Radio icon David Hamilton, also known as ‘Diddy’, has revealed how he ‘fell in love’ with a sex worker after having children ‘spoiled’ marriage.
The BBC broadcaster, 87, rose to fame in the 70s on Radio 1, as well as hosting Top of the Pops.
At 24 years old, he wed makeup artist Sheila Moore, but during their 8-year ‘happy’ marriage, he ‘fell in love with someone else’.
‘I went to meet her at Liverpool Street station,’ he told Best magazine. ‘She was sitting on her suitcase wearing a fur coat, which she told me later she’d borrowed.
‘I just looked at her and thought, wow. I think if anything spoils a marriage, it’s children. Suddenly, the man is taking a back seat.’
Hamilton and his wife had two children, Jane and David Jr, before their divorce in 1970.
The broadcaster, nicknamed Diddy by Ken Dodd, continued: ‘Then he meets someone young free and single and thinks, “Crikey, I could go back to that happy state I was in before.”
‘My wife found out because I talked about Roz a lot. I was head over heels. I left my wife and children, and we lived together for four years.’
Hamilton helped her open a business and said they ‘became very fond of each other’, adding: ‘I was getting in too deep.’
The romance ended, and in 1993, the presenter married his second wife, Dreena, a decade after they were set up on a blind date.
The pair are still married, even though Dreena admitted she was told he was a ‘womaniser’ when they first met.
To Best magazine, Hamilton praised his wife as ‘the wind beneath [his] wings’.
In 2022, Hamilton was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which gives him a tanned complexion due to the overproduction of red blood cells.
Polycythaemia vera is a slow-growing cancer that thickens the blood, which can cause clots, and while it is not curable it is largely manageable.
‘Everybody who sees me says how well I look,’ he told the Daily Mail at the time.
‘Too many red blood cells gives you a very rosy complexion, so it looks like you’ve got a sun tan.’
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