Mel B on sleeping with Geri Horner

“She had great boobs!” When Morgan asked Mel B if she and fellow Spice Girl Geri had slept together, she said, “Yeah, we all slept in a bed together, but not “like that”.” When he pressed her further, Mel B smiled and nodded. “She’s going to hate me for this, because she’s all posh in her country house with her husband. We were best friends. It just happened. It just happens one time, you talk about it and it doesn’t really happen again.”

Cheryl Cole on her divorce from Ashley Cole

“There’s a part of me that will always love him, of course – big part of my life. And I love his family and I love what we had. It’s just a chapter in my life that I don’t want to feel miserable about… I feel numb. It’s reality – to other people, it’s their entertainment.”

“I was just a heartbroken girl. I wasn’t a footballer’s wife in an ivory tower with all the lovely things and so it’ll be fine. Anybody that’s been through a divorce knows it’s one of the toughest things that you can go through and on such a public scale, and not being able to have the privacy you need to deal with those feelings is really, really hard. You just want to go home to Newcastle and hide… God, this is turning into therapy… I’ve said it now and I’m ready to get back to myself.”

Gordon Brown on the death of his daughter

In 2002, Gordon and Sarah Brown’s daughter, Jennifer, died when she was just 10 days old.

“I could hold her hand and I could feel that she knew I was there, and there was nothing that you could see that was actually wrong, but she just wasn't growing.”

“After a week I turned to the doctor and I said, “She’s not going to live, is she?” and he said, “No, I don’t think so.” And she was baptised and we were with her and I held her as she died.” 

Caitlyn Jenner educating Piers Morgan

When Morgan asked, “How does your physique compare now to what it was like then? Obviously, certain areas we know”, Jenner responded: “See, you made a comment there and that’s why you would get in trouble. You just said, “Oh, certain areas”. That to a trans person is disrespectful, because you don’t make a joke about that, because it’s not funny. It’s life. And it’s a part of my life and it’s a very serious part of my life. Out of respect to myself and the community, it’s not something that you joke about. People die over this issue.”

Kim Cattrall on Sex And The City

Cattrall addressed turning down offers to make a third Sex And The City movie, as well as her relationship with her co-stars. “We’ve never been friends. We’ve been colleagues, and in some ways it’s a very healthy place to be, because then you have a clear line between your professional life and relationship and your personal.”

“To get any kind of negative press about something that I’ve been saying for almost a year [no to a third movie], that I’m demanding or a diva… This is really where I take to task the people from Sex And The City – specifically Sarah Jessica Parker. I really think she could have been nicer. I don’t know what her issue is. I think the thing that still bothers me is this feeling of being in some way made to be the baddie. The common ground we had was the series and the series is over.”

Freddie Flintoff on his struggle with bulimia

“I did it when, if I’d eaten something which I thought, “You know what, I’m going to put weight on with this”, or I’d had too much to drink. That’s when it started. And then it slowly crept in more and more. And I remember we had this chat, the England team… there was a dietitian and she starts saying about your diet and how she’d dealt with models, actors, athletes who had eating disorders. And I thought, “I can have a chat with her after this.” And then she said, “But I can’t imagine there’s any of that in here.” So it was like, I can’t tell her now can I? Jeez.”

“When I was on tour in India, I was doing it a lot. I was doing it at lunchtime – come off, have something to eat, and I’d go and bowl again. Curry and naan bread, I’d end up in the toilet… I thought I couldn’t tell anyone, because in the world of professional sport, you don’t want to give anything away. You want to almost come across as bulletproof and that was part of my make-up.”

John Lydon on Jimmy Savile

In a 1978 BBC radio interview that was never broadcast, which Morgan replayed on the show, Lydon said: “I’d like to kill Jimmy Savile. I think he’s a hypocrite. I’ve heard he’s into all kinds of seediness that we all know about but are not allowed to talk about. I know some rumours. I bet none of this will be allowed out”.”

Lydon responded: “Most kids wanted to go to Top Of The Pops, but we all knew what that cigar muncher was up to. But I’m very, very bitter that the likes of Savile and the rest of them were allowed to continue. I did my bit – I said what I had to. Well, I’m still here, and the rest of them, what are still alive – nice bit of jail time for them. Jail time!”

Coronation Street’s Beverley Callard on her depression

“I tried maybe half a dozen times [to take her own life], but it wasn’t a cry for help at all. I’d known for quite a while that I wasn’t myself, but I didn’t really know what to do about it. I was going to work and I was still filming and I didn’t really talk to anyone about it. They took me into the Priory in the early hours of the morning… They tried different medications, but none of them seemed to work. In the end, the treatment they gave me was ECT – electro-convulsive therapy.”

“It kills your short-term memory… I actually now don’t know how I learned my lines. People stand on the gate waiting to meet people who are in Coronation Street, and I couldn’t sign my autograph because I couldn’t remember how to spell my name. I truly could not write my name for six months.”

Simon Cowell on the death of his father

Cowell received the news after calling his mother in “total euphoria” after discovering that his group Westlife had their first number one. “I believed in the band and I wanted to share the news with my mum and dad, and then [came] the news of what had happened and I had to get back to England. I rang to tell them the news, and my mum was acting in kind of a strange way, and then she called me back and told me.”

When Morgan asked about his immediate reaction, Cowell said: “Oh Piers… it wasn’t, wasn’t good. But you’ve just got to deal with it, you know, and I went back and realised that your first responsibility is that you’ve got to look after your mum. It was a horrible, horrible, horrible time, like I said. You believe everyone is going to live forever and they don’t. And all the stuff you think you care about, the hit records and stuff like that, it’s just meaningless.”

Alesha Dixon on her mother being abused

When Dixon and her brother were young, their mother was physically abused by the man she was seeing at the time. Discussing its impact on her, Dixon said: “I was afraid of everything. Outwardly, I’m very confident. People that meet me would imagine I’m a confident person, but… I don’t know what I was petrified of really when I look back, but I think it created an insecurity in me. I was scared of the world. I was scared of everything. And maybe I would put on a front, as if everything was OK, and I remember being quite angry.”

She mentioned she still occasionally sees this man and when she does, “I’m very pleasant. My mum’s forgiven him. If she can forgive him, then we can forgive him.”

Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, Saturday 25 May, 9.15pm, ITV/HD (CH 103/113). Also available for 7 days in Catch Up > Channels > ITV Hub