OHMYGOSSIP — Melanie Sykes reported Leigh Francis to producers after he made a series of offensive remarks towards her.
The 50-year-old beauty was reduced to tears following an appearance on ‘Through The Keyhole’ in 2018 – which is fronted by the comic as his Keith Lemon alter ego – as he left her stunned with an alleged barrage of abusive comments, which she claimed he only did to entertain the studio audience as she knew they wouldn’t make it onto TV.
She told the ‘Frankly Speaking with Lynne Franks’ podcast: “I’d been on holiday and I was happy and relaxed.
“I went into the studio and I didn’t think Keith was going to be like he was on the other show that he does (‘Celebrity Juice’) where it’s all sex and b*** jobs and talking about people’s a**holes and all that.
“I sat there for a three-hour record and he did all of that stuff to me verbally to entertain the live audience — because it was never going to make the edit of the show, because it was a family, Saturday night show, so he used me to entertain the audience.
“I had Jonathan Ross to my right and Ashley Banjo to my left and the first thing that Keith said to me, in character: ‘I bet your a**hole smells of flowers’.
“It makes me want to cry right now because I was so caught in the headlights and wasn’t expecting it.”
Melanie wanted to walk out but knew it would reflect badly on her.
She added: “It went from bad to worse, I kept thinking ‘What am I going to do?
“I can’t get up and storm out because it will be all over the newspapers that I’ve walked out and it will of course be my fault, everybody in the audience has a mobile phone so they could see’.
“So for three hours I struggled through that. I got home and I cried all night and I rang my agent in the morning and told him.”
Melanie called the head of production company Talkback to tell them about her “terrible experience”.
She recalled: “She said, ‘You’re the first person that’s ever complained about him’. I said, ‘I don’t care’ — and this was before MeToo.”
The former ‘Let’s Do Lunch’ host hit out at the Keith Lemon character for being able to “give voice to men in the street, men in the office, men in your home, to talk to women like s*t and think it’s funny.”
And Melanie is frustrated by her reputation as a “geezer bird” because she thinks it stops men from showing her respect.
She said: “I’ve tried to get to the bottom of why this happens to me, because men talk to me in a real brazen way and they expect me to be able to deal with it.
“I don’t know whether it’s because I’m Northern, down-to-earth because what ignited my fame was a commercial for (Boddingtons) beer.
“I want respect, I deserve respect, I respect everybody else.”
Leigh’s agents haven’t responded to the claims, while Talkback declined to comment.

Source: VacationHunter.Online
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