Dannii Minogue broke down in tears on the panel (Picture: Ken McKay/Shutterstock)
Dannii Minogue has recalled wanting to ‘walk off’ The X Factor after being reduced to tears during a live show.
The 52-year-old I Kissed A Girl host was under an intense level of scrutiny from fans, the press and even judges Sharon Osbourne and Louis Walsh, and she found herself struggling towards the end of her first series in 2007.
At one point, she was introducing one of her acts during a live show and ‘completely broke’, and she ‘couldn’t take any more’.
‘I just had this feeling of wanting to stand up and walk off the show and run. It wasn’t my job to come on and spill my crap over the show. My job was to do my job. But I just broke. I completely broke.’
She found herself planning her next moves in her mind, including worrying she was risking legal action.
‘I’ve signed a contract. My next call will be to [my team]. I’m going to be sued because I’d just walked out of a live show,’ she told The Independent. ‘But that’s what it had to be because I couldn’t take it any more.’
Dannii’s attitude to television changed (Picture: Ken McKay/Talkback Thames/Shutterstock)
However, the emotional moment resonated with viewers, and shifted her mentality after long believing in the idea that the show must go on, at any expense.
‘I’d been told my whole life that if you wanted to be in entertainment, you had to be thick-skinned. But being thick-skinned isn’t nice. It isn’t comfortable,’ she admitted.
‘You don’t have real communication with people, because you’re just constantly guarded and closed off and locked down. I couldn’t live that way. I couldn’t walk around feeling like I needed an armour shield around me.’
When it comes to Dannii’s mental health at the time, she admitted that while X Factor have been vocal about a care team for contestants, her own team – including her manager, publicist, and hair and makeup stylist – stepped up as her support network.
Her close knit team stepped up during her X Factor days (Picture: Ken McKay/Talkback Thames/Shutterstock)
She admitted they ‘had to take on so much’, adding: ‘They’ve seen me in the lowest of lows. They had to become my care team.’
Dannii insisted working on I Kissed A Boy last year was the ‘first time’ in her career that she’s been given access to a care team, and she’s been blown away by the experience.
Asked what would happen if she had a similarly tough moment like she did on The X Factor all those years ago, she said: ‘They said they’d stop the cameras for me and it’d all be fine. That was new and wild for me.’
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