Vicky Pattison: I worried my kids would end up broken. Now I’m ready for a baby

For much of her life, Vicky Pattison assumed she would never have children. Not because she didn’t want them, but because she feared that any child she brought into the world might end up “broken, like me”. “I thought alcoholism was a genetic condition that I’d inherited; one that I was going to, in turn, pass on to my children,” she says. “So, for ages, I didn’t entertain the idea. I partied, I was wild and I drove away nice men.” Bit by bit, things changed. “I got the therapy, I distanced myself from people who weren’t serving me, and I met a really nice man.” With that man – fashion entrepreneur Ercan Ramadan, whom she married in 2024 – she became more open to the possibility of children. At 35, she went through the process of freezing her eggs, buying herself time to work out what she wanted. Shorts Three years on, Pattison has her answer. “We’re trying for a baby, and I’m really excited,” the 38-year-old says. “I’m a little bit nervous about the changes that are going to happen; it’s a huge responsibility to take on. “We’re now having all the conversations about where we would want to raise them, how I want them to have a Geordie accent, and who will stay home. Ultimately it was the love and safety and security that we built that made me feel like I want to share it with a family.” Pattison is telling me all of this over Zoom from her kitchen table in Essex – where she lives with Ramadan and their two Labradors, Max and Milo – in a conversation that feels as deep and candid as one I might have with my closest friends, rather than someone I have known for half an hour. But the presenter, who is funny, thoughtful and disarmingly personable, has a way of making you feel just as familiar. That honesty is perhaps partly a product of her years in reality television, where the boundaries between public and private have long been thin. One of the original cast of Geordie Shore, the MTV show built around sex, rows and prodigious quantities of alcohol, Pattison spent nine series and more than three years in the white heat of the unscripted genre’s early 2010s boom. The series made her so famous that her slang for kissing – to “tash on” – found its way onto Collins’ online dictionary, while millions watched the highs and lows of her messy relationships and messier Newcastle nights. Vicky and her husband Ercan Ramadan at the 2025 BAFTA Television Awards (Photo: Kate Green/BAFTA/Getty) Yet it is clear that the woman before me has travelled some distance from that twenty-something party girl: now a TV and radio presenter, with her own Saturday show on Heart, she has increasingly used documentaries to explore subjects as serious and far-ranging as alcoholism, fertility, deepfake porn and women’s health. These days, Pattison is also far more concerned with looking after herself than she once was. The prospect of having a baby, she tells me, has given her a new incentive to feel as fit and healthy as possible – which is part of the reason she signed up to raise money for Global’s Make Some Noise, a charity supporting small community projects across the UK. Her challenge: to cover 250 miles from Newcastle to London in five days, by cycling, running and kayaking. “I’m completely terrified,” she tells me ahead of setting off on Monday. “I like my sofa, and I love chocolate and crisps. So it’s going to be hard and uncomfortable. But if it wasn’t, no one would donate any money, and these very deserving charities wouldn’t feel the benefit.” With five million Instagram followers, her reach is considerable. “I realised about 10 years ago that I was very fortunate to have this platform, and I wanted to use it responsibly,” she says. “I’m not just going to put up ads and bikini pictures and go: ‘Look at me on another lovely holiday.’ I do all those things – there’s no judgement here. But I feel like I’ve been given another go at things, and I don’t want to squander that. What is the point of my life turning around if I’m not going to do anything good with it?” Vicky Pattison at the European Premiere of ‘The Devil Wears Prada 2’ in Leicester Square (Photo: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty) To understand that sense of having been given a second chance, you have to go back to Pattison’s childhood in Newcastle, where she was raised by a mother who worked in the charity sector and a father who was a civil servant. It was a childhood filled with “traditional, relatable experiences”: afternoons at the beach, days at the park with her grandparents. She loved school, too. But there was also what she calls “a secret in the family”: her dad was an alcoholic. “Even before I was old enough to articulate it or understand it, I knew our family was different,” she says. “My mum did her best to shield us from it, but there were times when our home could be loud and scary.” She adds: “Being the child of an alcoholic does change you. It can lead some people down a very similar, devastating path if they don’t face the trauma and learn from it. And for a little while, it looked like that was the trajectory I was on. Alcohol could have claimed my life very easily.” After leaving Newcastle to study drama, media and cultural studies at Liverpool John Moores University – chosen, she admits, partly because the city offered nights out to rival the ones she had at home – Pattison imagined a future for herself as “the UK’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw”. “I wanted to run around London and kiss boys, drink Cosmos and wear a tutu,” she laughs. Instead, at 23, she was scouted for Geordie Shore, the British spin on the US series Jersey Shore. For years, her twenties unfolded on screen amid the drinking, sex and explosive arguments on which the programme thrived. She has since spoken about having sex on camera as one of her greatest regrets, while in 2013, while the show was being filmed, she was arrested after throwing a stiletto in a nightclub, injuring two people, and was later sentenced to 180 hours of unpaid work after admitting two counts of assault. “Everyone is figuring themselves out in their twenties, and we all make mistakes,” she says now. “We all have chapters that we wouldn’t want read aloud. We box them up and compartmentalise them, never to be opened again – until some therapist prods and pokes. The only difference with mine was that they were broadcast.” Vicky Pattison and ‘Strictly’ partner Kai Widdrington (Photo: Guy Levy/BBC/PA Wire) At times, she says, the version of herself on screen became “a caricature”. “I was lost and scared and trying to navigate a space I didn’t really have the tools to be in.” But she resists the temptation to rewrite herself as a victim of the programme. “It would be easy for me to blame MTV, and say, ‘I was so nice before I went on that show; I was manipulated and edited.’ “I wasn’t. I was on a dangerous trajectory anyway. I was angry, I had a complicated relationship with alcohol, and the two fuelled each other. I hadn’t worked out who I was, and I hadn’t processed any of the trauma from my childhood. I was lashing out.” Still, I say, this was a time when reality TV, we realise now, lacked any duty of care. “It was like the Wild West,” she agrees. “You were pushed, especially when you were vulnerable, in order to get the best TV – the most chaotic, the most car-crash, the most heartbreaking. It has changed since then. But it has taken too many heartbreaks, and too many beautiful lives lost, for it to get to this.” For years, Pattison says she tried to leave Geordie Shore, but was made to feel there would be little waiting for her beyond it. When she finally did leave in 2014, a female-led agency took a chance on her. “My past was controversial. I was somewhat broken. I was surrounded by toxicity.” And so? “It was so f**king life-changing to have women who believed in us; who believed that I could be something better.” Vicky was named Queen of the Jungle (Photo: ITV/PA Wire) Within a year came a pivotal opportunity. In 2015, Pattison was in the line-up of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! “I think ITV let me on as an absolute courtesy,” she laughs. “They were probably like: ‘Let’s see this knobhead. I’m sure she’ll be awful.’” Instead, viewers saw a different side of her, and she went on to win the series. “Without the jungle, without being able to show everyone I was different from what they thought, that process of changing people’s minds about me would have taken a lot longer.” In the decade since, her career has flourished. Last year she competed on Strictly Come Dancing; she co-hosts the podcast Get a Grip with Angela Scanlon and, after presenting drivetime on Heart North East, was “unleashed”, as she puts it, on a national audience with a Saturday afternoon show she adores. Now she is approaching 40, I wonder what she has learnt about self-acceptance. “I will always regret certain things, because it’s not what I want to be remembered for and it’s not who I am now,” she muses. “But I can’t punish myself for ever. There are enough people online to do that for me.” If anything, she thinks those years have made her a better person today. “Maybe I wouldn’t be so inclined to exercise compassion if I hadn’t been that person for so long who needed it from others.” “I’m starting to become proud of who I am,” she adds. “I now look at my kind husband, and my gorgeous dogs, and the family that we are hopefully about to start, and I wouldn’t change a thing.” Vicky Pattison is on Heart Saturdays, 4-7pm. Support her charity challenge at makesomenoise.com