I LOVE that people are still talking about my saggy breasts when I'm nearly 50, ...

She has sparked hundreds of complaints from Britain's Got Talent viewers who think her raunchy gowns are too revealing for a family show.

But a defiant Amanda Holden has insisted she's delighted her remarkable figure still attracts attention: 'I love it that people are still talking about my tired old breasts and I'm nearly 50!'

Holden, 48, revealed in an interview: 'No one talks about [BGT co-host] Alesha Dixon's – she's got great boobs by the way – and she's eight years younger than me.

'Age is totally irrelevant, thanks to people like J-Lo, who is 49 and just a sexy, hot woman who dresses for how she feels.'

Holden insists her choice of clothes is primarily influenced by cost. However, her new $3m deal to co-present a breakfast show on UK radio station Heart will make her Britain's highest paid female radio presenter – so this should reduce any anxious glances at price tags.

From tomorrow, she will be up at 5.15am and on air from 6.30am to join her co-presenter Jamie Theakston.

But will she regret leaving her two teenage daughters and husband Chris Hughes to fend for themselves?

'I will be there for school pick-up. And I will make sure spellings are done and uniforms are laid out,' she says.

'I've had a job since I was 13, so I will always find a way to earn money, to make sure my family is supported, always make the most of every opportunity,' she said. 

‘I have all the love I need'  

From the tragedy of a stillbirth to her own brush with death, AMANDA HOLDEN has had more than her fair share of heartache. She tells Chris Harvey how she stays strong – in the good times and bad

Amanda Holden loves to get up early. ‘I’m a bit like Margaret Thatcher – I can survive on five hours’ sleep,’ she says. That’s lucky, as the Britain’s Got Talent judge will need to tap into her inner lark as the glossy new queen of breakfast radio. Tomorrow on the dot of 6.30am, just hours after the BGT live final, she’ll be joining Jamie Theakston at the helm of Heart’s breakfast show when it goes national for the first time.

It’s a big deal for Heart: they’re reportedly paying their hot new signing £3 million over two years, making her Britain’s highest-paid female radio presenter. It’s a lucrative contract, but I wonder if her male radio peers out-earn her? ‘The pay gap is complicated. It doesn’t take into account the different paths men and women take, on average obviously! I’d like to think that we’ve taken big steps in the past couple of years to correct any misbalance.’

Certainly she’s ‘thrilled’ about this new gig: ‘It’s fantastic that it’s national, because it means my mum will hear me in Cornwall. All my relatives everywhere will be able to wake up with me in the morning!’

Amanda and Jamie have known each other for 20 years. So will they have more chemistry than he did with her predecessor, Spice Girl Emma Bunton? ‘No…’ she says, then with a laugh, ‘Well, yes. Jamie will probably notice that I’m a gobshite, and I will interrupt him constantly. He’s affable and sweet, and will probably think, “Oh, here she goes.” Hopefully I’ll be on MailOnline’s sidebar of shame every day because of something outrageous I’ve said.’

She’s certainly no stranger to going viral. Only two years ago, Amanda, now 48, dared to bare on BGT in a plunging Julien Macdonald dress that had 663 outraged viewers contacting Ofcom to complain. ‘I love it that people are still talking about my tired old breasts and I’m nearly 50! No one talks about [BGT co-host] Alesha Dixon’s – she’s got great boobs, by the way – and she’s eight years younger than me.’

Perhaps it’s this front – figuratively and literally – that pushes Amanda from triumph to triumph. Her role at Heart (where she will be competing for listeners against Zoe Ball on BBC Radio 2 and Chris Evans at Virgin) is another chapter in the remarkable story of a woman who has overcome unpromising beginnings, personal tragedy and terrifying health scares.

But then Amanda has a get-on-with-it attitude that she learned from her beloved grandmother. She was devastated when Ethel died at the age of 97 last year. ‘She was my biggest inspiration,’ says Amanda, who has described her nan, a former ice-cream factory worker, as ‘feisty and fabulous’. Stubbornness and determination are traits shared by all the women in Amanda’s family, including her mum Judith and younger sister Debbie. Amanda has previously revealed that their family mantra is: ‘Speak up, speak out and be strong.’ But growing up, she could never have imagined how much that backbone would be tested.

In 2016, Debbie survived a serious car crash. ‘She went to hell and back, but she’s carried on like nothing happened,’ Amanda says. ‘Like we all do [in our family], because we’re not victims of our own circumstance.’

Amanda, too, faced her own near-death experience when her heart stopped beating for 40 seconds. She’d just given birth to Hollie, now seven, her second daughter with husband Chris Hughes. Hollie was delivered safely, but the placenta was attached to an artery, which ruptured. Amanda lost several pints of blood and flatlined. ‘Chris watched the entire bloodbath. It was definitely worse for him,’ she says. They were both later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and although Amanda says ‘little things still trigger it’, creating feelings of intense anxiety, they got through it with the help of humour. ‘We’re jokey, light-hearted people,’ she says, ‘so we don’t linger on things too much. I try to move on with some dark, horrific joke that no one else will laugh at.’

Her brush with death came just 11 months after her son Theo was stillborn, 28 weeks into her pregnancy. She described in her 2013 memoir No Holding Back how she had got up and had a bath on the morning of 1 February 2011, when she noticed that she hadn’t felt him kicking in a while. She drove to hospital for a scan to reassure herself, but was told,

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