Victoria Coren Mitchell 'frightened all the time' as she admits 'I'll never be free again'

Victoria Coren Mitchell once confessed she was "terrified all the time" when she first became a mum. The Only Connect host shares two daughters with her comedian husband David Mitchell - Barbara, born in 2015 and June, born in 2023. But easing into parenthood wasn't easy for the Have I Got News for You star.

Writing in 2016, Victoria said that the sheer number of celebrity deaths meant she couldn't look forward to the festive period. Victoria Wood, David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Prince all died that year, as did George Michael - who would pass just days after Victoria published her piece. She said her sense of devastation was only strengthened by becoming a mum for the first time.

Writing in her column for The Guardian, she described the first few months of motherhood as being "dizzy with sleep deprivation, aching in every corner and crevice, baffled by breastfeeding, terrified of cot death, riddled with guilt about every failure, nervous and tearful, ravaged with misery at the news of any slightly negative thing happening to anybody anywhere in the world."

She went on: "Women do laugh about the physical disintegration, so you know about that in advance. But nobody tells you about the sadness and the terror. Not really, anyway. I'm so grateful for (and besotted by) my daughter, but I was the freest person I'd ever met and I'll never be free again. I'm frightened all the time."

Victoria said that when she was younger she was frightened of never becoming a mother, but warned her younger self: "It isn't better. It's amazing, but it isn't better. Not having children is also completely amazing."

Peep Show star David, meanwhile, also confessed to being "fearful" in an interview with RTE in 2019. He said: "I'm probably more fearful in middle age. I now have a wife and a child, so in terms of society breaking down and the world collapsing, it's more frightening than when there's just you.

"Your focus completely changes. You stay in a lot more and sleep a lot less. But I still do the same job and I love my job in the same way and Victoria similarly, but there's always something in your mind which is a different priority, a home you have to keep safe and supplied, and make sure that our daughter is happy and seeing us a lot."