Mark Speight’s SMart co-star Kirsten O’Brien reflects on his suicide

Former kids’ TV presenter Kirsten O’Brien has reflected on having to report her co-star and friend Mark Speight’s suicide on children’s news show Newsround. 

The SMart frontwoman, 39, spoke on the The Hot Mess Mums Clu‪b podcast about her late colleague’s heartbreaking suicide in 2008 and admitted she felt pressure when she was asked to speak about him on the BBC show. 

Mark died by suicide aged 42, when he was found hanged in Paddington Station in April 2008, having become consumed by grief after the death of his fiancée Natasha Collins, who died in January of the same year after a cocaine binge. 

Of the troubling time, Kirsten said: ‘It was just horrendous, then I got asked to talk about him to the kids on Newsround, I felt quite a lot of pressure which is weird because I know it wasn’t about me, but I felt like I was in the eye of the storm.’

Mark’s personal life hit headlines in January 2008 when Natasha died in a scalding bath after the couple had partied at their St John’s Wood home and taken ‘a significant amount of’ cocaine and sleeping pills as well as drinking wine and vodka. 

His guilt and grief became so extreme that the following month, he resigned from his job on SMart, which he had held since 1994, and in April, he went missing before being found hanged by railway workers at Paddington Station.

Kirsten presented SMart, Mark’s best known show, from 1999 to 2009 and became close to her co-star leading to the request for her to speak about him on long-running kids’ news show Newsround, which is aimed at ages six to 12. 

The choice to report his death was controversial among parents at the time, with the story being explained on the show as: ‘Mark’s girlfriend died of a drug overdose earlier this year and when he went missing people were really worried about him…

‘Yesterday his body was found at a train station in London. His family said he had been extremely upset and depressed by the death of his girlfriend and he was finding life very hard. CBBC and lots of you have lost a great presenter and friend.’

Kirsten then came on to say: ‘We are all completely devastated.’

Despite claims of outrage from parents, the report received only five official complaints, while Kirsten detailed how hard she found the scenes.  

On the aftermath of his death, she said: ‘I think there will, thankfully be very few people in life who will ever have to experience the horror of seeing one of your friends in the news headlines and I just remember walking on to the train…

‘You know everyone discards the Metro everywhere, I could just see his face everywhere, all over the train. Mark and I used to go to the theatre…

‘Naturally people would come up to me and ask what happened and I would be there in tears. But as a person, he was without a doubt the funniest person I ever knew’. 

Jenny Powell, who presents the podcast opposite Kelly Pegg, said: ‘He really did light up a room. It just goes to show, especially now, at the time mental health wasn’t such a thing and people weren’t aware of how much of a crisis it was…

‘I felt for you because I knew you were working with him and I knew you were partnered up all the time, and I kept thinking like you’re a human being as well’.

With mounting pressure over social media restrictions and trolling in the wake of Caroline Flack’s suicide, Kirsten admitted she is relieved he did not see the social media age as she could not imagine how Mark would have coped. 

She went on: ‘Thinking about it now, in light of social media, I think there is small room to be thankful that there wasn’t that much social media at the time…

‘In that period after Tash had died and Mark was still around, I think that he would not of liked that social media environment at all, which has been proved of late with Caroline Flack bless her, it’s just not a nice world…

‘In some ways there’s a small mercy that he did not have to experience that social media environment’. 

Elsewhere in the podcast, Kirsten, who is married to Mark Drake, discussed life as an ‘older mum’ to her son Fox Michael, nine and her three-year-old twins. 

Speaking about her IVF journey, she recounted: ‘So we had Fox, and then nothing for a while after that. And then, we spent a small fortune on IVF, and I always say, Fox we will pay to go to University but the twins, they have had them spend now…

‘I was that last throw of the dice woman, I had Fox at 39 and I had the twins at 44. It was that thing of ‘you only have two eggs left’ and I was like fine, put them both up, because I didn’t want one man to be left behind. It was an absolute shock!…

‘They said to me in the appointment, your levels are really high it might be twins. And then I went out of the doctors in central London and was in such a daze…

‘I remember going back to the doctors and tracking the woman down, sitting her down, and explaining to her why it couldn’t possibly be twins. Then they came 6 weeks early, and we have been in lunacy for about 3 years now!’