Alan Titchmarsh speaks on 'heartbreaking' moment he left wife and daughters

Alan Titchmarsh revealed the "heartbreaking" question his daughter would ask him after kissing her goodnight.

The gardening expert admitted he was forced to spend extended periods away from home due to his work, which would leave him racked with guilt.

The gardening expert spoke to James O'Brien's Full Disclosure podcast in July 2023 and shared: "It's not something I wanted but it was at a time in my career where I knew it had to be done. The girls would be sort of 10,11 that kind of age.

"I would go away on a Sunday evening and come back later in the weekend. I do remember the heartbreaking thing of kissing one of them goodnight and thems saying, 'Will you be here in the morning?'.

"I knew I wouldn't, and that was hard, of course. I did say, I mean every weekend, it's not as if I'm in the army going away for three months or a year or whatever, so that was my excuse."

After leaving his Yorkshire school in 1964 with just one O level in art, aged 15, the TV star went on to host and present a range of programmes on both television and radio.

He has also become one of the most well-loved gardening presenters of all time.

Titchmarsh first appeared on the screens as an expert on the long-running BBC television show Nationwide before hosting the 1983 Chelsea Flower show.

From there, he hosted a range of shows, including Pebble Mill and Gardeners' World, and was part of a trio of faces who fronted the much-loved Ground Force.

Titchmarsh said that his time on Ground Force "pushed him" into the public's eye and that everything changed by a "quantum leap".

He said: "We were getting audiences of 12 million, it was the Bake Off of its day.

"Yes I got noticed before that but not in a kind of obtrusive sort of way. I remember they moved Ground Force from BBC Two to BBC One because too many people were watching it and that's when we were getting 12 million.

"And I was walking down the street and everybody was looking, and I thought, 'Ooo gosh'. I went home and I thought, 'Either I get used to this or I come out of it now."

Titchmarsh has been happily married to his wife Alison since 1975. The couple met when they were both in their early twenties at an amateur dramatics group and struck up a romance that is still going strong five decades later.

Titchmarsh has often described Alison, who worked as a doctor but is retired now, as his "best friend", and these days they split their time between their Grade-II listed Georgian farmhouse in Hampshire and their holiday home near Cowes on the Isle of Wight

Titchmarsh and Alison are parents of two daughters. Their eldest, Polly, was born in 1980, followed by Camilla, who was born in 1982.

Now 43 and 41 respectively, Polly and Camilla have gone on to have their own families, making the gardening expert a grandfather too.