'Kind of ironic' Hairy Bikers star Dave Myers details health battle with alopecia

Dave Myers, 64, appeared on Comfort Eating with Grace Dent two weeks ago. The star makes up one half of the famous travelling chef duo, the Hairy Bikers, alongside fellow food enthusiast and friend Si King, 55.

MasterChef regular Grace, 48, has hosted plenty of famous guests on her podcast with The Guardian, where they discuss their favourite comfort foods before delving a bit deeper into their personal lives.

After sharing some tinned tomatoes on toast, the pair went on to have a heartfelt discussion about Dave’s tough adolescence.

The podcast presenter spoke to Dave about his experience as a young carer and about his alopecia.

Alopecia is a medical term for balding, where patchy baldness can develop anywhere on the body, including the scalp, beard area, eyebrows, eyelashes, armpits, inside your nose, or ears, according to the American Academy of Dermatology Association.

Grace remarked: “So you were always really a carer? And going into your teenage years, you’ve never really been carefree. You’ve always been caring for someone. Did that affect the kind of teenager you became?”

“Yes,” Dave replied. “I had alopecia as well, which is quite ironic seeing as how I’m known as a Hairy Biker.

“I had no hair, no eyebrows. It started when I was eight, funnily enough.

“I was really, really bald. Alopecia – it’s here, there and everywhere. So it’s not like you’re going bald, bald.

“And that was the time before it was cool to be bald and my only role model was Yul Brynner in The King and I.”

“I think the more ill somebody gets, the harder it is to look after them, the more work it takes,” Dave mused.

Dave was only eight years old when he and his father discovered that his mother had multiple sclerosis.

Grace went on to suggest that both of Dave’s parents had been “very ill” at one point.

The Hairy Bikers star then revealed that he had once come home from sixth form college to discover that his father had suffered a stroke.

Describing that period of his life as “chaos”, he went on to explain that he didn’t attend school for a week in order to look after both his parents before social services got involved.

At that point, a teenage Dave was faced with the heartbreaking decision to choose which parent he felt he could “look after better”.

In the end, knowing that his father had a better chance of recovery, he opted to keep him at home.

Dave then explained that his mother “went into hospital and never came out” after a five-year stay.

Years later, Dave teamed up with Si to start up their show The Hairy Bikers.

They first appeared on UK television as presenters of The Hairy Bikers’ Cookbook in 2004 and this show ran for four seasons on the BBC.

Watch their latest series The Hairy Bikers Go North tonight at 7pm on BBC Two.

The Guardian podcast Comfort Eating with Grace Dent airs weekly on Spotify, Apple and other streaming platforms. 

source: express.co.uk