Paddy McGuinness: “I was drowning and needed help!” Raising autistic kids and clinical depression
Happy Place
Fearne Cotton
4.6 • 15.2K Ratings
🗓️ 15 September 2025
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Men are starting to open up. Presenter and comedian Paddy McGuinness used to work on building sites where vulnerability would have been seen as a weakness, but he’s seen things changing...
In this chat with Fearne, Paddy talks about his own clinical depression, and what he’s learnt from therapy about keeping his mental health in check. He explains that understanding why you’re reacting a certain way will give you the power to change your behaviour.
Paddy’s three children all have autism, and he’s frank about how he felt when he first got the news. He talks through the common misconceptions, and what he wishes more people understood about the realities of raising autistic children.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, hello, a big welcome to Happy Place. I'm Fern Cotton and today I'm chatting to Paddy McGuinness live at the Happy Place Festival at Tan Park. |
| 0:10.4 | I felt like I was drowning and I needed help and I wanted someone to throw me at like a lifeline. |
| 0:17.3 | And I thought, I need to speak about this because what we're happening is I were going to work |
| 0:22.2 | and you're doing shows, which is all jazz hands. No one had a clue what were going on, so I found |
| 0:27.7 | myself getting really wound up about things. And I mean like, like nothing things. And I was like, |
| 0:36.3 | jeez, I need, I need to talk to someone about this. |
| 0:39.6 | How are you gorgeous people? So look, I'm now, my kids are back at school. I feel like I can |
| 0:44.1 | sort of start to rearrange my life after them being off school for like eight weeks. I'm sort |
| 0:51.1 | of still trying to sort my house out, which just seems to turn into an absolute shit show over the summer holidays. |
| 0:57.0 | So I'm reorganising things. I'm chucking, I'm sort of doing a spring clean in September. |
| 1:02.1 | I also just turned 44, which felt kind of big. |
| 1:07.9 | I'm not even sure why. Maybe it's the fact that it's two fours stuck together. I've had quite a year, my 43rd year. So now I'm sort of entering a new year thinking, right, new chapter, new era, what's going on here? Yeah, I'm just trying to sort my life out. I'm also editing a new book, and that is taking up a lot of my time and headspace. So I feel a bit all over |
| 1:28.3 | the shop. Like things are still quite chaotic, but I'm hoping as we canter through September, |
| 1:33.2 | that I can really start to feel a little bit more organised in the head and practically and a little |
| 1:39.9 | bit more sort of grounded, I guess. I'm also change of a season. I love going into autumn. I always |
| 1:45.9 | think I'm going to hate it and then I get to it when all the leaves are all golden and start wearing |
| 1:50.3 | chunky knits. I fucking love it. I can't wait for autumn. Now, I know loads of you were massively |
| 1:55.9 | excited when you saw that Paddy McGuinness was on the Tatton Park Festival lineup. He is a legend of |
| 2:00.6 | UK TV, |
| 2:01.6 | but we actually got quite deep quite quickly during this chat. So we talk about all things. |
| 2:06.4 | What I loved about this chat is Paddy, you know, before Paddy did comedy, he worked on building |
| 2:11.7 | sites. Like he's had quite sort of a laddie, a laddie time. He's a working class lad, lad, |
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