Davina McCall has revealed she struggled with Alzheimer’s symptoms after her brain surgery last year.
The 58-year-old described 2025 as the ‘hardest year’ for both her and her partner Michael Douglas.
‘After I’d had my brain tumour taken out, I had advanced Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t remember anything,’ she told Paloma Faith on her Mad, Sad, Bad podcast.
‘When I came out of the operation, I didn’t know I’d had an operation,’ recalled the presenter and former Big Brother host. ‘The staff came in every day, and they’d go, “What’s my name?” and I’d go, “I don’t know”.’
‘Michael would come and visit 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,’ she continued.
‘I couldn’t watch a movie for six months, because I couldn’t remember what had happened in the movie 15 minutes before. A book I couldn’t remember the page before.’
However, music was a huge aid, with Davina saying it acted like her ‘mind physio’ and was able to help her overcome the challenging side effects she was experiencing.
‘Music was what healed me. And last October was the first time I woke up, and I went, “Oh my god, I remember what I did yesterday.”‘
Davina’s tumour was a 14mm benign one, known as a colloid cyst, for which she underwent a craniotomy to have it removed ‘after a lot of deliberating’.
Colloid cysts are non-cancerous, small fluid-filled sacs located in or around the lateral and third ventricle of the brain, according to the London Neurosurgery Partnership.
While hosting Comic Relief in March 2025 she said: ‘It’s been, quite possibly, the hardest thing I’ve ever been through and this whole experience, weirdly, kind of weighing up all the risks and all the positive things about having this tumour removed made me think deeply about what life is all about, and what really, really matters when things get tough.’
The following month she shared on Instagram that she’d received the all-clear, adding that her brain surgeon ‘got everything out during surgery’ and that ‘it’s not coming back’.
However, in November 2025, Davina revealed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer after a lump was found, forcing her to undergo another surgery.
This second health battle was a huge blow to the star, with the Masked Singer judge saying it made her ‘really angry’.