Ben Shephard has announced a break from This Morning, but has refused to confirm what he’ll be getting up to.
The former Good Morning Britain presenter hosts the ITV programme with Cat Deeley, having taken over from Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby after they stepped down.
The pair usually host Monday to Thursday together, and take breaks during school holidays, however, Ben has now revealed he won’t be on screens next week.
At the end of Thursday’s show, he told viewers: ‘I’m taking a couple of weeks away to go out and work on this exciting new project for ITV.’
‘It’s top secret!’ he told Cat.
The 49-year-old added that he was flying ‘to the other side of the world’ straight after the show, but ‘can’t tell you what it is’.
When Cat probed on if he’d be eating ‘witchetty grubs’ as part of I’m A Celebrity bushtucker trials, Ben replied: ‘I can neither confirm nor deny where in the world I’m going.’
She then asked if he’d be seeing her ‘two mates’, Ant and Dec, to which he repeated that he couldn’t ‘confirm or deny’ anything.
Ben did tease that he would reveal all the details on Monday’s This Morning, ‘live from where I am in the world’.
The star hasn’t confirmed what he could be up to, though celebrities are reported to be heading Down Under for I’m A Celebrity, which starts in just over a week.
Ben and Cat joined This Morning after Schofield and Holly quit within months of each other, with the former admitting his ‘unwise but not illegal’ affair before stepping down.
However, since the new presenting line-up, This Morning has failed to capture viewers, with numbers having halved in their first few months.
The ‘big slump’ in viewers led to reports that ITV staff were facing ‘shorter contracts, pay freezes and job cuts’.
It was even said the likes of Susanna Reid and Lorraine Kelly were reportedly warned of new measures facing ITV staff following ‘crisis meetings’ being held at the broadcaster.
‘ITV is really tightening their belt. There have been concerns for months at the top but now that it’s trickled down to the shop floor it feels very depressing,’ a source told The Sun earlier this year.
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