Life after loss

Footballer-turned-movie star Vinnie Jones opens up about losing his beloved wife Tanya

- STEVEN PERKINS, ALISON SLADE, IAN MACEWAN

NEW TALK SHOW

Piers Morgan’s Life Stories

Saturday, ITV HD, 10 pm

When Vinnie Jones first appeared on Life Stories in 2009, he was riding high. As his wife and childhood sweetheart Tanya sat in the audience, the football hardman looked back on his playing days and talked about a budding movie career that had started with a role in Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels.

More than 10 years later, Jones becomes the first person to appear twice on the show this week in the first of two Life Stories specials.

This time, the focus will be on his beloved Tanya, who died last year, aged 53, after a six-year battle with cancer. The couple, who married in 1994, each had a child from a previous relationship. Renowned for his tough-guy image, Jones showed a vulnerable side when talking about Tanya’s illness and death last year, and he has now written about living with grief in his new book, Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya.