By Meghna Amin

Copyright mirror

This Morning host Dermot O’Leary leapt to the defence of his co-presenter Alison Hammond following her speech at the National Television Awards. The television duo appeared alongside Cat Deeley and Ben Shephard at this week’s ceremony, where they claimed the Daytime prize for the first time since 2022, triumphing over Loose Women , James Martin’s Saturday Morning and Scam Interceptors. Kicking off Friday’s This Morning by marking their victory, Dermot declared: “We don’t want to wang on about it but we won the NTA which we are over the moon about.” “What you didn’t know were the speeches,” he continued to viewers, turning to Alison and describing her speech as “incredible”. As she chuckled, he added: “When we were sat down before we started, yes we can come back to me, thanks, me and Alison were talking and we said, ‘What do we do if we win?’ because you don’t know if you’re going to win,” reports Wales Online . “And we both decided as a team that if we win, even though we’ve been here longer, the right thing for us to do is for Ben and Cat to do the speech. We both agreed that! “You can imagine my surprise therefore when we get to the stage, and as we were walking up, I’m like, ‘Well if we get the opportunity I’ll say something nice about the team who have had a really tough couple of years and it’ll be nice to give them some credit’.” “And in your defence, nobody said anything!” he told Alison, as she insisted “Nobody went to the mic so I thought I had to say something!” Dermot continued: “And then… you spoke! I kept thinking to myself, it’s ok, I’ll say something in a minute, but no she was still talking, still talking.” “And then having done that show, we were up there for so long,” he said, indicating that he knew the This Morning team had to get off the stage by that point. “I was going, ‘Go on, say something!'” Alison exclaimed. During the speech as they accepted the award, Alison claimed “Natural order has been restored.” She said: “Can we just say a massive thank you to each and every person who voted for This Morning. We are so overwhelmed. “This award means so much. We’ve been humbled the last two years, we haven’t won this award. We don’t take it lightly that we won this award, we’re so grateful.” Cat also said: “We are so lucky to get to do this show, we all love it. Every single person who comes on, we love this show and it’s like having a family.” This comes after Dermot referred to the scandals that had engulfed the show in recent years in his acceptance speech, as reported by publications in the winners’ room. Before Cat and Ben took over, Phillip Schofield had stepped down from his ITV projects in full after his “unwise but not illegal” past affair with a younger employee came to light, while Holly Willoughby quit over personal reasons. Dermot said: “Feels longer than two years since we accepted this award. “There is a team who have worked on the show since I started who have had to endure an awful lot of s**t. “Two and a half hours of live tele every day is quite simple but to do it under the spotlight of being on the front page of the news every day, we aren’t supposed to be on the front page of the news. “This show holds a mirror up to Britain and provides entertainment so to reclaim this award is something we would never take lightly, it means an awful lots, especially to those people who have been through the mill.” This Morning airs weekdays from 10am on ITV1 and ITVX.