TV presenter Davina McCall has said she experienced symptoms similar to “advanced Alzheimer’s” following brain surgery.

Speaking on Paloma Faith’s podcast Mad, Sad and Bad, the 58-year-old described suffering from memory loss while recovering from an operation to remove a benign brain tumour in 2024.

“After I’d had my brain tumour taken out, I had advanced Alzheimer’s, so I couldn’t remember anything,” the former Big Brother host told singer and Celebrity Traitors star Faith.

“When I came out of the operation, I didn’t know I’d had an operation,” she recalled. One regular member of staff would ask McCall every day if she could remember their name. “And I’d go, ‘I don’t know’.”

The Masked Singer judge had surgery in November 2024 after a colloid cyst was found in a health check-up as part of her menopause advocacy work.

In November last year she revealed she had also undergone surgery for breast cancer.

She called 2025 the “hardest year” for both her and her partner.

Speaking about the recovery from her brain surgery, she said: “Michael would come and visit [hospital] for two hours, and he’d go to the loo and come back, and I’d go, ‘Oh my God, you’re here’, and I didn’t know he’d been there.

“I couldn’t watch a movie for six months because I couldn’t remember what had happened in the movie 15 minutes before. [When reading] a book I couldn’t remember the page before.”

A year ago, for the first time since the surgery, she noted, she woke up and could remember what she had done the previous day.

According to the NHS, external, later stage symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease include “significant problems with short and long-term memory”.

Alzheimer’s is a progressive disease and so symptoms gradually worsen over years.

After brain surgery, though, problems tend to be worst early on, then stabilise and improve over weeks to months. Some people are left with milder lasting changes.

Music therapy can help people to recover from brain injuries and McCall said she believes it was ultimately singing lessons that had “healed” her.

In April 2025, McCall revealed she had been told – following MRI scans – that her tumour was “not coming back”.

A benign tumour is not cancerous, but such cysts tend to grow slowly, according to the Brainstrust charity.

Non-cancerous brain tumours are more common in people over the age of 50, and symptoms can include headaches, vision problems and drowsiness, the NHS says.

McCall’s surgery, known as a craniotomy, involved part of her skull being removed to take out the tumour.

She has spoken about the procedure and her recovery, including on her own podcast called Begin Again.