STRUTTING down the X Factor runway, Caroline Flack was the beaming face of Saturday night TV.

But behind the stage make-up and dazzling designer frocks, she was masking a secret pain — a year-long battle with depression.

Three years on, the presenter has told of her panic attacks and becoming reliant on anti-depressants.

Caroline, who won Strictly Come Dancing in 2014 and landed the X Factor gig alongside Olly Murs the following year, cites the 2016 Baftas as her lowest point, when host Graham Norton cruelly joked about her in front of six million viewers.

But her problems dated from long before then. She says: “It all started the day after I won Strictly. I woke up and felt like somebody had covered my body in clingfilm.

“I couldn’t get up and just couldn’t pick myself up at all that next year. I felt ridiculous, being so sad when I’d just won the biggest show on telly and had such an amazing job.

“However, I felt like I was being held together by a piece of string which could snap at any time.

“People see the celebrity lifestyle and assume everything is perfect, but we’re just like everyone else. Everyone is battling something emotional behind closed doors — that’s life. Fame doesn’t make you happy.

“Anti-depressants helped me get up in the morning, and stopped me from being sad, but what they also do is stop you from being happy.

“So I was just in this numb state. I stopped laughing at jokes, and that’s just not me.

“I came off them after six months, as I realised feeling something was better than feeling nothing at all.”

Caroline, 39, had visited her doctor after having a panic attack in her dressing room moments before going live on The X Factor.

She was prescribed citalopram — a type of antidepressant used to treat depression and quash panic attacks — but she didn’t tell her family, friends or boss Simon Cowell of her troubles.

She says: “I didn’t want to be a burden. It was a really lonely place. While anti-depressants can work for some people, I became a little too reliant on them — if you forget to take one, you feel awful.

“The only way I can describe it is that it was like going around a roundabout about 300 times. They’re a whirlwind for your body.

“I remember being at the photoshoot for my book cover and having to sit down because I was so dizzy. I couldn’t tell anyone the reason, that I was coming off anti-depressants.

“I eventually went to a juice retreat in the Mediterranean to wean myself off them. It was the only way I could get them out of my body.”

Both Caroline and Olly were lambasted by viewers of The X Factor during their 2015 hosting stint.

Size 8 Caroline was “fat-shamed” one week while Olly, 34, was ridiculed after mixing up the judges’ scores and prematurely announcing a contestant’s departure.

Caroline says: “I was embarrassed about everything, what had happened, how I felt and just embarrassed about who I was.

“I felt like a bit of a joke. We were getting slammed week in, week out and we couldn’t do anything right.

“I could have walked on water one week and been told I couldn’t swim. Even if I’d gone on there, done seven pirouettes and the splits, and magically whipped out some rabbits from my hat, people would have gone, ‘But where’s Dermot?’. I was fighting a losing battle.

“Even though my time on The X Factor ended badly, I still feel very grateful to Simon Cowell. He gave me a job that I adored and it’s given me so many chances.

“But as much as I would put on a happy face, backstage I’d be in tears with my make-up artist.”

Caroline speaks frankly about her feelings over Norton’s opening joke at the 2016 Baftas, in which he said her future return as The X Factor’s host was less likely than the executed Anne Boleyn returning to BBC2 historical drama Wolf Hall.

She added: “I was sitting there in my dress, I didn’t have a plus one, and Graham’s first joke was basically, ‘There’s more chance of Anne Boleyn returning to Wolf Hall’.

I’m sure it was quite funny but not so much when you’re the person living that life, sat in the Baftas and the cameras are on you.

“I remember the person next to me touching my arm in sympathy and just trying not to cry. I went home pretty much straight after. It was really horrible and my lowest point.”

Despite being best mates when they landed the lucrative X Factor job, her friendship with Olly suffered after the show.

But while he has also admitted battling depression after the series, in the past year they have rekindled their friendship.

Caroline says: “Olly and I didn’t have a falling out but our confidence was really knocked, and it took its toll on us.

“Although we never really stopped talking, we drifted apart while we processed what had happened. It was like a break-up — a thing neither of us wanted to talk about. But recently we’ve started speaking again and we want to get back to how we were pre-X Factor.”

Today Caroline is happy and healthy, and 2019 promises to be her busiest year to date.

Meanwhile, she will be back on our TV screens in Strictly Come Dancing’s Christmas special, she recently filmed the Love Island Christmas show and she is about to embark on her biggest role yet — making her West End debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago.

Even sweeter, two years after Graham Norton’s joke, in May this year Caroline was back at the Baftas — this time collecting the award for Best Reality Series for Love Island.

With her life back on an even keel, she is keen to quash the stigma surrounding mental health problems.

She adds: “You would tell people if you have taken Nurofen or Lemsip, but not anti-depressants.

“There’s a stigma around it. I used to go to the chemist to collect my prescription on a Sunday, thinking the pharmacist had probably seen me on telly the night before.

“I was mortified, which I now know is ridiculous and was all in my head.”

While Caroline’s professional life has never been better, she has had a chequered personal one lately.

She has had an on/off romance with Apprentice contestant Andrew Brady, 28, to whom she got engaged three months after meeting in January, but split soon after.

As well as a heated bust-up on holiday in Portugal in the autumn, last month they had a row which led to Andrew prank-calling an ambulance.

Caroline says: “We have a very passionate, raw love but at the minute we just need to look after ourselves. We need to be happy in ourselves before we can be together, I think — and that’s what we’re doing. I think we want the best for each other.”

Conversation closed. And anyway, these days Caroline is fine as she is, irrespective of the state of her love life.

As she explains: “I have a great life, a lovely house, and I know I am very lucky. I don’t want anyone to ever think I am a victim, because I’m not.”