I'm A Celeb's Dean McCullough confesses to 'hidden homelessness' before finding fame

I'm A Celebrity star Dean McCullough is these days known as a beloved familiar voice on BBC Radio 1 - but his life hasn't always been so easy.

As a child, he was forced to sleep on a sofa after his parents' painful split left him and his mum with nowhere to go but his aunt's house. Revealing his hidden past for the first time ever in an interview with the Big Issue magazine, Dean confessed that he hadn't even realised he was homeless, as technically he wasn't living on the street.

However, he was "sofa-surfing" - a pattern that he continued to dip into in the early days of adulthood as he fought to forge a career - and it left him with lasting mental trauma. "I have problems with my possessions and feeling like I need to take care of absolutely everything around me," he confessed. "That comes down to moving from house to house and not ever feeling like anything was ever truly mine."

For a year of his childhood, he had no fixed address, and he then moved around on a "regular basis". His predicament is what is commonly referred to as "hidden homelessness", which can affect up to one in 183 UK children, but often goes unnoticed due to the fact that those in this situation still have a roof over their heads.

In the lead-up to his TV and radio success, Dean's mental health spiralled again, and he used alcohol to numb his pain - particularly during the isolation of the pandemic. "What was like a glass of wine of an evening after work turned into a bottle which turned into two bottles and then, some weekends, I was drinking like a bottle of vodka too," he agonised.

The Big Brother star, who is almost unrecognisable today, continued to iNews: "I just saw the path in front of me and it wasn't nice.

"It was really dark and it was very destructive and I thought, if I want to get to Radio 1, which was always my dream, if I want to do that, I need to make some changes."

He vowed to become teetotal - and then, four weeks after ending his relationship with alcohol, he saw an advert looking for a presenter to cover for Clara Amfo.

He applied - and, of course, the rest is history.

Dean has been hugely popular ever since, despite not everyone believing his tearful panic on recent episodes of I'm A Celebrity was authentic.

The 32-year-old had a meltdown after Ant and Dec broke the bad news to him that he'd be buried alive in sand up to his thighs while being fed creepy crawlies through the mouthpiece of a sarcophagus.

It was a particularly gruesome trial, with mealworms and crickets invading as he was quizzed on a series of general knowledge questions about Egypt, which he'd have to answer correctly to win ten stars for his team.

Strictly pro Ola Jordan and her fellow dance star husband James accused him of acting, with the former declaring: "I don’t believe one bit that he was scared of that #ImACeleb" - but some have had more sympathy for Dean.