Starting her days at 4am to host breakfast radio, then going home to parent her daughter Kitty, means that Jackie O is used to living life in the extremely fast lane.
But now that she’s added being on the guessing panel of The Masked Singer to her overflowing plate, Jackie admits she was stressed trying to juggle all her responsibilities.
“We were filming until midnight pretty much every night,” Jackie, 44, tells TV WEEK of her 18-hour days.
“In the lead-up, I was really quite stressed about how I was going to physically do that – and I think in the end I was just running on adrenaline. But because we were having so much fun, I didn’t mind.
“I know I was running on not very much sleep, but somehow… it’s like a blur.”
.png?resize=380%2C285)
Jackie was stressed in the lead up to the show.
Aside from the long hours, Jackie admits she “was a bit worried about feeling like I wasn’t going to see Kitty as much as I usually do”, so she made the most of her time on set – and brought along her eight-year-old daughter, who she shares with her ex, Lee Henderson.
“She was loving it and wanted to come every day,” Jackie says. “It was the first time, I think, where she was like, ‘Wow, you have a really cool job, Mum!'”
And Kitty is clearly a good judge of a good TV show, if the one-million-plus ratings are anything to go by. Jackie, too, didn’t need any convincing to sign on to the singing show with a difference.
“I couldn’t wrap my head around it [the format of the show] at first, but I watched the American version and I was in straight away,” she says.
“I was like, ‘This is so fantastic!’ It’s a really different kind of show. We haven’t had anything like this before.”
Jackie’s daughter Kitty loved visiting the set.
This isn’t Jackie’s first foray into television, but it has been a while between TV drinks. So it begs the question, could The Masked Singer be a catalyst for more TV in the future?
“I love doing radio, but this is the first time I’ve gone back into it [TV] and really enjoyed it,” she says.
“These kind of shows don’t come up very often, and for me this is just the perfect gig. I’d love to do it again [another season of *The Masked Singer],* but I’m not really looking for anything else beyond that.”
Read Next: Which celebrities are behind the masks on The Masked Singer Australia?
