It was when Davina McCall stood on a hill top, getting a bird’s-eye view of Monrovia from the ruins of what had once been a luxury hotel, that the real tragedy of Liberia struck her. ‘I said, “What is this place?” and I was told Pan Am used to fly people over here to gamble. It had a luxurious pool, now empty. But I could imagine people sitting with cocktails on the terrace, looking at the beautiful,turquoise sea below. It’s a slum area down there now, but back then it would have been a pristine beach. It must have been incredible.’

Just the sort of place the presenter would stay in, in fact, so the reality of what is now Monrovia’s best hotel came as a shock. ‘I like my luxuries, so it’s probably good for me to go somewhere where there aren’t any,’ she says. ‘When I looked in my hotel bathroom I nearly cried. I didn’t want to walk on the floor in bare feet and I thought, “How am I going to shower? The water’s not really coming out and oh, I want to go home…” But after a day of meeting people and listening to their stories I went back to the hotel and thought, “It’s fine.”’

McCall, 41, most famous for working herself and the crowd outside the Big Brother house into a frenzy, is an intriguing woman. In person she is thoughtful and quietly spoken. It’s obvious from the way she describes her experiences in Africa, where she made films for our appeal that you can watch online, that her difficult background makes her hypersensitive to other people’s pain; though in this case, she says, she can only ‘sympathise rather than empathise. The troubles I went through, you could say, were self-inflicted’.

Abandoned at three by her French mother, Florence — a ‘fabulous, outrageous’ alcoholic who was manager of the Yves Saint Laurent boutique in Paris (and who died earlier this year) — McCall was raised by her grandparents in Surrey until she was 13, then moved in with her father, Andrew, and his wife, Gaby. She spent the school holidays in Paris, and while her flamboyant mother was thought ‘cool’ by McCall’s friends, her heavy drinking dominated their relationship.

A hedonistic streak and an inherited addictive personality combined disastrously: she left school, worked as a booking agent for Models 1, hit the London club scene, and was soon addicted to heroin and cocaine. It wasn’t until she was 24, after six years of dependence, that her survival instinct asserted itself and she began the long journey to recovery.

The charity work she does now is part of that recovery. ‘There’s a motto in the 12-step programme [the Alcoholics Anonymous recovery programme], “You can only keep what you have by giving it away,” and I get so much back from the experiences I’ve had. I hope I enrich my children’s lives with my stories of where I’ve been, and if I can do anything to help anyone else, I will.’

Travelling to Liberia was one of the most ‘intense, emotional’ trips she has ever done. ‘I met women who’d lost their babies. Some people may think you’re not as attached if you lose a baby that’s a few days old, but that’s rubbish. From the moment it’s conceived you’re attached, and if you lose a baby, whether through a stillbirth or miscarriage, or when it’s a month old, it’s the most gut-wrenching, painful experience anyone can go through. It’s amazing that these women go on to get pregnant again. You can only imagine the amount of heartache they must suffer.”

On arriving in Kingsville, she was at first confused: ‘I’ve seen extreme poverty in cities, and I looked around and thought, “Life here is okay. It’s clean, it’s out of the city, it’s not too polluted, what’s the problem?” ’ Then a woman with malaria collapsed in front of her. ‘She’d heard Save the Children were there doing some filming, and she’d walked with her two children to try to talk to us. I thought, “She’s dying, someone help her.” She was taken to the clinic, but I don’t know what happened. It was touch and go whether she would make it. How can that happen when £5 buys a life-saving mosquito net that a whole family can sleep under? That’s the great thing about giving to developing countries, a little bit of money goes such a long way.’

Visiting the school made her think of her own children: Holly, 7, Tilly, 5 and Chester, 2. ‘The teachers don’t get paid. I couldn’t believe that. There are no books, no pens, nowhere to play. You think of how many times your kids have moaned about getting dressed in their uniform in the morning and you look at these kids — they just love it. One girl, Bonetta, made a huge impression on me. At 15, she was going to school for the first time and was looking immaculate in her uniform, absolutely pristine, because she had such a sense of pride about finally going to school.’

The images of the people she met keep flickering through her mind. When she arrived home, her husband, Matthew Robertson, studied her face and tried to guess how long it would take her to get over the trip. ‘A week?’ he suggested. At the time, she nodded. ‘I couldn’t even speak,’ she says. ‘I’m still feeling emotional. I can’t quite handle normal life.’

Find out more about Davina's work for Save the Children's Kingsville appeal, and watch her video on Kingsville mums-to-be