Esther Rantzen interview
copyright Victoria Mary Clarke, 2003

Esther Rantzen's hotel room is a room so white it dazzles, as white and dazzling as Esther's famous smile. White carpet, white walls, white bed, white sofas. The only two splashes of colour are provided by a Bird of Paradise on the dressing table and by the more exotic bird that is Esther herself. Being the consummate television professional that she is, Esther is effortlessly glamorous, but not overtly anything. Not overtly dollied up, especially. Unlike most women of her age who have the time and the money to be glamorous, Esther has got it exactly right. Her make up is subtle enough to have the effect of making her look tanned and healthy, with a natural glow, instead of something orange and artificial. The hair is done, but carefully done so that the highlights or low-lights or whatever are not stripey and stupid, but rather are successfully surreptitious. She is not beautiful, never was, but she looks fabulous. A burgundy scarf lights up warm hazel coloured eyes and black fishnet tights add a coquettish air to a formal black suit.

'Do you like them?" she asks me, grinning. 'They're my favourite kind and they don't snag."

Desmond Wilcox, Esther's late husband, first noticed her because she had a hole in her fishnets. What Esther noticed about Desmond was his talent for cutting film. A meeting of minds, she says. Desmond died suddenly three years ago, it would have been his birthday this week. She fights back whatever it is that she's feeling, when I mention this and I feel her pain as she does so.

'Of course I miss him," she says. "It's quite tricky. But we were very lucky to have each other." They had thirty years together, having met when as a young woman, she went to work for him as an assistant.

"Fairly quickly, we got together. When the job was over, I was going to work for someone else and he said 'You can leave on condition you come out to dinner with me." Which I did, and it was a very nice dinner. We were a great fit. He liked my kind of woman and I liked this generous, almost foolishly courageous man who was fascinated by humanity."

What she doesn't mention is that he was married. A fact that was revealed in her autobiography, a few years ago. I don't mention it either. The fact is they stayed together, and they were happy together. But we are not here to talk about that, we are here to talk about television, because Esther has just written a novel called 'A Secret Life",it's her first and it is set in the bitchy but glamorous world of television and stars a much loved and much hated and now dead presenter of daytime talk shows and her loyal friend who sets out to uncover the truth about her death. No-one is better qualified to write about this world than Esther because she has worked as a presenter of some of the most watched television shows in British history, including 'That's Life"a show which ran for twenty one years and regularly attracted audiences of eighteen million viewers. About which Esther is sceptical.
"Television is lovely and great fun, but it's what people do when they've got nothing better to do! You sometimes feel you could entertain more people by trying to eat a maggot, than with all your carefully honed documentaries. It's not the same as writing a book."

Writing books is all very well, I argue, but surely television is a more powerful medium? After all, how many writers sell eighteen million books? She hesitates, for a moment and presents me with her televisual teeth, in a smile. Her voice, when she speaks, is carefully and considerately modulated, a voice that likes the sound of itself and takes it's time, luxuriating in long drawn out vowels and rounded r's.
"When I worked on 'That's Life", millions of people watched and you could change people's minds about things. You could launch something like "Childline" on television. So it can be a major source of important revelations."

If Esther Rantzen was never to have done anything else, the concept of Childline would ensure her place in history, for having done something so enormously, incalculably useful. For having probably saved the lives of thousands of children who were being abused and who had no-one to turn to. The idea was born after an episode of "That's Life" when they talked about child abuse and found their phone lines jammed with children, looking for help.

"We suddenly realised that this was a population of children that no-one else knew existed. And that this could be a way of reaching children that had nowhere else to turn. The experts said that it would be a service that children would use, but that it would be impossible to set up. But we did it and four thousand children try to ring Childline every day. We can only answer half the calls."

Having any kind of experience of child abuse, even reporting it changes your life, she says.

"It gives you a terrible glimpse of the evil that people can do and you never feel quite the same way about humanity again. Most of us have happy childhoods and never see this kind of thing. You do become more afraid for your own children, too. I used to have a code, if they were away from me and I called them, if they were uncomfortable they would say "my nose is a bit itchy" and I would come and get them straight away."

Much of the material that Esther presented was more frivolous, however. Dogs who could say 'sausages" and that type of thing. The recent series of 'I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here" she found mesmerising.

"I was completely fascinated with whether John Fashanu would get through the eels or Wayne Sleep would get past the rats. But the rational mind has to recognise that no-one is going to get hurt on a programme like that!"

'Friends" she says is a classic. "Sex and the City" she finds embarrassing. She never lived like that. She wouldn't know where they get the energy, those girls. I suggest that she must have a lot of energy, to do the work she does.

"Oh yes, but I never deployed my energy like that, all that sex! I find it embarrassing to watch it with my children, they send me out of the room for the steamy bits."
In Esther's novel, the television world is enormously superficial and the daytime television jungle presents snakes and rats far more vicious than anything in the tropical kind . In my experience, television people have always seemed quite well meaning. Am I just naïve?

"Remember that I worked behind the scenes, in the office and I saw the rivalries and I heard the way people talk about each other. The thing about television is that the gate is so narrow. Very heavily guarded. And if you manage to get past it and onto the screen, there are many people sitting around the edge, who say why did you get there and I didn't? I could do it better. And nothing please man better than to watch best friend fall off roof! But I fell in love with Desmond even though we worked together in television, that's a real relationship. You can have strong, loyal relationships within that world."

It was difficult, though, to raise her children, even with the salary that she was earning.

"I was fortunate enough to be able to afford two nannies! And the kids were brought in to see me on Sundays, when I was working on Sundays and we had lunch together. But television does eat away your life."

So why do it?

"It's such fun! You are communicating with millions of people and if you fall on your face, they will watch you fall on your face. If you make a joke they like, they'll talk about it the next day in the street."

Most of us, I say, can barely survive looking at ourselves in the mirror and meeting the few people that we do meet, without feeling awful. To have to be on television must magnify your insecurities by millions?

"There are a lot of people to help. I rely on a designer. But the errors I made in the beginning are there on video for all to see. When I started, I decided that the best thing was to wear the same clothes every day. So I wore a pinafore dress, with a different shirt under it every time. After four weeks there was a call to the BBC complaints department saying please will Esther Rantzen wear something else!"
Being a telly addict myself, I am aware that most of the women on our screens are skinny and blonde, but the guys get away with being fat, bald, and ugly.

Doesn't this depress her?

"I'm hopeful. Cilla Black, for instance, is not beautiful, even though she's very attractive. What she has is a wonderful personality and a sharp brain and that's why you watch her. Same with Victoria Wood. Great broadcasters have a quality of mind that you enjoy and I think that's true of men as well as women. The trouble is that when you are hiring someone, the instinct is to go for beauty, but these people can be quite dull. And interchangeable. We always picked people who had magnetism."
When Esther started on television, she wanted to be a producer and director. She wanted to use the medium to tell stories and accidentally ended up on screen.

"But now if you ask kids what they want to be, they say famous! What's that about?"
We are all taught to believe that it's possible, I say, to have our fifteen minutes. If not on 'Big Brother" then on some other show where talent doesn't matter. This, she doesn't understand.

"People used to say to me God I would hate to be you! No privacy, it must be so intrusive. And they meant it!"

But people want to be celebrities because it's a valuable commodity, you can use it to sell books and videos, I say.

"Yes. Because I'm a journalist, I don't see myself as a celebrity. Although the fame is very pleasant. People who don't like you cross over the road but people who do like you go out of their way to come and talk to you. And it's a level of communication that you can't get any other way."

She is insightful about the cult of celebrity watching, however.

"People do not know their next door neighbours, so the stars become their neighbours. I think there is a new loneliness in a society that's not based on community and that loneliness is filled with celebrities who become almost like friends."

And that, perhaps, is the secret of Esther's enduring success. Because unlike the celebrities who go on television in order to become famous and special and in order to be treated like VIPs and attain privileges and status that mark them out as superior to the civilians, Esther is instantly recognisable and yet utterly approachable. If the soap stars are the next door neighbours that you never talk to, Esther is the Parish Priest that you never had. A font of wisdom, an approachable auntie who will listen to your story and be genuinely interested. Like most of us, though, she wants something else, she wants to see what else she can do and so she's written a novel. It's not the greatest story ever told, nor even the second greatest, it's a little light reading set against the backdrop of a world which many of us are curious about. And it's enjoyable, which is, she says, what she wanted it to be. Having seen the way she progressed as a television presenter, having watched her become the polished communicator that she is today, one wonders what she might come up with, if she put her mind to it for a while. Something quite brilliant, one suspects.

'A Secret Life" is published by Century Books, 14.99 euros