Richard Bacon ‘set to return to TV screens two years after battle with pneumonia left him in a COMA’

Richard Bacon is reportedly set for a return to TV screens with a new BBC game show later this year.

A source has claimed that the presenter, 44, will front a new ‘half-reality, half-game show’, provisionally titled This Is My House,

Richard’s reported new venture comes two years after he was placed in a medically-induced coma for 11 days, after being rushed to hospital with pneumonia. 

An insider told The Sun: ‘BBC bosses want Richard at the helm of it. They think he has the right balance of charm and humour to front such a weird format. 

‘It’s been described as The Circle meets Through the Keyhole meets Would I Lie to You?’

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Richard Bacon for comment. 

On This Is My House, four contestants will reportedly live in the same house, but only one of them is the real homeowner.

The other three contestants will all dress the same and use the same name to try and convince a panel of celebrities that the house in fact belongs to them. 

They are then interrogated in a studio before the celebrities pick who they believe to be the true homeowner and cash prizes are on the line. 

Richard, who presented Blue Peter for 18 months until he was fired in 1999 after taking cocaine, returned to TV last year by covering for Piers Morgan on Good Morning Britain. 

He spent 11 nights in a medically-induced coma while battling the potentially fatal disease pneumonia in 2018, revealing that his body went blue at one stage and doctors expected him to die.

The presenter said that coming out of the coma was the worst day of his life because it took 14 hours and he kept hallucinating.    

While presenting GMB last year, Bacon revealed how doctors gave him four minutes to inform family members and get his affairs in order before they would place him in a medically-induced coma.

Susanna Reid joked about how most would use the time to ‘call their mum’, while her co-host used it to cancel appointments with Fortnum & Mason and Soho House. 

Dr Jennings told Bacon, 43: ‘The only way we’d thought you’d survive would be if we’d do the breathing for you through a ventilator. If not you would have died.

‘The effort you were making to breathe was making a big strain on the rest of your body as well. The ventilator helps to do that for you.’

Explaining the hours before he went to hospital he said: ‘It was bad luck; I breathed something in.

‘The working theory, they never really worked out what it was exactly, is that I got on the plane at the wrong time and the pressurised cabin caused this infection in both of my lungs to explode everywhere.’

‘When I got off the plane I couldn’t breathe properly. I did something really stupid which is, I believed that because I go to the gym a lot I’d kind of be fine.

‘Obviously working on your biceps has no impact on what’s going on in your lungs. So, I left it 18 hours. When I got to A&E that’s when it all kicked off.’

‘I was very, very close to death,’ he said adding that doctors ‘went from telling me I needed to be in an induced coma to being in a coma in 4 minutes’.

‘They said to me afterwards, ”it wasn’t that you might die, we expected you to die”. I was the illest person in Lewisham hospital.’