Cover story: Fern Britton on life, love and liberation
Revelations, resolutions and one big regret... Fern Britton speaks candidly for the first time about the breakdown of her marriage – and tells why she’s glad Phillip Schofield came out.
Theirs had seemed a rock-solid marriage. So the announcement in January that Fern Britton and TV chef Phil Vickery were going their separate ways after 20 years was a surprise to all. ‘Yes, sorry about that,’ says Fern today, a little too breezily, from her home in Cornwall where she’s been in lockdown with her two daughters.
Their joint statement said they’d decided to ‘follow different paths’, ripping the fairytale romance apart. So what happened? ‘There comes a point when the children are substantially off your hands and you look at each other and wonder where you’re going to go from here,’ says Fern.
It seems a courageous step, given that she’ll be 63 next month. ‘I’m not afraid of many things, including being on my own,’ she says. ‘The last 30 years have been incredible, married to two amazing men. You stop seeing all the bits that were difficult and the happy memories bob to the surface. Those three decades also produced four incredible children.
‘It sounds as though I’m painting it with sparkle, but for my own mental well-being it’s important not to hang on to horror and blame. There was an awful lot of good there and there’s an awful lot of good to come.’
Perhaps it was the recent loss of both her parents, coupled with her youngest child turning 18, that might somehow have pushed her over the edge? There’s a long pause. ‘Interesting,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that.’ Then she adds, carefully, ‘I knew it was important not to live unhappily.’ So was she the instigator? ‘It was becoming clear to both of us.’
To the outside world it seemed such a strong relationship, and Fern insists that for the most part it was. ‘We had a wonderful time,’ she says. ‘We were the best of friends. And I miss that friendship. But I’m sure, once all the tricky bits have been sorted out, we can be friends again.’ Do they still talk? ‘I’d rather not answer that.’ Will they divorce? ‘Ditto.’
Fern had been separated from her first husband, TV executive Clive Jones, for a year at the end of the 1990s when Phil became the resident chef on This Morning, which Fern co-presented. ‘Then one day at work someone said, “Phil Vickery fancies you.” And I said, “Remind me, which one is he?”’ she said during happier times in the marriage. ‘Eventually I kidnapped him, put him in my car and drove him home. The next day he baked me his irresistible gooseberry crumble.’
Fern was smitten. Her twin boys, Harry and Jack, were four (they’re now 26) and daughter Grace hadn’t started toddling. She married Phil in 2000 and their daughter Winnie was born a year later, when Fern was 44.
Whatever happens of course, Phil remains Winnie’s father. ‘Precisely – and the same with Clive and the other three. But as you get older the battle scars heal and you realise that this is your big family in all its forms. I wouldn’t want Phil not to be in my life, or Winnie’s of course, or Harry, Jack and Grace’s either. Grace was 17 months old when Phil and I first met. He’s been a fantastic stepfather to all three of my older children. It means they’ve effectively had two fathers.
‘I really did try to build good families, but it didn’t work out. I won’t try again. We think we’re in charge of our own destiny but we’re jolly well not.’
Fern has talked to me in the past about ‘the black dog of depression’ that has hounded her down the years. The last time we spoke she made me laugh by saying he was currently in kennels but she occasionally hears the odd whimper in the night. And now? ‘He must be off on his travels. I haven’t seen him for some time.’
Even so, having taken this giant leap, there must be regrets and loneliness. ‘I don’t feel lonely,’ she insists. ‘But I do miss talking to people of my own age, although I like my own company. I realised not long ago that I was married, on and off, for 33 years. Now I find myself joining the army of silver splitters and I’m really looking forward to the next 20 years.’ She’s not looking for a new partner to share them with though. ‘I don’t want anyone. I can do it by myself, but I’ll need a bit of looking after sometimes. That can be traced back to my father leaving when I was a baby, so there was no dad whose lap I could climb on, no male role model who could give me a cuddle and make everything right. Now I wish there was someone I could take my problems to and they’d help me sort them out. But I’ve always been very independent.’
There are a lot of contradictions going on here. On the one hand she’s a headstrong free spirit, but on the other a long-time wife who still craves a sympathetic ear. Perversely, she’s found lockdown therapeutic. ‘I feel deeply for those who’ve lost loved ones and who are self-isolating on their own. But it’s done my mental health a lot of good. The truth is I don’t really like people very much.’
That can’t be true. This is a woman who radiates warmth. ‘All right, but I don’t like being interrupted. I love it if the phone doesn’t ring. I cherish the silence. If there’s a knock on the door I want to shout, “Go away!” It’s probably only the postman. I’ve made a discovery – I’m turning into a recluse, and I’m really loving it. I’ve returned to the person I was in my late 20s before marriage. I was a work-in-progress then, I still am, but I’m proud I’ve done some incredible things.
‘The point is that an uncertain future doesn’t panic me and I don’t long for the past. I feel liberated. I know lockdown liberation sounds like a contradiction but I’m happy in my own skin. I have faith that it’s going to be all right. I’ve made lots of mistakes but I’ve learned so much.
‘An uncertain future doesn’t panic me – I feel liberated’
Now I’m looking forward to the last third of my adult life.’
Then of course there’s the other Phillip. Fern and Mr Schofield spent the best part of a decade copresenting This Morning, but it’s always been rumoured there was no love lost between them. Much of the angst was apparently generated by Phillip being paid almost three times as much as her – she was reportedly on £700,000 a year, while he was being paid £2m a year for fronting This
Morning, Dancing On Ice and All
Star Mr & Mrs (it was said he was paid £45,000 per show for the last while she, as co-host, received £15,000). ‘Throughout my career I’ve noticed a gender problem,’ she said earlier this year. ‘I always worked with a male presenter and somehow it was always the guy who was on top.’
Amanda Holden appeared to vindicate Fern when she said on her Heart FM radio show last year that three things she would not want to find in her house were ‘spiders, flies and Phillip Schofield’. She claimed she had been lined up as a temporary replacement for Holly Willoughby on This Morning when Holly went to do
I’m A Celebrity, having filled in for Holly before when she was on maternity leave, but Phillip had said he wanted someone else. Ruth Langsford is also said to have made an official complaint about Phillip after he cut her off midsentence while she was presenting a preview of Loose Women on
This Morning.
When I asked Fern about Phillip some years ago, she said, ‘We had an indefinable chemistry which seemed to work on-screen. We enjoyed a laugh, and viewers seemed to warm to that. But, like Morecambe and Wise, we chose not to live in each other’s pockets. We were a great professional partnership but we never went on holidays together.’
Still, she must have been stunned when Phillip recently came out as gay live on the show, at what seemed like an arbitrary moment.
‘My immediate thoughts were for his lovely family,’ she says tactfully. ‘I send them all my love. It must be tough. I haven’t seen any of them for a long time so I don’t want to pass comment on how they must feel. Let’s just say my heart goes out to all of them. I’m very glad Phillip’s found out who he is in the same way I’m glad I’ve found out who I am, but the timing of his decision did surprise me.’
Fern left This Morning in 2009, and rather tellingly two days after quitting she pulled out of co-hosting the British Soap Awards with Phillip. It was far from the end of her TV career though. She’s since hosted two chat shows– a short-lived celebrity one on Channel 4 and Fern Britton Meets... on BBC1, in which she interviewed high-profile figures such as Tony Blair about their religious beliefs – as well as other entertainment shows.
It was after her well-received autobiography in 2008 that her publisher suggested she write novels. So far there have been eight, and this week will see the ninth. When her adored mother Ruth passed away, aged 94, in April 2018, the last of her generation to do so, Fern felt it gave her ‘permission’ to write
Daughters Of Cornwall, a heavily fictionalised account of this branch of her family.
Based on her grandmother (she’s named her Clara in the book), it tells the tale of the illegitimate baby boy she gave birth to during the Great War. Fern thinks his father might well have been her great-uncle Bertie, the brother of the man her grandmother later married.
Still grieving for her mother, Fern took a phone call just before Christmas last year to be told that her father, the actor Tony Britton, had died, at 95. ‘I went to tell my girls and found myself saying, “I’m an orphan.” It’s the sudden realisation that the buck now stops here.
‘When he died I immediately felt closer to him. Even though I hadn’t really got to know him until my 40s, his death rocked me back on my heels. It’s very difficult to get a perspective on losing a parent. I can’t ever feel, “Dead. Gone. Buried. That’s it. Done.” I still feel them with me all the time.
She’s currently researching her next novel, which she says she’ll take a year off to write, but she has no TV work lined up postpandemic. ‘I don’t mind that one bit. If someone offered me something I found interesting, then I’d say yes like a shot, but I’ve always believed that life goes in cycles. Rather than dreading things coming to an end, I see this as a liberation to allow me to go and do something else.’
As she comes out of this upheaval, Fern seems to be happy, a woman with few regrets.
‘Well I do regret having hurt anyone, even accidentally. I know I have done, we all do. And there are people who have hurt me a great deal too.
‘But from this vantage point I can look back on my life and say the vast majority of it has been a joy.’