By JOE KNOWSLEY

Last updated at 11:26 13 August 2006

She is famous as the acerbic blonde with pink, feather-trimmed plastic gloves who exposes the filth in Britain's dirtiest homes.

But Kim Woodburn, the star of the hit Channel 4 series How Clean Is Your House?, has for years hidden a tragic and deeply personal secret of her own.

As a young woman in her 20s she gave birth, alone in her tiny Liverpool flat, to a premature still-born boy.

But the traumatised young woman was too embarrassed to call a doctor. Instead, she slept that night with the dead baby next to her bed in a bowl.

The following night she went to a nearby park where, with tears streaming down her face, she used a spoon to scrape a shallow grave in the earth into which she placed the 'perfect baby', wrapped in a tea towel.

Kim, 23 at the time, says that February night in 1965 "stands out as the worst of my life".

That the sparky and outspoken TV celebrity has suffered such pain in her personal life will no doubt shock and surprise her army of fans. She has never previously shown any chink in her seemingly armour-plated character.

But Kim, now happily married to her second husband, believes the tragic experience is part of what shaped her life and made her the person she is today. She reveals the story in her new autobiography, serialised exclusively in The Mail on Sunday, telling how she was dumped by her boyfriend of two years when she told him she was pregnant.

She goes on to describe how she gave birth prematurely at nearly six months, saying: "My nightmare started with a meal in a local restaurant with my friends. Afterwards they dropped me back at my home in Liverpool.

"As I climbed the stairs to my flat I suddenly became aware that something was wrong. The trouble was that I was pretty ignorant about my condition. I was embarrassed about being pregnant. Although it was the Swinging Sixties, to be an unmarried mother still carried a terrible stigma.

"I started to get ready for bed and a sharp pain shot through me. The pain was excruciating, so I grabbed a handful of tissues and stuffed them into my mouth to stop myself screaming."

Kim tells how she delivered the dead baby herself, wrapped the tiny body in a tea towel and placed it in a bowl. She slept beside it all night, before leaving, traumatised and desperate for normality, to go to work the next morning. When she returned home she took the baby to the nearby park and buried him.

"I told him I was so sorry for what had happened and how great we would have been together. I told him he'd have been a fine boy but that it just wasn't to be. I had never felt more wretched in my whole life.

"I still talk to my son now," she says. "The deep sadness doesn't go away."

After her baby's death she moved house. She also changed her name. She had been christened Pat but 'never cared for it'.

"I ditched Pat because I wanted to be a different person,' she says. "I liked the actress Kim Novak and so I became Kim. With a new name I felt I was leaving behind my sad, lonely childhood and the wretched night I lost my baby."

In the years that followed, Kim lived a fairly ordinary life and before she was chosen to star with Aggie MacKenzie in How Clean Is Your House? she had been earning £1,000 a month as a housekeeper.

Now the pair are not only a stunning success in Britain but have cracked the American television market. Kim says: "No one has the right to say they're due a bit of good luck, but I can't help feeling that someone saw fit to smile on me at last."