Antiquity, poppies and wine! A cycling holiday around the glorious heartland of Umbria makes for a heady mix

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 Having a blast! Abandoned nuclear plant transformed into theme park... complete with a swing ride inside an old cooling tower By Adrian Lowery for the Daily Mail
Published: 14:47 GMT, 13 June 2014 | Updated: 15:58 GMT, 23 June 2014
            
As our cycling tour of Umbria drew nearer, the subject of hills cropped up in conversation with increasing regularity. ‘Umbria’s hilly, it’s like Tuscany, everyone says it’s hilly!’ my partner would aver.

‘Don’t worry, it’s not all hilly – not this bit anyway,’ I would reply, only half-sure of myself. And I was half-right.

The central Umbrian valley - we would learn - is broad and flat, patchworked by agriculture and irrigation. But like a giant saute pan, higher ground rears up on all sides, verdant slopes tracked with vineyards and olive groves.

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Green and rolling: a typical Umbrian vista.

Flat, with hills: The walled medieval hilltown of Montefalco was the longest climb on the trip - but there was a memorable lunch at the end of it.
As in neighbouring Tuscany, walled medieval towns take up commanding positions: from the familiar – such as Assisi and Perugia – to less well-known citadels like Spello, Montefalco and Bevagna.

To get around, we had chosen a self-guided cycling tour, which means you ride on your own, without a guide or other punters.


By Vicki Owen

Umbria might not have been as pan-flat as I was promised - nor the bikes as light as expected. But don’t be put off by the prospect of sore legs when you’re 'supposed to be on holiday'.

Getting around by my own steam I felt not only proud, and like I had achieved something, but more relaxed and all the more appreciative of my surroundings and Italy’s stunning buildings and townscapes.

The atmospheric churches are also great places to cool down! You might even be more likely to stumble across things by accident on a bicycle - especially if one of you has some perhaps overly-detailed instructions and the other a map and you’re not doing very well at following either.

One wrong turn sent us bumping along a dirt track we hoped would follow the canal but that ended abruptly at a shallow river. Slightly off-piste, we were soon delighted to stumble across a hidden Roman temple just below the main road near Bovara - albeit with soggy feet.

You can also truly enjoy the absurd amounts of delicious food and wine when you know you have put a bit of effort into reaching the restaurant before it stops serving!

The holiday was a dream and has left me resolved to get fitter so I can see more by bike or by foot, as it has convinced me this is the best way to experience a place fully.
As well as booking the accommodation and offering hire bikes, the tour outfit (see details below) provides you with maps, route descriptions and local info, and transfers your luggage each day so it is at your destination when you arrive.

Installed at our Assisi hotel and briefed on the itinerary, we were left to explore the hometown of frugal Saint Francis before taking delivery of the bikes later in the day.

The town’s immaculately preserved medieval centre draws thousands of pilgrims and tourists alike – particularly to the stupendous basilica dedicated to the saint that dominates its north-western reach.

The sense of ancient and meditative sanctity might for some tastes be compromised by the trinket shops and density of tour groups, but the panorama over the valley westwards across to Perugia and south towards Montefalco is unquestionably divine.

And interesting not least because it takes in a good deal of where we will be riding in the next few days.

It’s a spectacular morning as we freewheel gently down from Assisi, traversing the lower slopes of Mount Subasio in search of Spello, which soon rears up ahead, looking much as it must have done 600 years ago.

In what will become a familiar pattern we lock up our bikes - which were a bit on the chunky side, but sturdy and reliable - at the city gate and take on the steep cobbled and stair-welled streets by foot.

Which is fine because the point of a trip like this, even for this keen cyclist, is to take your time: strolling the deranged alleyways scented by hanging baskets, ducking into the dark and cool of a basilica, dipping into an enoteca for some prosciutto, pecorino and whatever is the local vino rosso.

The first was one of the longest day’s riding at about 23 miles and took us to our lodgings at the beautiful agriturismo Casa Giulia in Bovara – but not before we’d bumped into the Giro d’Italia (Italy's equivalent of the Tour de France).

We arrive just as the the forty-minute motorised vanguard, the breakaway leaders and finally the peloton zip through with 10km to go to the finish town of Foligno – which we had just come through. This happy coincidence had not been, I was forced to insist, part of some trip-booking masterplan.

The Bridge of Towers or Ponte delle Torri crosses a deep gorge and connects Spoleto's castle with a fortification tower on the other side of the gorge.

And so it went pleasurably on, rolling through fields and olive groves, verges decked with honeysuckle and poppies, towards the reward of a cold beer in some medieval piazza or other at the end of each day.

The valley floor is criss-crossed by a network of navigated rivers, canals and irrigation channels – and our detailed directions frequently take us along them, on quiet lanes also open to cars and on gravel towpaths which aren't.

Breathtaking basilicas: The cathedral at Spoleto and the church of St Francis at Bevagna

It’s not lyrically bucolic though. There is some light industry in the valley and it is populated and visited heavily enough that you never feel you are truly ‘in the middle of nowhere’.

Hilltop Montefalco is the biggest climb and we are rewarded at the top with its expansive medieval piazza and a truly splendid lunch in the shady garden of the upmarket Coccorone restaurant. Steak from the chianina breed of cattle is matched with Sagrantino di Montefalco – a rich and complex, densely coloured red wine particular to the area.
It's a good job it's downhill all the way that afternoon.

Pretty old .... The fifth-century Church of Saint Angelo in Perugia.
Distant hills: A view of the central Umbrian valley over the rooftops of Perugia.
At Spoleto we thrill at the vertiginous Ponte delle Torri and in Bevagna’s charming and seductive streets we come across an austere candlelit procession, a statue of St Francis born aloft by priests on a circuit of the town, with a retinue of nuns, locals and four-piece band.

Finally comes Perugia, which even for someone suffering antiquity fatigue can’t fail to impress. We walk the maze of cobbled streets until we drop, amazed and silenced, at one of the oldest churches in Italy. Dating from the fifth century, the serene Tempio di Sant Michele Arcangelo has at least seven hundred years on the many medieval and renaissance basilicas that have punctuated our trip.
The small town of Spello was the first lunchtime stop, halfway between Assisi and Bovara.
Stumbling through to the rear terrace of a restaurant-bar on the city’s eastern flank, we are greeted with an unbroken vista of the valley, with Assisi and Spello nestling in the lower flanks of Mount Subasio, twenty miles opposite.

Our cycling trip might be behind us, but there it is laid out before us.

FlexiTreks (01273 410550, flexitreks.com), offers the seven-night Umbria Classic Tour covering 198 miles maximum from £495?pp, based on two sharing a double room, B&B in three and four-star hotels and daily luggage transfer. Bike hire £65 extra. Tours depart departs daily from Assisi from 1 March to 30 November.

Flights: BA, Vueling and Air France fly from London airports to Florence - but Rome is almost as close and convenient for southern Umbria.


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Is Halifax a bank we're supposed to take seriously or an angry old man who can cope with the 21st century?

By Richard Browning for the Daily Mail

Published: 12:11 GMT, 27 April 2013 | Updated: 12:13 GMT, 3 May 2013

Applying for and managing complicated tax-free savings accounts these days is a doddle.

We’re 13% of the way through the 21st century and paying 0% tax on your nest egg has been made child’s play over the last few years. God bless the internet.

Even a revitalised state-owned behemoth such as Halifax, that by rights should have gone bust and vanished off the High Street in the late noughties, makes Isas easy with its state-of-the-art website and UK call centre.

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Hellifax: A bank that requires you to visit the branch, check the website, write a letter and use the phone is like an old man at odds with the modern online world.

According to the Halifax website, you can easily...
 
• view accounts and balances
• pay bills
• apply for products.
 
If you want to apply for an Isa but are worried it may go wrong, there’s an Isa promise. A promise ladies and gentlemen!
 
And there’s more...
 
‘Online Banking,’ it says on the website, ‘is a safe and secure way to manage your money online.’ The future has arrived!
 
Technology has finally fixed our lives and sorting our finances is a simple stress-free joy. If only that were true.
 
All I wanted to do was check up on my junior Isa, open a new Isa and make some transfers into it. It's what banks do. Isas were invented in the previous millennium. They should be really good at it at by now.  

Have you tried to deal with Halifax lately?

Dealing with Halifax is like being tutted at over the garden fence by a long-retired, angry old man who knows there's a modern world but can't quite understand or coordinate it because it's not like it was in the 1950s.

If you are thinking of transferring your Isa to the 1950s via Halifax please read this warning – because in spite of the Isa promise your Isa could be wrecked too.
 
The list of what you can and can’t do in Halifax would make the confused old man next door proud.
 
For example:

Do not try to transfer your existing Halifax Isa online. They may say you can when you telephone but you can’t, at least if you get the same treatment I did.
 
If the call centre AND branch staff insist that you should manage or upgrade your cash Isa online because you can, DON'T - because you can’t.
 
DO NOT hit the big TRANSFER button on the Halifax website. That’s the button next to your cash Isa account that allows you to transfer your cash from your old Isa to your new Isa using the menu included as part of the process. Because it’s not a TRANSFER. It’s a WITHDRAWAL.
 
It’s perhaps hardly surprising that dealing with a bank that's being propped up by the State isn’t going to be the smoothest of processes. I know, I should have known better. But it’s so confusing.

If you go to the website, the first thing you see is a big advert for a prize draw - it's a hugely attractive proposition and one that successfully lured me - but it's perhaps a rather odd first impression of a cutting edge bank trying to reinvent itself as serious.

The first thing you hear if you phone - before being told you can manage your Isa online, which you can't, is an advert for the prize draw. It's as though Halifax has decided banking's too complicated and appointed itself the online replacement for, I dunno, bingo halls, which were another popular feature of the previous century.

I should have known better when I opened a junior Isa, which you can't do online, obviously, and was asked if I'd be happy to help with staff training - only to sit through an insurance up-sell session - up there with some of the more admirable banking excesses. The interest rate I was given on the Isa was subsequently wrong.
 
I should have known better when I phoned the bank for help over some mysterious apparently missing money and was told that the call centre couldn't help, because that was a branch issue. But the branch couldn't help either. I'd have to wait for news by post.
 
I should have known better when the online Isa transfer forms don't allow you to fill in the name of your current provider if has more than two words in its name, such as First Direct, or if the account number doesn't follow the non-specified Halifax formula.

I should have known better. But I'm normal. I didn't.

Halifax had a three year-fix, which meant I could transfer my few quid from my few Isas and forget about it until there's a slim chance that interest rates may have a hope of rising again from 2016. Easy life.

I did what I was told in the branch and on the phone and on the website and transferred my current Isa into my new one. But it wasn't a transfer it was a withdrawal.

The call centre doesn't literally tut at you. But it does either cut you off [three times] or repeat your name at you over and over if there's a problem.

This is worse than being tutted at.

'Mr  Browning, you manually transferred it Mr Browning, you should not manually transfer it because there's nothing we can do Mr Browning.'

'But you told me to. In the branch, on the phone and online.'

'Mr Browning.'

Then, some hope was thrown my way.

'Jordan,' said the call centre man, Jordan in the special Isa back office, who wouldn't speak to me, may be able to help put things back to how they were before the mistaken transfer that wasn't a transfer took place. I'd have to log in online to see if the secretive Jordan had been successful. 

A few days later, I checked my online account. And things had been put back to how they were. Brilliant! Except they weren't.

I got a letter in the post from the Halifax, explaining how my special transfer out and Jordan's transfer back was the same as opening two Isas in the same year, which is illegal, and I'd have to phone to explain before they called in the tax man.

I phoned. And they said:

'Mr Browning.There's nothing we can do. There's maybe someone in the back office who can help. But you'll have to phone back.

'Mr Browning.'

Repeat and fade.

Tut.

Now, a few weeks into the new tax year, none of the above has been resolved. The junior Isa interest rate remains a mystery, an Isa transfer made through the branch hasn't been done, the Isa transfer made online and resolved by phone and post hasn't been sorted - although another made by post and not mentioned above was successful. A nice man on the phone was able to confirm one thing though - I am included in the monthly draw. Bingo! 

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There's nothing weird about getting a veg box delivered - especially when it gets my family to the Caribbean

By Richard Browning for the Daily Mail

Published: 09:08 GMT, 22 December 2014 | Updated: 09:08 GMT, 22 December 2014

Richard Browning on how combining two money-saving secrets means he can take his family to the Caribbean... 

When Share Radio presenter Georgie Frost asked me live on air for my best money-saving tip, I said: ‘I get vegetables delivered.’ Because it is.

'Hmmm vegetables,' I felt a cloud of confusion forming over my fellow guests as if the man from Radiohead’s song Creep had just turned up in the studio naked and spoken for the first time.

And that's fine by me because I’m going on holiday to the Caribbean AGAIN because I get vegetables delivered.

I’ve been a few times, not because I’m loaded – I’m the opposite of that - but because I have a clever technique that starts with a cabbage. Let me put my clothes back on and explain how it works.

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Martinique in the school holidays? Not quite as out of reach as you might think, says Richard Browning ...

When I first rang Jill at Greener Greens to order a vegetable box, she refused to sell me anything other than a ‘mini’ one. 

It was an important lesson.

She explained that she didn’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed by the sudden arrival of too much fresh, organic veg – and more importantly, she didn’t want anyone to throw away any of the precious produce.

Greener Greens sources veg and fruit from a variety of organic and biodynamic farms across the South East and delivers to households across the region.

Over time we’ve moved up to a regular order of a ‘small’, sometimes a ‘fruit and veg’, a ‘medium’, or maybe ‘Mediterranean’ with a salad bag thrown in.

Every Wednesday is a bit like Christmas. A box of goodies noticeably more tasty than anything you can buy in a supermarket is left on the doorstep. It costs around £12 to £20, depending on the order. It’s healthy and given the quality, it’s very reasonable.

Importantly there's no waste. We never throw vegetables away. 

Organic veg box: Healthy, cheap, colourful and every Wednesday is a bit like Christmas.

And you could, I suppose, live on the contents of the veg box alone. We don't because we like meat and coffee too much and there’s no beer in the box either.

But to live a healthy life you could do worse than use vegetables in season as the foundation for your diet and anything else you can buy on a need-to-have basis.

Supermarkets don’t have ginormous trolleys for a laugh. They want you to fill them with as many spontaneous purchases as possible.

By cutting £20 off your weekly shop you save 52 x 20 = £1,040. But supermarkets are much bigger, more powerful, evil psychological geniuses than that.

I know this is because I worked out that by avoiding the supermarket for all but the things you cannot get anywhere else, we save about FIFTY quid a week.

Don't believe me? Come and have a look at the little spice shelf in our kitchen that still has 62,324 of the pesky little jars. The extras add up.

Not spending £50 a week is an annual windfall of £2,600 a year. My family can go to the Caribbean for two weeks in the school holidays for that.

No you can’t! Flights from London to Barbados cost £1,200 each in the school holidays.

No fly zone: Flights to the Caribbean for a family can be prohibitively expensive.  

Yes I can!

Here’s how.

France has two main Caribbean islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe. They’re departments of the country much in the same way that the Isle of Wight, and the county of Hampshire, are part of the UK.

And much the same way that ferries run back and forth all day from Portsmouth and Southampton to Ryde and Cowes, there are planes whizzing back and forth from Paris to Fort de France and Pointe-a-Pitre. There are three main airlines operating several flights every day to the little islands. It keeps the costs down.

France also, sometimes, has different school holidays to the UK, especially at Easter. In the UK, the Easter holidays are shifted every year to fit around the double bank holiday. In France, they aren’t.

Next Easter, for example, even with France’s more-sensible-than-ours system of different holidays for different parts of the country, the first week of April is not a school holiday anywhere in France. It is here. It keeps the costs down.

You can see the French school holiday calendar here 

French people also tend to take their holidays in one go - either the whole of July or the whole of August - so it means there’s plenty of available space on the flights in April. It keeps the costs down. 

Anyone familiar with the French holiday rentals, Gites de France, will know that this can be a very low-cost way of renting accommodation. They have Gites on Martinique and Guadeloupe too. As well as Airbnb and other sites that promote low-cost private holiday rentals.

Paradise found: Airbnb has a two-week rental in Martinique in our school holidays for £43 a night or £602 total. 

Accommodation outside the school holidays can be had for as little as £30 a night with a Gite. Although these days we like to splash out and last time rented a place with its own beach for £700 for a fortnight. Sorry I’m not sharing that one.

There are three of us in my family. Although sometimes we travel with parents, which means we can divide the costs even further by sharing the costs of travel, car hire and the flat or house.

Flights from Paris to Martinique next April cost less than £400 each.

Caribbean for less: Scheduled flights ply the route from Paris to Martinique several times a day for a quarter of the price of flights from the UK. 

The catch is you have to get to Paris.

You can fly on one of the low-cost operators for around £180 return for three but we prefer to drive, which costs about the same a flying once the ferry, petrol and tolls are factored in.

Airport parking at Paris, Orly, is on a par with the UK so it's not included in my calculation as you'd pay that anyway. There are also stay-and-park deals available at the Orly airport hotels.

There are risks, mostly French industrial action. You are not ticketed all the way through from the UK airport to the destination so if your low-cost flights to Paris are cancelled and you miss your transatlantic flight – tough.

France’s strikes, particularly by maritime workers, are notorious. But we’ve always managed to cross the Channel even when the ports are more or less shut down.

Snow has proved to be biggest worry when we’ve driven to Paris but by April you should be fine.

This is how the cost breaks down...

Flights x 3: £1,200

Car ferry: £100

Petrol, tolls Calais – Paris return: £100

Car hire: £330

Accommodation: £700

Total: £2,430

...for two weeks in the Caribbean in the school holidays.

That’s less than we saved once we started to get our vegetables delivered and lived without the weekly supermarket shop.

See, I’m not creepy. Just a bit geeky maybe when it comes to ‘free’ holidays.

This is Money appears with Georgie Frost on Share Radio every Friday, 11am. Listen again here: 

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Bank keeps rock-bottom rates on hold as case for earlier hike in cost of borrowing strengthens

By Adrian Lowery for the Daily Mail

Published: 15:37 GMT, 7 May 2014 | Updated: 07:22 GMT, 9 May 2014

Policymakers at the Bank of England have once again left rates unchanged today amid growing pressure to consider rate rises earlier than the expected spring 2015 horizon.

A heating housing market and positive economic data have strengthened the case of those who think the cost of borrowing must rise sooner rather than later. But no one expected the monetary policy committee to act this month, and it kept the bank rate steady at 0.5 per cent, and left the quantitative easing asset purchase programme unchanged.

The bank rate has been at that historic low of 0.5 per cent for more than five years, and with the recovery gathering pace, policymakers led by Governor Mark Carney have made clear they want to see spare capacity in the economy taken up before any increase.

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The Bank of England is keen to slack in the economy taken up before raising rates.

That has led experts and money markets to expect a first rise in the spring of next year. But there has been growing speculation that more hawkish members of the nine-member MPC may start to press for an earlier hike, in order to head off the possibility of inflation becoming stored up the economy.

Martin Beck, senior economic adviser to the EY ITEM Club said: ‘Today’s decision was unsurprising. GDP growth in Q1 came in below the MPC’s expectations, so, in the words of Mark Carney, the economy remains in "recovery rather than expansion" mode.

‘Moreover, inflationary pressures have continued to ease, with CPI inflation in March dropping to 1.6 per cent, the lowest since October 2009, and below the Committee’s forecast,’ he added.

Sterling has powered up towards a five-year high of $1.70 this week as the improving outlook for the economy raised the prospect of an interest rate increase this year.

Research group Markit recently said its purchasing managers’ index of activity among British businesses – in which scores above 50 represent growth – rose from 58.2 in March to 59.4 in April.

The report put the UK on course for growth of 0.8 per cent in the second quarter of the year – the same as between January and March – and suggested British firms were creating around 100,000 jobs every month.

The pound has risen as high as $1.6996, with bulls targeting $1.70 - a level last seen in August 2009.

Experts have put the recent creeping up of new mortgage rates down to increases in swap rates, which lenders use to price their loans. Swap rates are effectively bets on the future course of the bank rate.

Pound: Sterling stormed to $1.699 at one point a level not seen since August 2009 after official figures showed the US economy grew at an annual rate of just 0.1 per cent in the first three months of the year.

Financial information group Moneyfacts reported this week that the rates charged on two-year fixed-rate deals are rising at their fastest pace in over two years. The hikes mean that someone applying for a two-year fix on April 1 would have typically been offered a rate of 3.52 per cent, but by April 30 this would have jumped to 3.61 per cent on average.

Meanwhile, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has hiked up its UK growth forecast to 3.2 per cent and sounded a warning that action may be needed to cool the housing market.

The international body called for action to restrain demand in order to contain levels of household debt. It said this should include restricting access to the Help to Buy scheme, which provides mortgage guarantees and loans to open up the housing market to those struggling to find deposits.

The OECD said the minimum requirement put down by homebuyers under the initiative ought to be increased.

Last week, Bank deputy governor Sir Jon Cunliffe warned that the surging property market could pose the biggest danger to the country's financial stability. Sir Jon Cunliffe said it would be 'dangerous to ignore the momentum that has built up in the UK housing market'.

E&Y ITEM Club's Beck said: 'With a number of MPC members recently suggesting that the housing market poses a significant threat to the UK’s financial stability, the current pace of house price inflation is the elephant in the room,’

Figures from mortgage lender Halifax today revealed that UK house prices rose 8.5 per cent year-on-year in April as demand from homebuyers remains strong, although that was slightly down on an 8.7 per cent year-on-year rise in March.

On a month-on-month basis, values dipped 0.2 per cent, marking the second monthly fall in a row and taking average prices to £177,648, Halifax added.

BoE Governor Mark Carney has been keen not to set any timeline for rate rises, stressing the weaknesses still left in the UK economy.

Howard Archer, chief European & UK economist at IHS Global, however, believes that the Bank of England is more likely to eventually try to calm the housing market down with measures other than an interest rate hike.

‘This could very well include further measures aimed at ensuring responsible mortgage lending by banks and building societies (the OECD has suggested the introduction of higher capital requirements and maximum loan-to-value ratios for mortgages),’ Archer said.

‘The Bank of England may also very well recommend to the government that it dilutes the Help to Buy mortgage guarantee scheme. In particular, the £600,000 price limit for a house under the scheme could be cut, perhaps to £300,000,’ he added.

The Bank has already tried to put the brakes on by withdrawing the Funding for Lending scheme, which widened access to mortgages last year by giving lenders access to cheap finance. It has been redirected purely to business loans.

Another measure has seen a new power created to be able to vary the affordability criteria that borrowers must meet, to ensure that they can afford to service mortgages if interest rates rise.

The Bank's interest rate policy states that rates will only be used to combat risks to financial stability 'as a last line of defence if those risks cannot be contained' by other measures by its Financial Policy Committee and other regulators.

But Investec chief economist Philip Shaw said the debate on monetary policy at the MPC may still be 'influenced by fears that conditions in the housing market might need to be calmed'. They would need to consider whether the Bank's separate Financial Policy Committee 'is equipped with the necessary macroprudential tools', he said.

Meanwhile, minutes of the latest MPC meeting have revealed disagreement about the key measure of 'spare capacity' in the economy now being used to determine interest rate policy after guidance linking it directly to unemployment was scrapped.

They revealed there was a 'range of views' about whether many self-employed people were in fact under-employed and looking for work as employees. That would imply a greater degree of 'slack' in the economy than the headline jobs figures would suggest.

Mr Shaw said: 'The loose nature of the new framework, with the aim of eliminating economic slack within 2-3 years, allows considerable scope for a range of views on the committee, and we fully expect this to be reflected in more robust policy debate and in due course, dissent.'

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‘I saw you kissing your half-brother!’ Jeremy Kyle embroiled in second incest scandal

THE Jeremy Kyle Show was rocked by another incest scandal today as a former couple appeared on the show to establish if you of them had kissed her half-brother.

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INCEST SHOCK: Sam was accused of kissing her half-brother [ITV]

Simon appeared on the ITV morning show to try and prove that ex-girlfriend Sam had locked lips with half-sibling Chris by getting her to take a lie detector test.

Sam had denied Simon’s accusations as he told Jeremy he once climbed onto a roof to try and catch the pair in the act.

"I caught them kissing. Basically I was with her for four months, the last month didn't feel right, I didn't want to touch her or sleep with her, it didn't feel right. I slept with her and it didn't feel right,” he said.

"Brother and sister don't look at each other like that. I stopped feeling anything towards her."

“I caught them kissing. I didn't want to touch her or sleep with her, it didn't feel right.”

Jeremy Kyle guest

Sam said she felt “physically sick” by Simon’s accusations, branding her ex “mad”.

"You have no proof and you are mad. I never did anything but look after you, Si,” she said.

"How sick are you, really?"

The lie detector results backed Sam up too as Jeremy revealed that Sam had been telling the truth all along had had never kissed her brother or anyone else while they were together.

"I told you you were going to look a fool if we came on here. I love you. I told you I'd never lie to you, you need help Si, seriously," she raged.

The Jeremy Kyle Show airs weekdays at 9.25am.

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I’m A Celeb Australia: Freddie Flintoff gets a relaxing facial... with elephant POO

OWZAT! Ex cricketer Freddie Flintoff got a faceful of elephant poo in the Aussie version of I’m A Celebrity.

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BULLS**T: Cricketer Freddie Flintoff gets elephant poo smeared on his face [ITV / GETTY]

It seems his pranks and schoolboy antics have started to grate on the other celebrities and a result he had to face a bushtucker trial called the Safari Spa.

Beauty treatments included an African clawed frogs shampoo, a cricket-filled hair drier, a sauna overrun with rats and a facial containing elephant dung and maggots.

His nightmare was topped off with a spray tan made up of a yellow gooey substance and elephant dung drops but the brave sportsman, 37, managed to win nine stars for camp.

Meanwhile, Freddie ended up flying over the Aussie jungle camp for his first bushtucker trial last week.

He and co-star Tyson Mayr had to move along a high wire above the trees in the South African bush to win food.

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But Freddie was upset as his hunky accomplice stripped off to show his torso.

He moaned: “I haven’t got any abs.”

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The Keith Lemon Show: Martine McCutcheon and Peter Andre are the butt of the joke

TV STARS Martine McCutcheon and Peter Andre end up the butt of the joke when they make guest appearances on Keith Lemon’s Sketch Show tonight.

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DOWNTOON ABBEY: Keith Lemon pokes fun at Martine McCutcheon [ITV]

The ex Eastender, 38, lands the part of a maid in his version of "Downtoon Abbey".

And Peter, 41, fronts a new reality show called DIY Emergency where he makes over the home of a couple whose toddler son who suffers from a rare condition that makes him look like an old man.

“I don’t want anyone to be upset”

Keith Lemon

Lemon has previously confessed his worries that his new comedy might upset his celebrity pals.

In the sketch show, he does impressions of big stars like Kim Kardashian, One Direction, Mark Wright and Ant and Dec.

Keith said: “I don’t want anyone to be upset. I don’t do any thing with any malice.

“I don’t really have a nasty pop at anybody, it’s just silly.

"I think ITV were worried and said to me: ‘You’re not going to p*** off all of our talent are you?’ but I said: ‘I’m only doing people I’m a fan of.’”

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However, One Direction were in stitches over his impression of Harry Styles.

Keith said: “Harry obviously likes old ladies so I had to snog a few.

“I showed the other One Direction lads and they all laughed.”

The show is tonight 10pm on ITV 2.

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Emmerdale: Lachlan's unhealthy obsession with Alicia takes a sinister turn

BESOTTED teenager Lachlan White’s obsession with married Alicia Metcalfe takes a shocking turn tonight in an explosive hour long episode of the soap.

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OBSESSED: Lachlan White's obsession with Alicia Metcalfe takes a sinister turn tonight [ITV]

BESOTTED teenager Lachlan White’s obsession with married Alicia Metcalfe takes a shocking turn tonight in an explosive hour long episode of the soap.

Emmerdale bosses have managed to keep what happens between the pair when they end up alone under wraps for weeks.

“This is the biggest storyline I’ve had to date on Emmerdale”

Natalie Anderson

Fans will know that Lachlan (Thomas Atkinson, 14) has developed an unhealthy infatuation with the sexy villager (Natalie Anderson, 33) even giving her expensive gifts.

Even though her husband David (Matthew Wolfenden, 34) is concerned, she has failed to properly address the issue but tonight things takes a sinister turn.

A tipsy Alicia returns home from The Woolpack following pre birthday drinks.

She is alone as David has to dash to the hospital with his baby Amba whom he had with ex-fiancée Priya.

Alicia finds Lachlan waiting for her but producers won’t say what happens and want viewers to see the shocker when it airs.

Actress Natalie teased: “This is the biggest storyline I’ve had to date on Emmerdale. It will change Alicia forever.

“Lachlan will test her and David’s love for each other and every aspect of their life. I didn’t see this coming.”

Catch the action tonight on ITV in an hour long special at 6.45pm.

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