The Big Brother house was the worst thing ever, and I’ve been on a psychiatric ward
Gail Porter, the troubled TV presenter once beamed naked onto Parliament, bares her soul
COULD there be anyone more upbeat than Gail Porter — TV presenter, former lads’ mag pin-up and recent evictee from Celebrity Big Brother? She’s so relentlessly cheerful that she shrugs off the ‘hellish’ experience of being in the Channel 5 reality show — a narcissistic pantomime of banshee-tantrums and male preening — despite the fact it was: ‘The worst thing ever. And I should know, I’ve been sectioned under the Mental Health Act.’
There’s an endless supply of jokes at her own expense, particularly about alopecia — the condition that caused all her hair to fall out, including her eyebrows and eyelashes.
She regales me with a story about being confused for the shaven-headed Irish singer Sinead o’Connor in New York. ‘The poor man was so excited, he was like: “I love that song, man, Nothing Compares 2 u.” He gave me a piece of paper but I didn’t know how to spell Sinead, so I just did a big scribble and said something in a bad Irish accent.’
She delights in telling me how she teased fellow Big Brother housemate James Hill — the eventual winner, who appeared in The Apprentice last year — when he asked whether alopecia was contagious.
‘I touched him on the knee and said: “Yes, it is. See – you’ve got it now.” ’ She’s even laughing when she says she has to stop strangers comforting her. ‘I have to say: “It’s not cancer. It’s all right. I’m not going to die.” ’
The effort to be this buoyant must be exhausting, I say. ‘Ha!’ She snorts. ‘I have to stay on top of my mood. If I feel depressed in the morning, I’m up and I’m out for a run — rain, wind, snow, anything.’
As well as losing her hair in 2006, Porter, 44, has suffered from bi-polar disorder since her 20s. Her struggle with mental illness has been well documented, not least in her 2008 autobiography, laid Bare: My Story of love, Fame And Survival.
Most people remember her from the late Nineties or early 2000s, when she rose to prominence as a plucky Edinburgh girl. Her beauty combined the sexy vulnerability of Marilyn Monroe with the squeaky-cleanliness of a Barbie doll. She presented Top of The Pops and The Big Breakfast, and her giant naked image was projected onto the Houses of Parliament to publicise an FHM magazine ‘sexiest women’ poll.
And then, when the cameras swivelled onto the next bright young female, Porter seemed both physically and mentally to fall apart. She’d been losing weight throughout her 20s (‘I used to cut out all the pictures of Kate Moss when she was tiny and I’d think, yeah, I want to be like that’), but then plummeted to less than 6st — causing her to pass out in the gym and be taken to hospital.
AHISTORY of selfharm worsened: she slashed her left arm with knives, once so badly the wound required ten stitches. She developed septicaemia, and was restless with insomnia. She drank too much and suffered dark thoughts about suicide.
After a doomed marriage to Dan Hipgrave, guitarist in the band Toploader, and the birth of her daughter Honey, now 13, Porter’s health unravelled further. She suffered post-natal depression, for which she was prescribed Prozac, which in turn sparked a suicide attempt.
‘It’s been a barrel of laughs,’ she remarks dryly.
It was in 2005, while in las Vegas filming Dead Famous: Ghostly Encounters, a ‘paranormal reality television show’ for living TV, that her hair fell out completely. ‘I’d have a shower and the water was up to my ankles and I’d notice there were piles of hair blocking the drain.’
She jokes that her mum told her the hair loss stemmed from ‘meddling with the dark side’. ‘I said: “I’ll let the doctors know, Mum. It’s not alopecia, it’s dead celebrities.” ’ It’s actually caused by stress, something Porter can’t get her mind around. ‘Why aren’t there more people walking around without hair then?’
So it was surely questionable wisdom to lock someone with a history of mental illness in the Big Brother house, where insecurity and confusion are manipulated using tactics such as blanking out daylight, taking away clocks, limiting food and pumping in three hours of taped screaming on a loop.
This l atest foray onto the screen was a gamble for Porter, who does not want to end up defined by her problems, knowing there’s a risk that audiences will be drawn to her — as they are to troubled celebrities such as Britney Spears or lindsay lohan — to see what appalling thing might happen next.
Fortunately, she withstood it well. Although she was shown crying a lot, particularly when she was nominated for eviction, she says: ‘I didn’t cry all the time, those are just the bits they aired.’ She did, however, clean all the time: ‘I have obsessive compulsive disorder’ — and made a lot of tea, ‘a peculiarly British response to stress’.
She laughs when I ask why she went i n. ‘ When they first suggested it I thought: “No. Yes. Should I?” But then I thought, it’s only three weeks. In the end, those weeks were like dog years — endless. I didn’t know what day it was. It was tough.’
Inside, she felt ‘institutionalised’. This year’s series pitched a team of six UK celebrities against six from the u.S. ‘The worst thing was the “screaming”, she says. ‘The Americans were really loud. I found it too much. I’m sensitive to noise.’
It sounds like Guantanamo. ‘It was like lord of The Flies and The Truman Show [the film where the lead character’s life turns out to be a giant reality show]’.
She would like to return to presenting (she currently does voiceover work and writes a blog). I ask about an interview she gave after a breakdown in 2011 — that led to her being sectioned in the psychiatric unit at The Royal Free hospital for 17 days — in which she said: ‘I don’t like being on television.’
She looks surprised, then bats the i dea away. ‘ No, I really enjoyed i t. Everything was
great.’ She’s particularly enjoying being recognised in the street again. This morning, someone gave her a massive hug. ‘It’s like living in a soap. I like a chat anyway, but my Sainsbury’s shopping time has gone from half an hour to about two since I came out of the house.’
We’re in Willesden, North-West London, where she l i ves. The headlamp-sized eyes and doll face are instantly recognisable from her days as the bubbly foil for Chris Evans, 15 years ago.
Her bald dome is carpeted with a soft spiky fuzz, like a baby owl. She says at one point that she will ‘leave it to grow and see what happens’ — and later that she will ‘shave it off when I have a chance’. When it does grow it is patchy, she says, and it usually falls out quickly.
She has always gone defiantly wigless — keeping her once thick locks in a glass bottle — but: ‘My eyelashes are mine, and so are my eyebrows, and I started to get some leg hair in the Big Brother house.’
The shapeless top she’s wearing is camouflage for her boobs — a diffi- cult size 30G. They were her great lads’ mag asset, now they just give her backache when she’s jogging. ‘I always think about having a reduction,’ she says. ‘At first I was too scared. Once I plucked up the courage, I was too skint. My chest gets spoken to more than my face does.’
I’m surprised to learn that the magazines GQ, Arena and FHM didn’t pay her for stripping off — ‘Not a penny, no, I was naive.’
Although she says: ‘They were lovely pictures. I had a nice bottom. I never did anything gratuitous but my mum was a bit like: “Oh no, not again!”
‘My dad said nothing, not to this day,’ she continues. ‘Not even about that massive image on Parliament: that’s never happened, according to him. It’s never ever been brought up in conversation.’
Her presenting style was always warm and accessible. She worked for years as a runner in TV before someone suggested she audition for a kids’ game show on ITV. She got it.
Top Of The Pops and The Big Breakfast quickly followed, and a punishing work schedule. Days started at 2am. ‘I was at the studio for 3.30am. Rehearsing. Live at 7am. We’d all finish at nine, then I’d have a break, then Top Of The Pops started at 5pm, I was on at 7pm, home by midnight. Two hours’ sleep. That was my life.’
She says initially her mental illness helped. ‘Mania can be really helpful if you’re presenting, you’re like — whoo-hoo!’
After filming, her body clock was loopy. ‘When we left at 9am, everyone wanted to go to the pub. If Chris Evans was around he’d knock on the door of any pub and they’d let him in. You’ve been up since 2am, so it was like doing the nightshift. By ten, it felt OK to go for a Bloody Mary. Lunch was my supper. I had an afternoon nap and then depending on my schedule . . . No wonder I was manic.’
She decided to manage her own career. ‘But I did it really badly, and lost loads of money. Lose, lose! I screwed up a bit.’
The fame was intoxicating, however. ‘I was getting job, job, job, thinking: “You’re really popular, everyone loves you.” You know it’s all going to go downhill at some point but you don’t know when.’
The highs of television were matched by the ‘huge downs after it’. ‘I’d be up and happy, excited, and then go to an empty home and think: “Right. Er. Shall I read a book?” I could get really dark, but if I kept working it was fine.’
She adds sardonically: ‘And then suddenly when you don’t have as much work you think, oh God. And then your hair might fall out . . .’
Gail is reluctant to connect any of her issues with her childhood. ‘I was really happy. I wasn’t an anxious kid, Mum and Dad were great, my brother [Keith] was great.’
Her parents split when she was ‘19 or 20’ because of ‘arguments’ — she falters, then adds that it was amicable. ‘ They didn’t even get divorced. My dad moved round the corner. Mum seemed perfectly happy. I wasn’t bothered, I thought as long as everyone’s happy. We didn’t ask any questions.’
Her dad is in Spain now, ‘living the life of Riley’. Does he have a partner? ‘I’d never ask him. We don’t tell each other stuff like that.’
SHE joshes affectionately about his lack of warmth as a parent, reciting a letter she got from him after she l eft the BB house. ‘It was like: “Hullo. I’ve gone to Spain. I’m not going to come back to see you because it’s quite expensive so if you could just organise to come and visit me. Well done. Craig.”
‘He put underneath “Dad”, just in case I was confused about which Craig it was. But the fact he put “Well done” — that’s my dad saying, “You didn’t embarrass us.” You have to learn the dad code.’
Craig Porter used to run a construction company. ‘ They’re not very huggy the families where I came from,’ she says. ‘He used to go-kart race and once made a car in our garage, which in my little brain I thought was like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang for us. But it wasn’t. He was making it for himself. Sometimes he’d let me pass him a spanner. That was his way of being affectionate. I’d think: he loves me!’
She is tearful when she talks about her mother, who died of lung cancer in 2009 having never smoked. She’s close to her brother, Keith, 42, who lives in Edinburgh, and has a new boyfriend, a Glaswegian, ‘who works in maintenance’.
She calls her past difficulties ‘stupid’, and ‘unbelievably selfish’. When asked what advice she’d give to young girls who self-harm, she says: ‘ Don’t do it,’ and shows me the tattoos that she’s had done to cover up the scars. ‘They look much nicer, I think.’ She refuses to see a therapist and takes a high-risk strategy of going it alone after abandoning medication. ‘I run. I go to the gym. That’s it. I’ve felt the best I’ve felt in years. I couldn’t cope with the medication — I have been on Prozac, Citalopram, Zopiclone, Lithium . . . I’ve got a list somewhere.’ She laughs in that way that she does — always deflecting the darker stuff with that unfailing humour. It’s the one medicine she does believe in.
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