ITV’s Martin Lewis had a dramatic moment on air when he collapsed just before his show ended due to sudden illness.
The This Morning money expert, 52, was back at the helm of his money-saving programme with co-star Jeanette Kwakye, discussing the latest financial deals.
The main topic of the show was how viewers can boost their state pension, affecting Brits aged between 40 and 73. The father-of-one explained how fans could turn £800 into £5,000 by boosting state pensions before the opportunity ends in April 2025.
However, the live show took an unexpected turn when the TV presenter collapsed. During the last quarter of the show, he admitted that he was losing his voice after fielding a barrage of questions from viewers, reports the Mirror.
He was seen coughing throughout the programme, taking frequent water breaks to ease his discomfort. Trying to hand over the closing comments to his colleague Jeanette, he confessed between coughs: “I’m really close to the end on time. That’s it from me. my voice has gone, JK”.
His co-host expressed her concern, saying: “Oh no! I Was going to ask you what’s going on next week” before she burst into laughter as the host took another sip of his drink. His voice growing increasingly hoarse, he said: “We’re probably going to be doing wills and power of attorneys and difficult conversations but it may change, I don’t know, we may be doing savings. Let me know which you prefer.”
“Thank you to Jeanette, thank you to the audience here, thank you to everyone upstairs. I’m going to lie down, goodnight,” he concluded, before notably collapsing on stage amidst the sound of applause from the audience.
This event followed an earlier incident when the broadcaster’s show led to such an overwhelming volume of online traffic that it caused the government website to malfunction just five minutes after his show commenced. Upon returning from a commercial break, he declared: “Welcome back.
“Tonight it’s all about boosting your state pension by possibly tens of thousands of pounds for an urgent deadline. I predicted it before the break, the government website that do the checks has gone down, apparently it went down five minutes into the programme. It’s going to struggle, it’s like a denial service error but there’ll be time still to do it. Keep watching and learning what you need to do while you can get in touch.”
The presenter also made a point to say that he had forewarned the company about the topic of his financial advice show beforehand, although he did acknowledge that “no website can cope” with the rapid influx of viewers looking to act on his expert guidance.
As a consequence, it wasn’t long before viewers turned to X – previously known as Twitter – to share their vexations online.
One viewer questioned: “Are all government sites gonna crash tonight, this is the pension forecast tool Martin Lewis is currently talking about on screen #martinlewis.”
Another chimed in with: “#MartinLewis caused the Gov site to crash again” while a different user added: “Looks like we’ve crashed the site again @martinSLewis #martinlewis.”