Facts, fiction and Ulrika’s on-off love affair with the media

I FIRST set eyes on Ulrika Jonsson at the end of the 80s, when I was a worker ant in the TVam newsroom in London and she was the stunning Swedish blonde secretary who sat outside the office of the colourful and eccentric station boss Bruce Gyngell.

While the Australian within bounced away on his mini- trampoline and munched macrobiotic nibbles, the male population of the building wore the carpet out by making any and every excuse to walk past Ms Jonsson’s desk many times a day. She was a slightly plumper version of the model we know today – classic Scandinavian looks, all wholesomeness and flashing teeth. She was smiley, vivacious and known for meticulous hard work.

Ulrika was straight out of secretarial college. Within a year or so the 20-year-old was presenting the weather forecast, mitigating grey skies to come with that beaming grin. At around the same time she went out to the theatre with a male friend and two friends of his – Prince Edward and a female pal. The start of Ulrika’s adventures in tabloid land started with a carefully-cropped photo of the foursome leaving the theatre, except that two people were left out. Hence ‘‘Prince Edward leaves the theatre with his date, TV weathergirl Ulrika Jonsson.”

There was an instant tabloid feeding frenzy over her private life, with certain elements of the media bothering her father back in Sweden and knocking on the doors of teenage boyfriends. Life hasn’t really been quiet since, and some would say that Jonsson – while being entitled to a private life like anybody else – has at times fed the beast too much, to publicise her TV career. That’s all open to debate, but what’s certain is that unwarranted amounts of money and energy have been spent over two decades on “digging the dirt” on a woman who is not, as she says, a politician or a master criminal. Her complicated relationship with the tabloids includes a period as a columnist with the News of the World – whom she and other celebrities are now suing for alleged phone hacking.

Ulrika’s crime appears to have been that she’s not only had a few difficult relationships with men – she was assaulted in a Paris bar by then-boyfriend footballer Stan Collymore, had an affair with fellow Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (a few daft people think the dalliance lost the World Cup for England) and was abandoned by hotelier Markus Kempen shortly after their daughter Bo was born with a serious heart defect – but she has four children by four different fathers. She has in the past posed in Lad Mags, talks rather frankly about her private life, and has opened up when she needn’t – for example, three years ago she sold the media rights to the story of the birth of her fourth child to Hello! magazine. She says she didn’t choose to have relationships that went wrong, and obviously has no regrets about her beautiful children.

She calls herself “a walking dichotomy” and doesn’t seem to see how she can ever square the circle of now wanting to lead a quieter life in her newly-built house in Oxfordshire with third husband, advertising executive Brian Monet and the four children, aged three (her son with Monet) up to 16, while at the same time needing to publicise media ventures which currently include a new series of wacky BBC2 quiz show Shooting Stars with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, and selling her debut novel The Importance of Being Myrtle.

The novel tells the tale of a 57-year-old whose control-freak husband dies suddenly, leaving her frozen, incapable of running her own life because he had decided everything for 41 years of loveless marriage. Throw in two very different daughters with contrasting reactions when the exocet of a long-held secret is revealed, plus an annoying Italian-Australian do-gooder and a nosey neighbour with a heart of gold, and that’s pretty much it.

The story develops agonisingly slowly, one character is completely implausible, and the text is sprinkled with bizarre use of language. Jonsson says she’d like to write more fiction. Let’s hope she gets better service from her copy editor next time around. She says she’s aware that people will have been expecting her to write a “bonkbuster” about the showbusiness world, but she wanted to stretch herself. She’s been writing since her father, a driving instructor, brought home an old typewriter when she was eight-years-old. She has always found writing cathartic, that expressing feelings on paper helps to put them into perspective.

“I got the idea from a woman I didn’t know well, whose husband of many years was suddenly gone. I wondered how you pick up the pieces and continue your life. But that was about seven years ago, and I sat on it until I went to Penguin for a meeting about other book ideas, and they suggested that instead I had a go at a novel.

“That was when I went back to this story. As with my autobiography, Honest, I would not put my name to a book that I hadn’t written, because I felt I could write and so did the publishers, so there was no question of a ghost writer.”

The couple of years the book took Jonsson to write were interrupted by chronic problems with her back – she has a painful degenerative disc condition. She says she has enjoyed the quietness of writing and being in the public eye less. It has plainly given her a taste for a life away from the paparazzi. Looking back 24 years to her naive young self, she says she didn’t see what was coming when she agreed to every interview and photo shoot.

“I had no idea what I was doing back then and just said ‘yes’ because I loved the job, they were my bosses and I wanted to keep working. I’m a commodity and I have to give interviews to promote what I do. I try to associate myself only with things I believe in and want to talk about, but whatever your job, privacy is still privacy. I understand that in interviews you give a piece of yourself and I tend to be honest. It’s who I am.”

She says she still can’t get over the sexism prevalent in British society. “In Sweden women are not regarded in such a second-class way. Here, people are always taking women, especially mothers, to task. When I went into the Celebrity Big Brother house I was criticised because I had a seven-month-old baby. None of the men were treated the same way. This kind of judgement brings the Swede in me out in the open. Over there everything is shared between men and women, and women don’t have to feel nervous about other people being judgemental. I find the attitude here weird.”

Jonsson’s mother left her father for another man and went to live in Holland when Ulrika, their only child, was eight. Four years later and settled in England, her mother had remarried and asked her daughter to come and live with her. Ulrika agreed, although she adored and missed her father while growing up in Buckinghamshire, and didn’t particularly gel with her mum.Always in the background was the fact of having been abandoned.

Whatever anyone says about her as a mother, Ulrika Jonsson sounds to be in her element when talking about her two boys and two girls, the differences between them and the chaos they create. “As a mother you try not to recreate the mistakes your mother made, but of course you make mistakes of your own. All I’ve done is give my children masses of love, affection, security and self-belief. I hope they feel nurtured, and listened to. If you can do all that, then they’re half-way there, aren’t they?”

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The Importance of Being Myrtle is published by Penguin, £6.99. To order from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop call 0800 0153232 or go to www.yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage costs £2.75.