Kim Woodburn made headlines once again when she clashed with Phillip Schofield on ‘This Morning’ on Monday (6 February), but since the interview aired fans have been speculating about an incident the host referenced but left unexplained.
As they fought it out on the sofa, Phil brought up an argument she’d previously had on ‘Celebrity Juice’, but neither party offered any further detail, leaving viewers wondering what had happened.
It has since come to light that the ‘How Clean Is Your House?’ star had an explosive showdown with then-regular panellist Rufus Hound, with the row acting as the catalyst for him leaving the ITV2 show in 2012.
In a podcast with Richard Herring back in 2013 (that Digital Spy has since unearthed), Rufus detailed the backstage spat.
He recalled: “She was chatting away to Keith [Lemon] and he said, ‘Have you got much coming up?’, and she said, ‘I don’t think the people who make TV would want me anymore’. And I said, genuinely, honestly, ‘Don’t do yourself down. People will always need a cleaner’.
“Now bear in mind, that’s what she’s famous for. If I had said that to Jude Law, fair enough. That’s an insult. She’s a cleaner!
“She looked at me and said something on the lines of, ‘When I want an opinion of a fat man, I’ll stand outside Gregg’s’. It was a proper f**k you, an old-fashioned f**k you, and I just sort of laughed to myself that here she was having a dig because I genuinely hadn’t meant it as an insult. It really f**king spiralled out of control.”
“It ended up really horrible,” he said. “She was trying to be deliberately personal, and by the point it got to that place, I was like, ‘Okay, because I’m a stand-up comedian and if you want to start heckling, I’m good at this’. And so I was personal back.
“She basically kept saying I was fat. But I did end up saying, ‘That’s a bit rich coming from a woman who looks like a face drawn on a deflating party balloon’.”
Rufus claimed Kim had refused to leave the studios until he issued an apology, with producers trying to convince him to do so.
While he was initially reluctant, Rufus agreed after producers promised a copy of the row on tape so he knew for his “own peace of mind what happened is how [he] remember it happened”.
However, after he apologised, he ultimately never received the tape, with a producer admitting he would “never have given that” to him.
As a result, Rufus became disillusioned with the show, and eventually quit.
“That was sort of the point of it all,” he said. “They had this sense of, I should be grateful of being on this big hit show, but what they never understood was, the thing I set out in comedy wasn’t about being on a show like ‘Celebrity Juice’. For me to keep being on ‘Celebrity Juice’, they needed to have room for me in it, and they weren’t interested in it.
“And they eventually said, ‘You need to cheer up to be here’, and I said, ‘Make me happy. Cheer me up’. And they said ‘Take two weeks off and think about it’, and then two days later...”
Rufus has since been replaced with chef Gino D’Acampo on the show, which is hosted by Keith Lemon, with Holly Willoughby and Fearne Cotton serving as team captains.
HuffPost UK has contacted Kim Woodburn’s spokesperson for comment on this story.