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TV presenter Davina McCall has said she experienced symptoms similar to “advanced Alzheimer’s” following brain surgery.
Speaking on Paloma Faith’s podcast Mad, Sad and Bad, the 58-year-old described suffering from memory loss while recovering from an operation to remove a benign brain tumour in 2024.
“After I’d had my brain tumour taken out, I had advanced Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t remember anything,” the former Big Brother host told singer and Celebrity Traitors star Faith.
“When I came out of the operation, I didn’t know I’d had an operation,” she recalled. One regular member of staff would ask McCall every day if she could remember their name. “And I’d go, ‘I don’t know’.”
The Masked Singer judge had surgery in November 2024 after a colloid cyst was found in a health check-up as part of her menopause advocacy work.
In November last year she revealed she had also undergone surgery for breast cancer.
She called 2025 the “hardest year” for both her and her partner.
Speaking about the recovery from her brain surgery, she said: “Michael would come and visit [hospital] for two hours, and he’d go to the loo and come back, and I’d go, ‘Oh my God, you’re here’, and I didn’t know he’d been there.
“I couldn’t watch a movie for six months because I couldn’t remember what had happened in the movie 15 minutes before. [When reading] a book I couldn’t remember the page before.”
A year ago, for the first time since the surgery, she noted, she woke up and could remember what she had done the previous day.
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