There are times I'd love to be able to say, 'Oh, put the kettle on will you'

Having lost five stone following shoulder replacement surgery, thanks to healthy eating and exercise and, she insists, NOT fat jabs, Fern Britton has deservedly found fresh contentment writing her brilliant new novel. The only thing she concedes might be missing is companionship... not that she's especially looking

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YOU know what they say. Write about what you know. So, here we have Delia Jago, heroine of Fern Britton's new novel, A Cornish Legacy, and she's lost everything. Her mother, her father, her career, her marriage.

Remind you of anyone? Fern breaks into that familiar face-splitting smile. "Well, yes," she says. "I've been there." Her mother, Ruth, died in 2018. "I must admit, I found it difficult writing those scenes in the book. Mum was in her 90s but, no matter how old you are, you're still a child to somebody." She fans her face. "Just look at me." Seven years later, Fern, 67, still wells up at the memory of the loss.

Her father, actor Tony Britton, died the next year. "As soon as I heard, I went and told the girls [daughters Grace and Winnie]; they were both living with me then. 'I'm an orphan, I announced and they burst out laughing. It was exactly the tonic I needed." As to her career, well, it's been a bit of a rollercoaster, she says. She's twice been sacked, the first occasion when she returned to GMTV's Top of the Morning having given birth at 37 to her twin sons, Harry and Jack.

"The man who told me there was no more work for me was a coward. He'd put somebody else in my position while I was on maternity leave and he didn't have the guts to give me back my job." The second dismissal was from Carlton Television's After Five. "I was in the grip of post-natal depression. The woman I'd been interviewing was talking with much courage about the fact that she was terminally ill with breast cancer. And I'd cried on air, which was judged inappropriate." In 2009, she stepped down from co-presenting This Morning with Phillip Schofield after 10 years. "I always say that he and I had an indefinable chemistry which seemed to work well on screen. One day, when the time feels right, I'll share with the world what really happened." They haven't spoken from that day to this.