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Esther finds her feet – and has a ball
Consumer champion, child abuse campaigner, chat show host – and celebrity ballroom dancer. What next for Esther Rantzen? asks Sheena Hastings.
ESTHER Rantzen will be 65 next week, and she throws the phrase "at my advanced years" or "a woman of my great age" into the conversation quite regularly, a note of heavy irony in her voice and a twinkle in her eye.
She says she's absolutely not ready for retirement, and if anything, is widening her career net all the time – somehow skipping under the radar, as seems to happen in television where women of a certain age are concerned.
She's also writing her second novel and contributes articles to newspapers.
One of her birthday celebrations will be a ballroom dancing lesson for herself and a bunch of women friends with Anton Du Beke, the smooth charmer with iron thighs who partnered her and knocked her into shape for the last series of the Saturday night TV hit Strictly Come Dancing.
"Oh, I had a widow's hump until he sorted me out," says Rantzen, whose appearance on SCD, fluttering, floating and flirting outrageously, was a complete revelation and an utter contrast with the earnest, slightly scary Esther we'd come to know.
She demonstrates on me how champion dancer Anton rearranged her anatomy so that her diaphragm stayed up, shoulders down, tummy in and bottom under.
Hmmm...feels very uncomfortable, but Esther does have a remarkably straight-backed and queenly mode of walking and standing, as she moves back and forth around the kitchen of her Hampstead home.
She and her swain swirled about the dancefloor, she in frothy frocks and frivolous shoes, hair bedecked with feathers. Anton advised her to go redhead and she did.
They didn't win the competition, but in the public eye, a whole new Esther was born.
We were more used to seeing her sternly taking charge – of bogus sales people, dodgy tour operators and cold callers – on That's Life! the consumer magazine programme she hosted for more than 20 years. Light relief was provided by bizarre poetry, talking dogs and penis-shaped potatoes.
She says her friends noticed a huge difference in her after the months of hard graft and filming that went into the ballroom dancing tour de force. "I have always sung, and even trained at it when I was studying at Oxford", she says. "But then my voice broke. Dancing was something I could never do, and when the BBC asked to me to a ballroom dancing show I said no several times.
"In the end I said I would have a go at one session. I went along for two hours, and came away feeling fantastic. And it's lovely exercise."
Anton has apparently said that dancing is better than sex.
"The more I did it, the more people noticed a change in me. I held myself better, which I suppose improves how you look. I felt more confident and generally good about myself."
She's still dancing, and on the the afternoon we meet, she and Anton are due to strut their stuff at a charity do in London's Guildhall.
Clearly hoofing has brought the fun and the glow back into her life.
She's arranging a couple of massive bunches of flowers into various vases.
"I just love peonies, they're so ephemeral," she sighs ecstatically over the white pom-poms that are about to burst open.
Her daughter, Emily, has helped to heave the shopping bags from M&S and the flowers out of the car. All three grown-up children live with Rantzen. Their father, broadcaster Desmond Wilcox, died four years ago from heart disease.
"He was only 69," says Rantzen. "Even though he'd had the heart problem for years and a bypass, we kind of buried our heads in the sand, because his father had lived until the age of 86."
She thinks Desmond ("A man who packed five lives into one and made us all laugh so much...") would have approved of the dancing, but not the red hair.
One programme she would not have taken part in had she not been widowed was last year's dating series Would Like To Meet.
She was made over in tones of pink, cream and beige, and was advised about softening her image. "I'd watched the programme and enjoyed it. It was interesting, having the team deconstruct what they saw as this formidable, slightly intimidating and uncuddly image. This is one of the outfits they put me in, by the way."
She's wearing a soft pink cardie with frilled edge and a pair of well-cut, beige-cream trousers, with high heels.
"It's okay, but I think my beige days are over. I'm going to get rid of most of it."
She did WLTM because she thought it gave positive messages to women of a certain age like her who find themselves alone.
"There are lots of women in my newly-single state, and the purpose here was to help them to be more confident and socially adept," she says.
To cut to the chase: the experts didn't find her a suitable man, and she wasn't convinced that marriage bureaux were for her.
"I couldn't see myself with any of those men...To be honest, I'm not actively looking. I feel I've had my relationship.... but I'd never say never."
She swiftly realised that going to parties on her own was no fun, so she now calls on one of her male friends for such outings. Having for decades had the stressful weekly roundabout of a regular TV show, she says she's enjoying being off the treadmill. "I like to have a project or two on the go, but I love the fact that I've regained control of my life.
"When I was working full-time we had nannies and a housekeeper. Now I am around at home more, run my office here, and have time to think. I also see lots of the family."
She's due to stand in as the host of Channel 4's Countdown while Richard Whiteley recuperates from pneumonia, and she is about to film a series on dying with dignity, based on an idea of her own, and a function, to some extent, of losing both Desmond and, more recently, her parents.
"Part of being one of the first women in television was that I brought a woman's emotional sensitivities into programmes I made, on subjects like child abuse.
"That hadn't been seen before. Many of them were partly autobiographical, too – starting with my own experience of post-natal depression, which brought about a documentary about stillbirth."
She's as vehement as ever about the work of Childline, the national helpline for children in distress or danger, which she set up in the wake of her programme Childwatch in 1986. She is still its chair, and the day before this interview she has been in day-long talks about how to address the charity's cash problems.
"We alerted everyone to how much was wrong regarding children and how much some of them suffer.
"There are 3,000-4,000 calls attempted a day, and around 2,000 are answered by counsellors across the country. But we are really struggling financially, and I'm trying to convince people that what's needed is a hard-edged appeal in the media. I certainly can't retire until Childline is sorted out and safe."
Rantzen seems to have a life these days that is balanced between light and shade, with work projects that encompass the old compassionate, "let's get things done" Esther and the new "let's have some fun" Esther.
She's had lots of offers since recent forays into reality shows, but nearly all were unacceptable.
"I mean, why would I be remotely interested in Celebrity Live Shark Bait? And programmes where B-and C-list celebrities roll about wrestling in mud are simply beyond self-parody, aren't they?"
But she would defend many of television's makeover and reality shows. "I loved Jamie's Dinners, Supernanny and Wife Swap. They genuinely show you skills that can be learned, as Strictly Come Dancing did.
"But shows like celebrity wrestling are demeaning, and it's tragic watching programme-makers following each other like lemmings over a cliff."
sheena.hastings@ypn.co.uk
An Evening with Esther Rantzen is at Grassington Town Hall at 8pm on Monday, June 20, as part of The Grassington Festival. For information/booking call 01756 752691 or visit www.grassington-festival.org.uk
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