Rachel Riley
Rachel Riley was born in Rochford, England, United Kingdom on January 11th, 1986 and is the TV Show Host. At the age of 38, Rachel Riley biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, and networth are available.
At 38 years old, Rachel Riley has this physical status:
Rachel Annabelle Riley (born 11 January 1986) is a British television presenter and mathematician.
Countdown and its comedy spin-off 8 out of ten Cats Does Countdown is co-produced by Sophie Coddington.
A math major, her television debut came as a young 22-year-old girl joined Countdown.
She has since co-presented The Gadget Show on Channel 5 (2013–14) and It's Not Rocket Science (2016), a passion for popularizing mathematics and the sciences.
In 2013, she became a contestant on the BBC celebrity dance competition Strictly Come Dancing.
Personal life
Riley married Jamie Gilbert, whom she had known while studying at the University of Oxford in August 2012. In November 2013, it was announced that they were splitting. The split has been cited as an example of the Strictly curse. Soon after the show concluded in December 2013, she began dating Pasha Kovalev, a Strictly dance partner. Riley revealed in May 2019 that she was pregnant with the couple's first child. Riley and Kovalev married in Las Vegas on June 28, 2019. Riley gave birth to a baby girl on December 15, 2019. Riley revealed in April 2021 that she was pregnant with the couple's second child. Riley gave birth to their second daughter on November 5th, 2021.
Riley, like her father, who was born in Salford, was a huge fan of Manchester United; in October 2010, Riley presented a video on the club's television network MUTV that featured a tour of the Trafford Training Centre in Carrington. She has also appeared on the show An Audience with... Giggs, a footballer who appeared on Countdown in June 2013, gifted her with a signed team shirt, marking his 1,000th game for the club the same year. Celebrity Mastermind, a British quiz show, a contestant on the BBC quiz show Celebrity Mastermind, was broadcast on January 4, 2012, and she finished in joint second place in a limited (13-year) history of the club; she later finished in joint second place.
She was the co-winner of the Rear of the Year award in 2017 alongside Idris Elba.
Riley's mother is Jewish. "My family came over in the pogroms" from Tsarist Russia, she said. She is an atheist.
Early life and early career
Riley was born in Rochford, Essex. She was raised in the Thorpe Bay area of Southend-on-Sea and was educated at the independent Thorpe Hall School, and Southend High School for Girls, a grammar school, where she obtained four As at A-Level. She then completed a master's degree in mathematics at the University of Oxford.
During a university holiday Riley considered a career in the financial sector and completed an internship at Deutsche Bank in the City of London. The experience put her off: she found the extreme behaviour of city traders wearing and she disliked the early-morning train commute.
Television career
On Countdown, Riley replaced the long-serving Carol Vorderman. Like Vorderman, Riley's role is to handle the placement of tiles on the board for the letters and numbers rounds and to find an exact solution in the numbers rounds if the contestants are unable to do so. Riley's appointment to Countdown was announced at the same time as the announcement of a new main host, Jeff Stelling, replacing Des O'Connor; the duo of Stelling and Riley was in place for the new series beginning in January 2009. Although she had no ambition to be a television presenter, she was encouraged to apply by her mother, and decided to do so because she was interested in the numbers part of the game. Having beaten 1,000 applicants for the role, she commented, "There's only one cool maths job around and I was lucky enough to get it so I'm absolutely thrilled".
Since it was first broadcast on 2 January 2012, Riley has also performed her Countdown role on the comedy crossover spin-off version, 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown, alongside comedian Jimmy Carr as host. While Countdown is seen as a straight light entertainment show, in explaining the difference between the two, Riley sees Countdown as the role she is happy for her grandmother to see, while Cats Does Countdown is the more risqué, cheeky role which she shows to her friends.
From September 2013, Riley appeared in the eleventh series of the BBC One ballroom dancing programme Strictly Come Dancing with professional dancing partner Pasha Kovalev. She was eliminated in week 6 of the show, on 3 November, after losing out in the dance-off against Abbey Clancy and Aljaž Škorjanec, who went on to win the series.
According to Riley she lacked a natural talent for performing, so instead sought to frame each dance as that of a character. For the first five weeks, Riley suffered from stage fright, commenting that "As soon as the music would start, I would have a fuzzy brain and it was like an out-of-body experience"; after seeing a cognitive behavioural therapist she was able to control her breathing, and so was only able to truly enjoy the show for what proved to be her final appearance.
From 2013 to 2014, Riley co-presented on the Channel 5 programme The Gadget Show with Jason Bradbury. She presented three series of the show and was later replaced by Amy Williams. In 2016, Riley was part of the three-person presenting team for ITV's six-part series, It's Not Rocket Science, billed by the network as an entertainment series celebrating science. Her co-presenters, Ben Miller and Romesh Ranganathan, similarly had a background in science and maths.
In August 2016, it was announced that Riley had joined Sky Sports to present Friday Night Football alongside her former Countdown co-presenter Jeff Stelling, and Fantasy Football Club with Max Rushden and Paul Merson. She left Friday Night Football in 2017.