Good Morning Britain presenter Kate Garraway reveals her attempts at spicing up her marriage in excl

AS one of Britain’s best-loved TV presenters, Kate Garraway is not afraid of a challenge.

She has interviewed some of the world’s biggest names and deals with the pressures of live TV on Good Morning Britain.

She juggles that with being a mum to Darcey, ten, and seven-year-old William, and wife to ex-political adviser Derek Draper.

But on the cusp of turning 50, she faces another adventure – middle age.

In a new book, she discusses that journey – including her thoughts on facelifts and the fear of letting her love life die.

Here, exclusively in the Sun, she talks sex, surgery and learning to love the rest of your life.

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These days it feels like sex is everywhere — whether we are having it or not.

When I was younger, I would have assumed that by the time I got to nearly 50 I wouldn’t be worrying about it any more.

But middle age brings a whole new slew of concerns.

For example, when we start noticing wrinkles and other signs of ageing, do we only care about the way we look for ourselves?

It was strange looking in the mirror

Or are we starting to worry about whether ageing makes us less sexually attractive to our partners and others?

Maybe we worry how being seen as unsexy will affect us, especially as society seems obsessed with it.

Then, if you’re a woman, there’s the menopause, which can make you feel very differently about your sexuality.

I’m not there yet but I can’t pretend it’s not looming.

Susanna is always with me through the tough times

When I turned 49 I decided to face down all my fears about ageing and have learnt mid-life is a time of explosive change.

A time when we need to take charge and excel at the things we never knew we could be any good at, accept what we can’t change, so we make sure we don’t sleepwalk to 70 full of bitterness and regret, wishing we had done things differently.

But what to do about sex?

I got the idea of how to tackle this middle-age dilemma from my French friend, Sylvie, who was absolutely glowing when I bumped into her.

I had to ask her how she’d done it — she had a spring in her step, a radiant smile and looked ten years younger. Her answer was that she and her husband had been engaged in the “14-day sex challenge”.

According to Sylvie, everyone in Paris is doing it.

The rules are simple — you must have sex once a day for two weeks, no matter how inconvenient or unromantic the situation.

It can be over in seconds or last an hour, it can be in the bedroom or the kitchen...or anywhere else.

The idea is to put sex back as the focus of your relationship.

I was intrigued. When you’ve been with someone for a very long time, even though you still love them and fancy them, you may not be making space for the act of love.

Some days my husband Derek and I barely have time for a conversation about anything apart from the business of life — who’s picking up who and who’s cooking dinner.

He has always been very romantic, but over the course of a fortnight you don’t always find the time.

So I was ready to give Sylvie’s challenge a try.

When I told Derek he was nonplussed. “You mean, sex every two weeks?” he said nervously.

But when he got the idea, he was all for it.

Derek is a very practical person — so he sat down and made a spreadsheet. Oh, the romance.

We did something similar when I was on Strictly and had to squeeze in rehearsals, a full-time job and toddler, but this was different. An adventure just for us.

Once the schedule was established, it was time to get down to business.

Day one went well. It was rather fun, actually.

Day two was not so good, when a nightmare about Harry Potter’s fight with Voldemort brought our seven-year-old down into our bed.'

On day three we had a whole blissful hour to ourselves.

On day four Derek suddenly had an extra meeting scheduled so we were seriously squeezed for time.

On day five I discovered I like tickling. On day six I discovered that he didn’t.

On day seven I bought a new set of underwear, thinking it would come as a nice surprise.

But it wasn’t as easy to get off as get on and the bra clasp got caught in my hair.

It turned into a farce — but we laughed.

I found I was really enjoying myself. It was an adventure.

Even planning it and trying to make it work seemed to make us giggle.

Then disaster struck on day eight.

I’d like to say it was down to my spectacular acrobatics, but unfortunately not.

Derek had told me to take a long bubble bath, with lots of candles, while he took the kids to the park — lovemaking scheduled for later.

But when he came home his face was ashen. He’d slipped on wet leaves and needed to go to A&E.

Four hours later he emerged with four broken bones, a full leg of plaster, a wheelchair and instructions “not to put any pressure on the foot at all, possibly for as long as three months”.

Never mind swinging from the chandelier, just standing under a chandelier would be impossible.

Our 14-day challenge had stalled. But it wasn’t cancelled.

The time we’d blocked out for sex was there, so we used it.

Instead of wild lovemaking, I would sit and chat with Derek instead, and look after him, which was lovely in itself.

We just had a giggle about it all and decided to book a trip to Rome for my birthday — and do it properly then.

So maybe the challenge didn’t work out exactly as we expected but it was a valuable lesson.

We laughed a lot, which was a good reminder that sex isn’t just another chore to tick off.

But it also reminded me that you can’t assume things, even sex, will just happen without time and effort.

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It can be easy to let all sorts of things in your life slide, including your relationship.

A step as small as reserving 20 minutes together every day can stop that.

When it comes to letting things slide, I had a wake-up call last August.

We were moving house and I’d been packing up boxes and lugging them up and down stairs all week.

I started to get shooting pains in my chest, the sort you can’t ignore, so called my GP.

I was expecting them to tell me it was nothing — but instead they said I should go straight to A&E.

It turned out I had just torn the cartilage around my ribs, so nothing major, but that, combined with turning 49, suddenly made me feel very frightened about what was coming down the line.

I started to notice things about my appearance that I didn’t like — the crepey skin on the backs of my hands, deep furrows between my brows, my awful jowls.

I found myself staring in the mirror and pulling back my skin as if I’d had a facelift — wondering if
I’d look much better, more like the old me.

I became a bit obsessed with it but there were people, including my husband, who convinced me not to throw myself under the surgeon’s knife.

I started transforming myself in other ways — ditching sugar from my diet, taking up the gym and experimenting with less drastic cosmetic procedures like a soft peel on my face.

Crucially, I also tackled practical concerns like money and health in old age.

Plus spiritual and emotional ones — like facing up to the loss of loved ones as we get older, and our own mortality.

And it’s had a big effect.

Of course, feeling good about the way I look still matters to me.

I’m not ruling out surgery completely — never say never — but the changes I have made have given me a lot more energy and made me calmer about ageing.

I turn 50 in May. Ageing can be frightening, there’s no doubt.

But I’m ready for the challenge — after taking on the 14-day sex challenge, how hard can it be?

Asking Dame Helen Mirren in 2015 about a camping trip, Kate could not see her “getting down” in a tent. Helen replied: “That sounds rather rude.”

• The Joy of Big Knickers, by Kate Garraway (Blink Publishing), is out on Thursday.

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