Search icon

Boys Don't Cry

13th Mar 2019

1Xtra DJ Nick Bright explains what it is like to go through a break up in the public eye

Wil Jones

Brought to you by ASOS

Breakups are hard

But imagine how much harder they would be if you were in the public eye? If the press were writing stories about it, and everyone was gossiping on Twitter?

On this week’s Boys Don’t Cry BBC Radio 1Xtra DJ Nick Bright spoke about his break up with British athlete Katarina Johnson-Thompson.

“When I split up with my girlfriend, I didn’t want to tell anyone, not even my parents,” says Bright. “I wanted to keep it to myself for so long.”

Of course, being in the public eye, that wasn’t going to happen.

“The hard thing was, at work where I do the radio show, a lot of people had met her – she’d been in sitting in when I was on air. Everyone knew who she was, and was asking ‘How’s Kat?’ For ages, I was like, ‘Yeah, she’s alright,’ not telling anyone.”

Things got even weirder when the press got wind of the split.

“For me, I’ve never been in the public eye enough for anyone to care about that. And then one day, my agent got a phone call from a Daily Mail journalist saying that they’d found out that Nick and Kat had broken up and they want to write a story about it. And I’m like, this is fucking weird, because normally no one gives a shit.

“That was really hard for me to deal with. I didn’t want this to be in the paper, and then she calls me… because she thought I’d called the journalist. It was all a bit mad.”

You can subscribe to Boys Don’t Cry now at https://playpodca.st/boys-dont-cry.

Boys Don’t Cry is brought to you in association with ASOS. Head here to find out more about them and their latest collection.