Antony Worrall Thompson is to make a reality TV show for the BBC about his efforts to overcome his shame at being outed as a supermarket thief.


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“If by the cameras following me round for the next two or three months I can help others and get some answers for myself, then great,” he told Adrian Chiles on ITV1’s That Sunday Night Show.

“I will learn from this and I will come through it as a better person, but it has been an incredibly painful way to do it.”

Worrall Thompson has blamed his recent shoplifting spree on suffering abuse as a child.

The Ready Steady Cook star – who was caught stealing from a Tesco store in Henley-on-Thames, on five separate occasions over the festive period – is seeing a psychoanalyst in the hope of discovering the root of his problems, and claims being “locked in coal holes” as a boy could be to blame for the bizarre incident.

He said: “I am seeing a psychoanalyst. I want them to come up with a reason, but I hate to blame.

“The counsellor says, he thinks I’m like a guy with a gun that’s fully loaded and I’m always like that. And he said, ‘You’ve got to let that drop. People aren’t trying to attack you, they’re not trying to change you.’

“But that is the way I have been brought up where I’ve have had to fight for everything.”

“I have had one counselling session and the emotion he has got out of me in an hour and a half is quite extraordinary. I will keep up with it for as long as it takes.

“I think my psychoanalyst will say it was because I was sent to boarding school aged three, abused four times, locked in coal holes, abused by my mother’s new partner and beaten so badly that it drew blood.”