Yorkshire Vet star Matt Jackson-Smith has recalled ‘shaking’ after a gun was shoved into his face by two robbers.
The criminals had barged into Matt’s former place of work, video rental shop Blockbuster, and held him at gunpoint as they tried to steal cash from the tills.
The Channel 5 presenter, who was 18 at the time, said ‘everything seemed to slow down’ as he endured the terrifying and ‘surreal’ ordeal.
After a ‘much bigger’ customer entered the shop the robbers fled and while Matt, now 35, was left physically unharmed he was ‘really shaken up.’
Matt told The Mirror: ‘It was quite surreal. Two men burst through the door one in a Green Goblin mask, another in a balaclava and they put a gun in my face.
‘Everything seemed to slow down. The guy with the gun shoved my female co-workers into the backroom and locked them in. The other one was with me, trying to open the tills.
The robbers ran out of the Blockbuster when they became intimidated after a larger customer entered.
Matt continued: ‘That really shook me up. I remember shaking afterwards when the police came.
‘It wasn’t until I left that I remembered there was a panic button I could have pressed that Blockbuster had told me about when I joined.’
Docuseries The Yorkshire Vet began airing on Channel 5 in 2015 and follows veterinarians as they attend to animals in need at their practices based in North Yorkshire.
This year, The Yorkshire Vet was nominated in the factual entertainment category but lost to Jeremy Clarkson’s Amazon Prime Video series, Clarkson’s Farm.
Before joining the show in 2020, Matt trained as a vet at the University of Glasgow, while his debut book My Life as a Yorkshire Vet will be published later this month.
Matt also features in the spin-off special The Yorkshire Vet: At Home With The Greens and Channel 5’s Springtime and Winter on the Farm.
He recently became a dad to baby daughter Anastasia and is married to wife Katherine.
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