Featured Image Credit: Pics: ITV
Topics: TV and Film, UK News, ITV
Niamh Spence
A former children's TV presenter has revealed the cheeky backstage antics she got up to while filming a nostalgic TV classic.
CITV, which will finish airing as a channel in September, was initially a ITV's children's entertainment show and housed all the classics including My Parents Are Aliens, Jungle Run, The Worst Witch, Bernard's Watch and Art Attack.
Hosted by a team of presenters, it was the kind of wholesome and fun-filled programme you'd expect from a children's show - except behind the scenes it was anything but.
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Former presenter Danielle Nicholls worked on the channel from 1998 until 2001 at the start of her TV career.
Joining the show at 19, she worked alongside TV faces like Stephen Mulhern and Holly Willoughby, who presented Saturday Showdown, the first programme to air on CITV.
Danielle, who is now 44, met and interviewed many celebrities and famous faces in her stint as a presenter including Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and Victoria Beckham.
Yet it wasn't just interviewing that happened with the stars, as Danielle revealed to The Daily Star: "I remember when I was only 19 years old and on CITV I snogged a pop star in the dressing room.
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"It was quite cheeky, but I did even more than that with a footballer. The good news there is that I ended up marrying him, so that was OK!"
Danielle married former footballer and ex-Charlton Athletic manager Dean Holden five years after she left the ITV show.
Danielle's saucy confession comes as CITV prepares to come off air for good next month.
Closing down in September, the channel grew from an afternoon TV show which began in 1983 and spent more than 40 years on television.
The channel, which replaced Watch It!, airs children’s shows aimed at those aged 5-12, and is watched by hundreds of thousands of viewers each day.
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In a statement to Sky News earlier this year, ITV said the decision to close down the channel comes as a result of falling viewership.
It read: "As a consequence of this new streaming approach and responding to the changing ways children and their parents are increasingly accessing content. The CITV broadcast channel will close after the summer holidays on 1st September."
The closure of the channel doesn't mean we need to say goodbye to some of our childhood TV favourites, as they will still be available to watch on the ITV Hub.
For parents looking to keep their kids entertained, there will still be plenty of children's TV content from ITV as they launched ITVX Kids in July 2023.
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As CITV winds down, content from the terrestrial channel has migrated to the streaming service and the majority is still available for free, although some now sits behind a paywall via ITVX Premium.