Gail's bravery

Find out how TV presenter Gail Porter faced up to a life with no hair

It took just four weeks last summer for all of Gail Porter's hair to fall out.

At 34, the chirpy TV presenter, whose naked image was once famously projected onto the House of Parliament, had to face up to the probability that she would never have hair again.

She woke up one morning to find clumps of hair strewn across her pillow. After a six-month wait to see an NHS dermatologist, she learnt there is only a 10% chance that it will grow back.

A new documentary follows her as she learns to cope with being a bald woman. Sometimes she can laugh about the alopecia, joking to the camera that she's having a "bad hair day".

But when a specialist tells her that her hair is unlikely ever to grow back, the jaunty facade crumbles and the tears come.

Despite her understandable horror at going bald, Gail has always refused to wear a wig or cover her hair with a hat. But she bridles at the suggestion that she's brave to do so. She and Michelle Chapman, who have become friends through their alopecia, feature in this BBC documentary.

Stress-related

No one knows what causes alopecia, an auto-immune condition that affects one in a 100 people, but stress is a contributory factor, and there has been no shortage of that in Gail's life. Behind her mega-watt on-screen smile lurked a troubled soul with a long history of mental health problems.

She suffers from bipolar disorder (also known as manic depression) and has been anorexic. When she was pregnant with her daughter Honey, now three, she was a borderline obsessive-compulsive, rising at 6am to clean her home and check her CDs were in alphabetical order.

After Honey's birth, she had a crippling attack of post-natal depression which led to a suicide attempt. She takes tablets every day because her thyroid isn't functioning - and then she lost her hair.

She and cameraman James Lloyd got together shortly after she broke up with Honey's father, musician Dan Hipgrave, of the now-disbanded Toploader, whom she married in 2001.

Eating disorder

At college, Gail studied photography and film. She lost her virginity at 19, and within a year was diagnosed with anorexia. Her weight plummeted to six stone on a diet of cucumber and grapes.

An underlying cause of anorexia can be a desperate desire not to grow up and Gail didn't have a period for nine years. It was through sheer determination that she recovered.

She spent five years as a runner for a production company before landing her TV break on The Totally Interactive Game Show. She is off to Cambodia soon to make a film for Sky TV about adopting abroad and then on to Thailand for a film on kick-boxing.

After she and Hipgrave split in summer 2004, Gail found life as a single mother overwhelming and, after dropping off Honey at nursery one day in March last year, she felt so desperate and alone that she swallowed 30 sleeping pills.

"It was a cry for help, rather than a wish to kill myself,'' she insists. "That's why I called the doctor. I was a bit lost and I wanted someone to look after me.''