutely hopeless if people chucked abuse at me.

“I am very glad that social media wasn’t a thing when I started out presenting doing the Wide Awake Club 35 years ago. It would have mortified me to think what people were saying because it would have been one of those programmes where it would have been thrown at us with all the ridiculous things that we did.

“It is a harsh world, the social media world, and I am very glad that we do a programme that most people seem to like.”

Michaela’s time on Dancing On Ice came after a “relentless” year filled with personal loss.

The beloved wildlife presenter shared her on the On The Marie Curie Couch podcast that a series of bereavements had struck her family and friends, starting with the death of her sister-in-law from cancer at the start of the year.

She disclosed: “There was a lot of loss in my close circle of family and friends, starting off at the beginning of the year with the passing of my sister-in-law who died of cancer… she suffered for three years and eventually passed in January.”

She also spoke about the grief surrounding her partner Nick Chevallier’s ex-wife’s battle with cancer, which made his sister’s passing even more poignant. In a cruel twist of fate, around the same time, Nick’s best friend succumbed to a heart attack.

The sorrow continued as Michaela shared the harrowing tale of a close friend’s son who died at just 35, a situation she described as “heartbreakingly sad to watch a mother go through that kind of loss”.

However, the loss that struck Michaela most deeply was that of her close friend Lucy, who had fought the same type of breast cancer for which the presenter had received treatment.

She lamented: “Here I am 10 years later and I am fine. My friend wasn’t so fortunate and hers returned and spread and we lost her last year.”