Natasha Kaplinsky has spoken for the first time about a boat accident she and her family were involved in last year.
On Monday’s Loose Women, Natasha recalled the incident, which took place while she was on holiday in Corfu with her husband, son and daughter, as well as her own parents.
“Something terrible went wrong with the boat after 15 mins of being on it, it was long enough for us to be very far away from anywhere,” she explained. “There was a leak, we now know, in the fuel pipe, the boat stuttered and stopped.
“My husband made a phone call to get some advice and he was advised to turn the key to see what was happening with the pressure. It was just like a James Bond moment, the whole boat just blew.”
Revealing the accident left her and her family “badly burnt”, Natasha explained they were left in the sea for 45 minutes before they were found, admitting she now views this as a “blessing” because the water ultimately lessened their scars.
She said: “There is nothing worse than being a mum and seeing your child injured. I just kept on looking at her and her face, because that’s what was injured for her and her arm, and thinking about her wedding day. It was just one of the moments where you think, ‘I just can’t bear it’.
“But anyway, we now, nearly a year on - having had a lot of help and a lot of support from friends and amazing help from doctors - are OK. We were all air-lifted home and it was very traumatic at the time. It’s a shock.”
Natasha also revealed she underwent EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) treatment after the incident as she “couldn’t stop crying” in the aftermath.
“EMDR is used a lot for extreme trauma and for war veterans as well,” she said. “It helped to move the trauma away from the immediacy of what was happening in front of me, where we were on a burning boat... to a bit further away in my mind.
“It’s still very hard to talk about. My daughter is having EMDR at the moment. It is so helpful but a very, very painful process. Hopefully it will pay off in the long run, we have got to deal with it now.”
She also commented that she and her daughter, Angelica, “had a race to see who could grow their eyelashes and eyebrows back first”, noting: “It was almost better that we were both injured in the same way.
“If it was just her, I couldn’t have bared that, just to watch her go through it. We took all the mirrors away from the walls in the house and just stayed home for three months to see whose eyelashes and eyebrows would grow back first.”
Watch Natasha’s full interview on Loose Women below: