My Favourite Holiday: Kim Woodburn was fascinated by Morocco

Kim was fascinated by Morocco’s architecture - but she enjoyed bartering.

How Clean Is Your House? made Kim and Aggie MacKenzie unlikely stars.

Kim, 74, was runner-up to Gino D’Acampo on I’m A Celebrity and also worked on TV in America.

Now she and husband Peter, who live in Cheshire, are being helped to find a home abroad in the new series of A Place In The Sun, C4, Sat and Sun afternoons.

I was born during the Second World War and we just didn’t go on holiday.

We were a very poor family who lived in a two-up, two-down in Portsmouth.

The closest we got was sandwiches and a flask on a local beach.

So the first real holiday I had was when I was 23 and six of us booked a holiday to see Barcelona.

It was 1965 and package holidays were taking off, making trips abroad affordable for more people.

We stayed at Sitges and explored the city from there. Having never been on holiday, never mind abroad, it was as big an eye-opener as you’d imagine.

Not as much as Morocco, where I went in 1982. It’s still the most fascinating place I’ve ever been.

Kim Woodburn (Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)

Exploring a kasbah felt like stepping back to biblical times. In fact, at one stage I saw a man standing in the doorway of a courtyard in white robes and felt like I could have been looking at Jesus.

The bartering was something else. We were given mint tea – which my husband loved and I absolutely hated – and sat and haggled for tables that were piled into our taxi to take back to the hotel.

I wasn’t so impressed with some of the hygiene, though. We could see the man who brought our bread cycling along with the loaves open to the flies.

If I was younger I’d emigrate to Canada tomorrow.

I spent some time over there in 2007 and 2008 when I was doing a TV show and fell in love with the place.

Toronto was such a brilliant place. It seemed so law-abiding and nice and I was so taken by the underground shopping centres.

The one lesson I learned quickly was not to call Canadians Americans.

Having lived for many years in America with their “have a nice day, give us the money” attitude, I can quite see why the lovely Canadian people wouldn’t like that.

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