BBC star ashamed after avoiding thinking about | UK News

University Challenge host Amol Rajan overtly shared his interior battle with grief following the “shock” and unhappy passing of his late father, 76, after catching pneumonia. The BBC star admitted he’d “actively avoided thinking about him” since his tragic passing and recalled the precise second life stood still when he obtained a dreaded “withheld number” call on 17 January 2022.

It was a nurse at the hospital who had requested for Amol to “please come immediately,” additional telling him “he’s not responding”. Amol defined he’d now been left feeling “ashamed” for not tackling his grief head on and dealing with the troublesome feelings he’d purposely put to the back of his thoughts.

Sharing his ideas in an sincere article with the Radio Times, Amol confessed it was time for him “confront” his ache of three years. In his heartfelt piece for the publication, he penned: “Time is a healing balm and all that, but I’m ashamed to say that I have actively avoided thinking about him.”

He added: “Grief is both universal – we all experience it – and particular, in that every grief is different according to the bond that’s broken. Yet there comes a moment when you think, ‘Maybe I should confront this; I’m not a kid any more’.”

Amol realised it was time to face his emotions following a call from an govt producer, Anwar Mamon, who had approached him about making a movie on the Kumbh Mela, a main Hindu pilgrimage and competition, recognized as the most important peaceable gathering in the world, that happens every 12 years, and needed the BBC star to be half of it.

After talking about movie plans with his household, Amol realised he had been avoiding thinking about his father.

He wrote: “I didn’t want to think about my dear dad, thank you very much. But a conversation with my beloved mum and my kind wife, in the presence of my four young children, softened the scepticism.”

Despite his initial apprehensions, with the help of his household and a “brilliant team,” including director Brigid McFall, sound supremo Mark Roberts and Anwar, Amol did take up the chance to attend The Kumbh Mela, along with 500 million pilgrims from all over the globe.

The Kumbh Mela is well known every 12 years, however in 2025, the non secular occasion that Amol was due to attend was to be even more memorable, with the alignment of Jupiter, the Moon, the Sun and the Earth coming collectively only once every 144 years – a Maha Kumbh Mela.

Many Hindu’s imagine that by bathing in sacred Indian rivers just like the Ganges will cleanse sins and liberate souls belonging to the everlasting cycle of delivery, death and rebirth.

Although Amol wasn’t making a gift of any additional element away about whether or not or not he had taken the plunge into the non secular waters or not, he did say his father “would have been proud” of his efforts.

Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges will air on BBC One on June 25, 2025 and is avaiable to stream on BBC‘s iPlayer.