How close have you come to death?

I was on a plane in India and I thought it was going to crash. It was an old, rickety thing. It was pre-children - I wouldn't do it now.

I had spinal meningitis when I was 13.

On a motorway three years ago. An HGV hadn’t seen me and pulled out. My father-in-law’s a truck driver and he said black cars are not very visible. I don’t drive them any more.

Swimming off the north Cornish coast eight years ago. I remember thinking, “Why did they teach you how to inflate your pyjamas in life-saving classes at school, when they could have just told you what to do in a riptide?”

I’m convinced heartache almost killed me a few years ago.

Last year, driving in California, I found myself on the wrong side of the road. I was 30 seconds away from hitting two cars coming the other way.

The birth of my daughter.

When I was about seven or eight years old, I was messing about in a brook with my brothers and a friend of mine, Paul Hewitt, and I almost drowned. Paul saved me.

My sister saved me from drowning. I shouted at her because she pulled me out of the pool and hurt my arm.

Childbirth. And the wheel of our camper van coming clean off on the M1.

I was knocked over by a taxi in Liverpool when I was seven. And I fell off the seventh storey of a car park when I was 10 and broke both legs, my collarbone and my arm.

I’ve been in six car accidents – none of them while I was driving.

In 1989, in Cuba, about to board a plane for Milan, where I was going to school for a year. The visa didn’t arrive in time, so I couldn’t board. The plane crashed and people died.

I’ve been to two postmortems in real life, and spent the last 14 years talking about death at work – so, pretty close.

Anna dared me to jump off a cliff in Menorca on holiday a couple of years ago. I did. I fell 30m through the air, hit the water at an odd angle and shattered my coccyx.

On the back of an angry Icelandic pony when I was filming a show called Spending Dave’s Money with Phil Tufnell.

Falling down a mine shaft in New Mexico while filming.

On a flight between Beijing and London with Team GB divers. There was a fire on the plane. We landed on a long-abandoned strip in Siberia. Two days later, the same flight attendants told us we had beaten the odds by surviving.

I nearly died by burst ovarian cyst in 2001. I was doing the front cover of a magazine and someone said, “Can you not pull your tummy in?” It turned out that I had been carrying two litres of blood in my stomach. I was rushed to hospital the next morning and nearly died of septicaemia. They had to give me two blood transfusions. Had it been an hour later it would have been bye bye.

Modelling in South Korea, aged 19. After a party, I flopped into bed, lit a big candle and balanced it on top of a massive box of matches. I created my own firework display when the candle burnt down and set fire to it. It made the biggest noise ever which, luckily, woke me from my slightly boozy slumber.