Celebrity
Cat Deeley Has Been Pretty Busy Since Her SM:TV Live Days
She’s moved stateside, written a book, and built a family.
Cat Deeley was a consistent TV presence as I was growing up. From presenting Stars In Their Eyes to her time on Fame Academy, not forgetting her rock and roll entrance hosting the Brits in 2004. She’s TV royalty. This Christmas, she's ramping up the nostalgia alongside Ant and Dec, with a walk down SM:TV Live memory lane almost two decades after it went off air. The hit children's Saturday morning TV show seems like a lifetime ago, and a lot has changed since then. So, is Cat Deeley married now?
Yes, in the last 20 years she’s moved stateside, written a book, and built a family with her husband, the comedian Patrick Kielty. Deeley first met Kielty when they co-presented the BBC talent show Fame Academy, in 2002. However, it was years before they became a couple.
In 2006, Deeley made the move to the U.S. to present So You Think You Can Dance, while Kielty was based mainly in the UK. The pair stayed in touch nevertheless, and they began dating years later when Kielty took it upon himself to make a bold gesture. It was Deeley’s birthday, and as a joke she invited him to lunch, thinking he wouldn't be able to make it, given that he was in Belfast and she was in LA. He told Loose Women: “I got up at five, jumped on a six o'clock flight from Ireland and got into Heathrow at seven. Then jumped on a twenty-to-ten flight, got in at quarter past one, and walked into the Beverly Hills Hotel. I said 'Hi', and she fell off the chair, and we've been together ever since."
Deeley recounted the moment he swept her off her feet to Jessie and Lennie Ware on their Table Manners podcast back in November – and it really did sound like something from a Richard Curtis film. In 2012, after years of friendship and only a few months of dating, the pair got married.
They made their home in the U.S., and went on to have two sons, Milo and James, before moving back to the UK earlier this year. In September, Deeley published her first novel, The Joy In You, which she told Bustle is “a love letter to her boys." They may not have been around to see SM:TV Live when it first aired, but Milo and James will get to see their mum reminisce about the show in the reunion special on Boxing Day.
The Story of SM:TV Live sees Deeley, Ant and Dec look back on the first-ever episode, the studios it was filmed in, and the most memorable, and hilarious moments from more than 270 episodes (it first aired in 1998, and the final show went out in 2003). Speaking about reuniting with her fellow co-presenters to film the special, Deeley told Lorraine, “We sat down on the couch together, and instantaneously the chemistry was still there. We made each other laugh and we made each other cry.”
Earlier this year, she reminisced with Bustle, too. “We’d finish filming on a Saturday, and every single person who worked on SM:TV Live would go off to a bar and hang out for the rest of the afternoon. We knew just enough to get by, but we were naive enough, too,” she told us.
The Story of SM:TV Live airs on ITV on Dec. 26 at 9:25 a.m.
