‘I’ve never stopped campaigning,’ says Esther Rantzen, the broadcasting legend who has been trying to make the world a better place since the Sixties. ‘I have an overdeveloped rescue instinct. I’m the kind of person who helps an old lady across the road even if she doesn’t want to go!’
Now, the founder of Childline and former host of the long-running consumer show That’s Life!, with its anarchic mix of jokes, songs and oddly shaped vegetables alongside genuinely hard-hitting campaigns on the likes of seat-belt safety and organ donation, is returning to our screens at the age of 78. She’s joining the Channel 5 show Do The Right Thing, launching new campaigns alongside husband-and-wife team Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford. But when we meet to talk, Rantzen surprisingly reveals that the tables have just been turned on her for the first time, as her own children have been forced to intervene in her life in a dramatic and very touching way.
Esther Rantzen is joining the Channel 5 show Do The Right Thing, launching new campaigns alongside husband-and-wife team Eamonn Holmes and Ruth Langsford
‘So I’m sitting in my office downstairs and I turn around and my two daughters are there sitting just behind my shoulder and my son is on the phone. My son, the junior doctor, who’s never on the phone! One of my daughters says: “Mother! Stop doing what you’re doing. We are staging an intervention.” I turned round and they said: “You’ve got grandchildren. You love spending time with them. Why aren’t you doing that? Look at your diary. How much of this is more important than we are?”’
Ouch. How did she feel?
‘Taken aback. You blunder into a lifestyle where you’re not prioritising the things you really want to do, the people you want to be with. What am I doing that’s more important than being with the people I value and love?’
Working too hard was the answer, to chase away the chronic loneliness that had struck after the death of her husband, the television producer Desmond Wilcox, in 2000. ‘Widows do this a lot. They are some of the most productive members of society, particularly in the charity sector. Quite often they’ve been very busy creating a social life as part of a couple, being mum and working as well. Then they retire. The kids leave home. They lose their partner. There’s all that creative energy left over. They throw everything into the work. There is a fantastic definition of this kind of loneliness: having plenty of people to do something with but nobody to do nothing with.’
After her beloved husband’s death, Rantzen threw herself into becoming even more of a public figure, with a great deal of charity work but also appearances on both Strictly Come Dancing and I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!, saying: ‘How many more adventures will life throw at me?’
She lasted an impressive 16 days in the jungle, despite a fireside chat with camp-mates that left her weeping for Wilcox. But Rantzen says that a decade after his death, loneliness really hit her in a vicious way. ‘There was a delayed reaction because initially it’s like a tsunami or a volcanic eruption: you have to rush around making sure that things are shored up, keeping the wind and rain out – or in this case that the kids are all right. I felt I was in his wake. He’d set a path for us and I was continuing down that path. Then eventually I became aware that I was in uncharted waters. I was having to make decision after decision that he hadn’t predicted. Moving here, to this flat, was not on his agenda.’
She sold the family home in Hampstead and moved into a smart flat with a spectacular view stretching from the London Eye to the Wembley arch, but that was no consolation. ‘I was living alone for the first time, aged 71. It was tough at the beginning. Definitely.’
She sips tea from a bone china cup, looking elegant in a blouse decorated with blue and white poppies. Was there no question of trying to find another partner? ‘When I first lost Desi, I was very accustomed to being one of a couple and very used to the companionship, the love, the intimacy, all those things. If somebody had come along then, then something might have happened. But nobody did.’
I read somewhere that her daughter Rebecca wanted her mother to be happy but she didn’t want her to start dating again. Rantzen laughs. ‘I have fantastically generous kids. If I fell deeply in love with somebody, they would forgive me dating someone other than their father. And frankly it would take falling deeply in love for me to do that too.’
Rantzen smiles ruefully. ‘I have friends who do not feel the way that I do in this. For them there’s a gap that needs filling. I do not date.’ So why did she go on Celebrity First Dates in 2016? ‘I date on television, never in real life!’
Her blind date with an Irish lawyer called John began promisingly but ended badly. ‘I was really nice about him because he was nice. Then they asked him about me and he said: “Well Esther, for a lady of your advancing years, you were splendid company.” I said: “What did you say?”’ She makes a face like thunder, as she did on camera. ‘I was thinking: “This is TV gold.”’ John made things worse. ‘He said: “Didn’t you hear me, dear?”’ She was disgusted. ‘Never make a joke about a lady’s age or weight. Never call a woman dear, even if you’re married to her. So John blew it. God, it was funny though.’
Rantzen with her late husband Desmond Wilcox and their children Miriam, Joshua and Rebecca, 1986
Wilcox remains the love of her life. He was her boss and a married man when they first met, but they married in 1977 and had three children: Miriam, who is now 40, Rebecca, 38, and Joshua, 37. So when her grown-up children confronted her about working too hard, were they also saying that they had missed out on seeing her in their own childhoods too?
‘Neglected? I’m going to report myself to the NSPCC! I would think so. My older daughter told me a terrible story that when she was little, aged two or three, I’d go off to work and she would go up to her bedroom window and wait for me to come back.’
She is horrified by that thought now. ‘I had nannies who used to bring the children in to work to see me. Every minute I could spend with them, I did. They knew Desi and I adored our holidays, our times off, our weekends. But that’s not the same. My middle daughter has two sons and is a full-time mum. What did she learn from me? That it was a mistake to do it the way I did, possibly.’
She did talk about all this with at least one of them. ‘I once said to my older daughter when she was 12 or 13: “Do you think I should give up Childline because it’s taking me away from you a lot?” She said: “No, the children need you, Mum.”’
For a moment, Rantzen appears to be on the edge of tears. ‘She had thought it through, and she recognised what I was doing.’
I asked my daughter if I should give up Childline and she said, ‘No, the children need you’
Childline was created in 1986 as a response to the tragic story of a toddler who starved to death while locked in a bedroom. ‘The lines were jammed for 48 hours. So I knew there was this invisible, enormous cohort of children who were out of reach of any other kind of help and were suffering this terrible crime.’
With social media, bullying and so on, children seem to be in a worse place than they’ve ever been. ‘What has got worse is this profound unhappiness, leading to self-harm, eating disorders, anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. We are getting more high-risk contacts from young people than ever. I think we really do have to ask ourselves in Britain why this is, because it’s not true of every nation.’
What’s her answer? ‘When my kids were young, we always had family supper, to talk about our day. Nowadays it’s a ready meal on a tray, go up to your room and communicate with a screen. I remember a police officer saying to me: “You wouldn’t allow a stranger to come in through the front door, go up the stairs, into your daughter’s bedroom, shut the door and be alone with her. But, that’s what the internet is doing.” So I think we have to pretend we’re Italians or French and go back to eating together, around a table as a family. Because there is a loneliness among our children and among our older people that is causing a lot of suffering.’
Esther Rantzen is taking more time out these days to be a granny, at the insistence of her own children, but she’ll also soon be back on telly trying to change the world again, with Do The Right Thing. She can’t help herself, even after all these years. That’s her life. ‘I just love feeling useful!’
‘Do The Right Thing’ starts on Sunday at 9pm on Channel 5