Dannii Minogue has admitted her stint judging The X Factor from 2007-2010 ‘took it’s toll’ and left her drained, calling out the show for their lack of mental health support.
Dannii Minogue has revealed that working on The X Factor UK wasn’t all it was cracked up to be in the height of the show’s fame. The Australian TV star, who was a judge on the show from 2007 until 2010, worked alongside Simon Cowell, Sharon Osborne, Cheryl Cole and Louis Walsh.
“I definitely had a moment where I was like, ‘If this is what [the show] is – the toll it takes on your entire life – I don’t know if it’s worth it for me. I remember thinking, ‘The show is what it is and I’ve got to step off’,” recalls Dannii, speaking on a new episode of Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place Podcast.
Claiming that she was constantly in rehearsals with the contestants, something the other judges didn’t do, Dannii continues, “The length of the days were so long. We would go straight into rehearsals for the next week’s songs and none of the other judges were there, I was always there at 10am.”
Dannii is currently working on BBC Three show I Kissed A Boy, and says it’s the first time she has worked on a show where production have taken her mental health into account – something she believes The X Factor could have learned from.
“The first time I’ve worked on a TV show – bearing in mind I’ve worked on TV since I was seven – the first time I’ve ever been told, ‘If you need to speak to someone they’re there’, was on I Kissed A Boy season 1.”
“It’s the first time I ever thought that my mental health was important, and was acknowledged.”
“It would have been really helpful back in The X Factor days to have had anything like that,” says Dannii.
During the conversation, host Fearne recalled her shortlived presenting gig on the series’ spin-off show, The Xtra Factor, which she says the lines are ‘blurred’ on whether she left on her own accord or she was fired.
Looking back at the full-on schedule, Dannii says that, after a full days work in rehearsals with the contestants, she would ‘rather stick pins in my eyes’ than appear on The Xtra Factor.
“I’d get home at 1:30 and it would take me three hours to wind down, then they’d say, ‘Do you want to just pop over to Xtra Factor?’
“You just want to say, ‘I’d rather stick pins in my eyes’. But, when you’re a viewer at home and you get that extra bit… it was amazing. It just, energy wise, you didn’t get the best of us.”
After leaving the show in 2010, Dannii was replaced by Tulisa Contostavlos on the judging panel. The X Factor was axed eight years later, after making stars out of acts such as One Direction, Little Mix and James Arthur.
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