Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
SELINA’S STARS
She left the spotlight to rear and rescue animals. Now Selina Scott is back on TV – and the dogs she saved are joining her on camera. By Lisa Sewards
After leaving fame behind her for life on a farm, Selina Scott is back on TV – and she’s bringing her dogs with her
As one of TV’s first female newsreaders, she was the golden girl of television, enjoying a beauty and fame which even captivated royalty. Indeed, Prince Andrew was so mesmerised by her that he asked for her phone number on live TV. And Prince Charles flew in his own plane to spend a week with her on a remote Scottish island.
But despite her high profile, Selina Scott has always remained an enigma. She has never named her lovers, never married and guards her privacy fiercely. And there’s always been much more to her than her sex appeal. You just have to open the boot of her muddy Volvo estate to know. From vaguely musty-smelling wet dog blankets, out spring her three glorious canine companions Nip, Kendi and Doogie, all rescue dogs who found their way to her. ‘Because I have a farm everyone thinks I want another dog,’ laughs Selina, who is now 66. ‘Doogie, who is four and a half, is the last to join me. When he arrived I said, “I do not want another dog, thank you.” But he’s such a gorgeous little fellow. He’s a Teckel – a wi re- coated dachshund. The only problem with this type, I’ve discovered, is that they can be dirty little dogs. He cocks his leg up at any chair. Luckily I’ve got stone floors.’
Who would have believed that the impeccably groomed Selina would have to deal with this domestic chore? But she is a no-nonsense country girl who’s been up before dawn today feeding her bullocks and seeing to her Angora goats – while still managing to sport an effortless elegance in her brown leopard scarf, tweed jacket, funky brown trainers and jeans.
For two decades Selina’s international career flourished until she decided to turn her back on the limelight and opt for a semi-reclusive life on a farm in her native North Yorkshire with her dogs and her goats – from whose wool she makes socks which she sells on the internet. Prince Charles is apparently a fan. These days she only tends to stick her head above the parapet to speak about ageism on television or animal welfare, and she only appears on TV for projects close to her heart.
This time it’s for a new series of the popular show Walks With My Dog, in which celebrities spend a day rambling in some of the most beautiful parts of Britain with their four-legged friends. For her part, Selina strolls with Doogie and Kendi, an Alsatian-cross, in her home county from the majestic medieval splendour of Helmsley Castle to the breathtaking ruins of Rievaulx Abbey. Unfortunately, her eldest dog, Nip, a 15-year- old Labrador-border collie cross, was cut out of the filming. ‘She’d got a sore patch on her cheek – she must have caught it as she’d gone through a fence and it left a little red mark. I think the producer felt that it might pick up on camera. So Nip missed her moment which is a shame, as she acts and smiles to camera.’
She clearly shares similarities to her mistress. ‘Nip also doesn’t like men in shorts running along a road – she thinks that they’re a menace on the public highway. Men in Lycra are not to be trusted,’ chuckles Selina, who took in Nip when she was found by her sister Vanessa in a litter feeding off their stray mother under an oak tree. About 18 months later Selina discovered Kendi in Majorca, where she’d bought a holiday home. ‘I found this beautiful Alsatian on a short chain tied to a tree. His ears were bleeding because flies were eating them away. It was criminal,’ she recalls. ‘It took me over a year to get him released. I started off getting permission from his owners to t a ke him for walks, which meant having to brave rats running amidst the chickens on the property where he was. Eventually, they gave him to me.
‘He was put in quarantine for six months and then a woman from Kent who had read about his predicament in the local Majorcan newspaper got in touch with me and offered me her private plane to bring him back home. So this moth-eatenlooking dog and I ended up on a private plane, flying in to Biggin Hill.’
She took in Doogie from a friend in Aberdeenshire, ‘because he’s so adorable – and he likes exercise. He’s bred to track wounded deer and he needed plenty of space’.
Dogs have always been part of Selina’s life. ‘Toby, our family dog, used to sit on my knee. He was too protective, actually; he used to set about people if they came near the pram.’ But she only started her current little family after she bought her 200acre spread, with its 15th- century farmhouse, when she decided to step away from her career.
Selina had been a regular feature on our screens since 1980 when, aged just 29 and a local reporter with Grampian TV, she was asked to front News At Ten for ITN – only their second female newsreader. In 1982 at the outbreak of the Falklands War, she became the Forces’ pin-up girl. For the rest of the 80s and much of the 90s she presented and produced chat shows and interviews with people including King Juan Carlos of Spain and Donald Trump – with whom she’s had a famously longrunning feud since making an unflattering documentary about him in 1995. She presented The Clothes Show on BBC1 and was a guest host on Wogan before joining the US channel CBS to host a current affairs programme, West 57th. She then hosted her own chat show on NBC in the mid-90s. But after returning to the UK in 1997 to join Sky, and having her chat show on that network cancelled after eight weeks, she became disillusioned. She says she chose to leave the industry when the things she was offered started to seem silly or demeaning. ‘I came back to Britain and discovered that women’s talents weren’t valued in a serious sense, as they were in America,’ she explains. ‘I thought, “Well, I’ve got a life and I want to do something totally different.”’
Happily, she found a new purpose – a group of six curly-haired Angora goats she rescued from a Scottish farm in 2003. Selina was visiting friends in the Borders when she came across them. Their owner had tried to diver- sify into mohair production but the animals, suited to the high, dry Himalayas, were not used to the wet conditions and were having health problems, particularly with their feet. Selina bought land in North Yorkshire, where conditions were ideal, judging by the way the herd grew. ‘It suddenly shot up to 27 before I realised that two billy goats left to their own devices caused havoc!
‘That’s why, having discovered they need shearing twice a year and their fabulous fine fibre was sought-after, I set about trying to find a use for it all. I found a workshop in Leicestershire which would take the wool and make socks, and I gave them away to friends, before the demand became so great I had to get serious about it.’ All these years later the herd has shrunk to just five, and she won’t be replacing them as
‘I had a lot of attention from men and a lot of it was fun’
the shearing is an intensive affair and she’s found sources in South Africa for the wool she needs for her business.
Despite her huge success she says it wasn’t a hard choice to step away from the TV cameras. By her own admission, she has found it hard to trust people and is happy to have them ‘come so close and no further’. But life in the spotlight wasn’t all bad. ‘Yes, I had a lot of attention from men and a lot of it was a lot of fun. And I think it made me appreciate men’s company more than women’s because men, it seems to me, are extremely obvious, you know? You don’t have to ask any particular questions about what’s their game. There it is. If you’re with a group of men and women, men are far more direct.’
Prince Andrew was certainly direct with her on TV’s Wogan in 1985. The prince was serving on HMS Brazen, where he’d been transferred after serving in the Falklands. ‘I went in there with a list of the questions I wanted to ask him in my head, but it turned into something quite different when he asked me for my telephone number and to sign a piece of fuselage for the boys down on the ship,’ she recalls. ‘It degenerated from then on.’
One of the uncanny parts of Selina’s career was how her image, with her feathery blonde hairstyle and impressive height, seemed to mirror Princess Diana’s. ‘When I first met Diana she said, “People say you look like me”,’ Selina recalls. ‘So I said to Diana, “Well I was here first.” It was better than saying, “I’m older than you”. There was a rapport between us. When she was first married, the Queen’s Press Officer Michael Shea asked me to befriend her, to counsel her. But I suppose I was shy at the time and I didn’t feel it was my job to do that.’
She certainly had an easy rapport with Prince Charles, who she’d first met when she was a 25-year-old tourism officer on the island of Bute and he was serving in the Royal Navy. In 1991 the pair were thrown together for a week on the Hebridean island of Berneray for her
documentary A Prince Among Islands. ‘We were at a dinner when Charles was talking about the crofting way of life being lost. It was against everything I’d read about him – this life of luxury and people putting toothpaste on his toothbrush,’ recalls Selina. ‘So I said, “Well, why don’t you come to Berneray? And I’ll go with a crew.” So there I was, standing on a grass runway, waiting for this prince to arrive and in Charles flew, flying his own plane. He was as good as his word, and lived the life of a crofter for a week. And he was a natural. There’d be mutton and potatoes on the table and he’d reach across to my plate and spear a potato if I’d left one, saying, “You don’t want that, do you Selina?”’ During walks and late-night chats in the tiny sitting room of the crofter’s cottage, the pair grew to trust each other, and she has revealed how he spoke of feeling trapped by his position.
Selina herself grew uncomfortable with her position in the spotlight. The 1999 murder of Jill Dando on her doorstep in Fulham hit Selina hard. ‘Around that time I was in my flat drying my hair and I heard banging in the hallway and then I heard the doorbell ring. When I opened the door there was this huge man and a little guy holding a wrench,’ she recalls. ‘I slammed the door and called the police, who were there in seconds. It was part of the madness of the time. I still have a stalker. I don’t think he’s dangerous, but he’s been in my life for 20-odd years. A sad person probably. But that’s the other reason I watch my security and privacy.’
In December 2008 she won an outof- court settlement (reported to be £250,000) from Channel 5 after she was dropped as maternity cover for Natasha Kaplinsky because of her age, and, in 2010, accused the BBC of ‘institutional ageism’ against women. ‘But things have changed in seven years,’ she says. ‘The BBC has embraced older women and men. Not to the degree I’d like to see but certainly there’s Mary Berry. Who would have thought?’
These days, Selina’s attention is firmly focused on good causes, including a petition to stop the overcrowded export of live animals for slaughter, for which she’ll lobby the House of Commons at the end of the month along with Joanna Lumley and others. And she’s also engaged in conservation work on her farm which has seen the number of species of birds increase from 20 to 90. She’s turned down lucrative offers for reality TV shows, including I’m A Celebrity... but, seemingly out of character, joined the cast of the third series of BBC1’s The Real Marigold Hotel, which airs this spring, and travelled to India to road-test retirement there. ‘It was intense, but I had my own room,’ she says. ‘I thought, “A bunch of old people together, what’s it going to be like?” But they were like children, in terms of energy levels. Heavens!’
Bounding about the farm after her beloved animals, she seems to have plenty of energy herself. No wonder she’s currently in talks for two new TV projects, one of them about fashion. So does she have any regrets? ‘I have none. I’m calm and happy. I love my life. It’s like the prime of Miss Selina Scott.’ Walks With My Dog, Thursdays, 9pm, More 4.