Mel Giedroyc has spoken candidly about missing her mother’s final moments after drinking with friends and leaving her phone uncharged overnight.
Speaking on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast, Mel described the incident as one of her personal “failures” and called her actions that night “ridiculous immature behaviour”.
The presenter was appearing in a musical in Bristol while her mother Rosemary was seriously ill in Oxford. She had been travelling between performances and visits, keeping her phone on around the clock in case she needed to leave quickly.
Mel said she had visited Rosemary on the Friday and planned to return on Sunday. After completing two shows on the Saturday, however, friends encouraged her to unwind and lined up four Bacardi and Diet Cokes.
She drank them despite having avoided alcohol throughout the run and was the last person to leave the theatre that night. Back at her Bristol flat, she fell asleep without connecting her phone to its charger for the first time in two months.
Mel Giedroyc opens up about mum’s death
Mel awoke with a hangover and immediately thought she needed to travel to see her mum. Once she plugged in her phone, a stream of notifications began arriving.
She recalled: “I could just hear in the bedroom, ding ding ding. Like fifty messages. So I just knew. I knew that she died.”
Her sister had been with Rosemary when she died. Mel then caught a train to the nursing home, where the rest of the family had gathered.
Despite their grief, she said her relatives greeted her with teasing as well as tears. Mel recalled that there was laughter alongside the family’s sadness.
“I had the [bleep] ripped out of me right royally. Right royally as I stepped into the room. It was just like, you know, so there were a lot of tears, but there was also a degree of laughter as well,” Mel explained.
She said she believed her mother would also have found humour in the fact that the one night Mel failed to charge her phone was the night she died.
Rosemary’s death was announced as peaceful. She was 86 and was described by her family as “adored”.
Mel’s close bond with her mother
Mel had previously discussed caring for Rosemary after her mother suffered four strokes in quick succession in her early 50s.
In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, Mel explained that Rosemary’s eyesight had been badly affected. After leaving Cambridge, she spent a year reading to her and helping her get enough rest, describing that period as special but intense.
Rosemary’s death came six years after Mel lost her father, Michal, who died in 2018 aged 88.
According to the account in Michal’s 2010 memoir, his family was transported to Siberia during the Second World War and forced to work on a farm after Soviet authorities seized their home. Following the release of Polish deportees in 1941, they began a long journey to England and later learnt that Michal’s father had been killed.
Mel grew up in Surrey in a creative family. Her siblings went on to work in film, television, children’s writing and music, while her maternal grandmother Astrid was a book illustrator.
The presenter now lives in Ealing, west London, with her television director husband Ben Morris and their two daughters.
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