Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
I’m not afraid of anything any more
After the trauma of almost dying from sepsis, Fern Britton says nothing can faze her – including nude photo shoots for her new role on stage in Calendar Girls.
Two years ago Fern Britton was fighting for her life after contracting sepsis when she developed an infection following what should have been a routine hysterectomy. So no wonder she’s twinkling with joy today (and a fair bit of mischief too), her jolly orange trousers perfectly suiting her devil-may-care mood.
That brush with death seems to have given her a new lease of life, and this month she’ll throw caution to the wind to appear on stage in a touring version of Gary Barlow and Tim Firth’s awardwinning musical Calendar Girls, inspired by the true story of a group of ladies who appeared nude in a Women’s Institute charity calendar.
‘This is a new me coming out on this tour,’ Fern says. ‘And why not? I don’t remember my 59th birthday because of the sepsis drama. Last year I was 60, now I’ve just turned 61. It’s a new decade for me. I’ve got to just crack on now. There are lots of things I want to do and I’m not scared of anything any more. Particularly dying. I’m not scared of any of it.’
So the idea of treading the boards in Calendar Girls, which famously requires the actresses to shed their clothes, didn’t worry her at all then? ‘ I hadn’t even thought of that until my agent said, “You don’t even have to take all your clothes off!” But that wouldn’t have bothered me in the least. What does bother me is nine months away from home. That’s long enough for both my girls to have babies and me never to even know about it!
‘But my agent had said, “Gary Barlow would like a cup of coffee with you”, and I’m a sucker for flattery. Then when I was offered the role, my younger daughter said, “Sod the family. Just do it!” So did my husband, so I know they’ll all be fine – it’s just my three cats I’ll be worried about leaving now.’
Among the actresses appearing with the fabulously fun Fern in the show are Hi-De-Hi!’s Ruth Madoc and Loose Women presenter Denise Welch, and the camaraderie between these middle-aged women and the saucy theme of Calendar Girls have clearly done Fern the world of good.
‘But we’re not Love Island girls,’ she laughs. ‘We haven’t got perfectly perky breasts. We did promotional photos where we were virtually naked, so everybody has seen each other’s breasts, and that’s fine. The best in the
‘We’re not perfectly perky Love Island girls’
company, I have to tell you, are Ruth Madoc’s. I told her and she said, “I know, dearie. And I don’t mind at all, because I was a dancer in the past and I was used to standing in the wings in just my G-string.”
‘ People seeing your breasts is meaningless. We girls will all see them and the crew will all see them, but just as you think there’s going to be something on stage there’ll be nothing, which makes it even more fun. But my character Marie [the head of the local WI], who’s super-organised and very sniffy about the calendar, does have a surprise at the end!’
Many of Fern’s fans will be disappointed that we’re not going to see her embonpoint on stage (or at least that’s what we’re told), because over the years it seems to have garnered a notoriety of its own. Her husband, the TV chef Phil Vickery, whom she met on the set of Ready Steady Cook in the late 90s, once tweeted about Fern’s ‘tats’ – he meant potatoes, of course, but the Carry Onesque allusion amused the nation. Fern’s stint on Strictly Come Dancing in 2012 was also memorable for the shocked expression on judge Len Goodman’s face when she did a raunchy chest-wiggle inches from his nose.
In truth, the last decade of Fern’s life has been a rollercoaster. She quit the cut-and-thrust of daytime television in 2009 when she stepped down from co-presenting This Morning wi th Phi l l ip Schofield to become a writer – she’s been very successful, and her seventh novel, Coming Home, is selling extremely well. She also wrote a searing autobiography about her IVF attempts, post-natal depression, a suicide attempt, a drinkdriving conviction and a rape when she was 21 by a man who had asked her on a date. She didn’t report it to the police because she had felt she was at fault. She’s also struggled with her weight and over-eating, and more recently had that near-death experience as well as losing her beloved mother, Ruth, this April.
‘It’s exactly two years since I had the hysterectomy, and within three days I was really ill,’ she recalls. ‘It was terrifying, but was it, actually? I think it was more terrifying for my husband and my elder daughter, who took the lead. I was starting to get a lot of pain, so I rang the hospital, who told me to take paracetamol. But the pain just built and built. I’ve never had anything like it. I was having killer contractions in my abdomen.
‘We called an ambulance the next night, but I managed to get out of bed and after being very sick I felt better, so I said, “Sorry to have called you out”, and they went away. But the next night I was in bed and felt I was dying. I knew my body was shutting down. I wasn’t frightened. I thought, “Well, I’m not going to tell anybody, but I know this is it. I’ve had a good life, even if it’s shorter than I expected.”’
Thankfully Phil intervened and spoke to their doctor’s receptionist, who Fern believes saved her life by overriding a decision by the emergency services not to send out another ambulance because they thought her symptoms didn’t warrant hospital treatment. ‘ When the ambulance crew did arrive, they said, “Oh!” and I went straight into resuscitation. They took me to hospital where I had a scan that