Bring on the Big Knickers!
Beset by midlife woes, TV’s Kate Garraway decided to fight back...with cosmetic tweaks, a startling sex adventure and an underwear makeover that made Bridget Jones blush. The result? This joyous (and painfully honest) account
MIDLIFE is a time of explosive change, when our hormones rampage and our bodies alter, forcing us into a whole new chapter of life whether we want it or not. Everyone has a moment when they realise for sure that this so-called passage of time is changing them – and perhaps not in a good way.
I don’t want to call it a midlife crisis, because that conjures up men with trendy hairdos driving cars they can’t afford, or women taking up pole-dancing and having wild affairs with younger men. Not that the latter isn’t appealing.
But I have found that midlife moments come in strange and confusing forms. It all started for me one Monday morning last August with what turned out to be quite a wake-up call. We were moving house and I’d been lugging boxes up and down stairs. By the weekend I’d started to feel crushing pains in my chest whenever I took a breath.
What’s going on? Is it some kind of anxiety attack, indigestion (hoping) or – gulp – is it my heart? My lungs? After a chest X-ray, my consultant said I had torn cartilage around my ribs.
‘You have to be careful as you get older,’ he said.
It’s not as though I wasn’t already horribly aware of my age. I work in an industry where most people are way below 50. I am older than most of my onscreen colleagues, and the ones behind the scenes, too.
Then there was my 49th birthday, only a few weeks before, when I’d headed to my Smooth Radio show and walked into a bevy of balloons, a cheer and a huge cake. How sweet, I thought – until I looked down at the cake and saw that it was emblazoned with ‘HAPPY 50TH KATE!’ in bright pink.
As the non50-year-olds say: ‘Awks…’
‘But I’m only 49,’ I said. My producer looked bemused. ‘Really?’ There was a pause. ‘How annoying! To celebrate, I’ve spent ages putting together a playlist of songs with references to the number 50. Like Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover.’
He was annoyed? Being young, like the rest of the Smooth team, he didn’t realise that adding a year to a woman’s age is almost as bad as offering her a seat because you think she’s expecting, only to find out it’s pasta not pregnancy.
At 49, you want people to think you are at least a decade younger, not a year older.
But if old age was hurtling towards me at a rate of knots, I was determined to overthrow the doom and gloom of middle age and transform myself into a state of joy, vitality and wisdom. This book is about working out my life list rather than my bucket list.
Midlife is a time to take charge and
excel at the things we never knew we could be any good at, to accept what is gone and shore ourselves up for the future so that we don’t sleepwalk to 70, unprepared for the years to come and regretful of those past.
Where, then, exactly do you start when you realise you need a total mind, body and soul transformation? With the way I looked, obviously…
Back in time with a cosmetic Tardis
IT’S not as though I have ever been what my grandad would call ‘a real looker’. You know the sort – the ones who are born with naturally perfect features and bodies that can stop traffic. I’ve often wondered what it must be like to be one of those people, to be someone who doesn’t have to really worry about saying something interesting, because whatever nonsense spills forth, people will always be keen to hear it. I have always had to work on ‘personality’.
I remember once in drama club at college, we all had to say something positive about another member of the group’s appearance. I got John, a gorgeous blond hunk of a lad. He paused for what seemed like an age and stared at me with a furrowed brow. My heart leapt. Was he struggling to single out just one of the myriad things he adored?
No such luck. ‘If I was lost and didn’t know where to go and I saw your face, you would definitely be the person I would turn to for help,’ he finally announced. Great. He saw me as a comforting maiden aunt or a living satnav.
At least today ‘we have the technology’ to try and turn back time. Facelifts can stretch skin, fillers can plump up hollowed cheeks and Botox can freeze frown lines. But just because cosmetic surgery is there, should we do it? I started to think maybe I should and would.
‘I want a facelift,’ I said to my husband Derek one night, as I cleared away the kids’ leftover fishfingers. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘People with facelifts look weird.’ I began to reel off a list of stars that I knew for ‘absolute certain’ had had facelifts. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘So they look good now, but what about in five or 10 years, when it all slips? Where will it all end? And anyway, I love your laughter lines.’
Look, I loved my laughter lines, too. It was the misery lines I hated – the increasingly deep grooves that ran from my nose to my mouth, making me look all droopy and sad. All around me, people were succumbing. One presenter in her early 30s confessed she’d been having ‘mini-lifts’ and Botox for years.
Carla Romano, the Los Angeles correspondent at GMTV for many years, said she is surrounded by people who have ‘fillers and Botox as openly as going to the dentist’.
The way Carla described it made me feel less like I was cheating if I had cosmetic enhancement and more like I was letting myself down by not trying it. I decided to stop talking and start trying out a few anti-ageing tricks.
First I had a Computer Aided Cosmetology Instrument treatment – two probes with electric currents running through them,
which make the muscles in your jaw and cheeks twitch. It’s a kind of workout for the face. It made my fillings jangle, which I didn’t like, but after 10 treatments I felt I saw an improvement. Although, just like going to the gym, you would have to keep it up to ensure long-term results. I saw a doctor in Mayfair whose consulting room was full of strange-looking equipment with levers and buttons. ‘It’s like the deck of the Tardis in here,’ I joked. ‘Are you Doctor Who?’ ‘If you’re asking whether I can take you back in time, I can certainly try,’ she said dryly. I spent an hour under a ‘red lamp’, which was supposed to ‘reignite the collagen in my skin on a cellular level’. It felt nice, like sunbathing. Then she smothered my skin in super-rich, vitamin-packed goo and rolled a tool covered in tiny needles over my face, making tiny punctures that would let in all those youthpromoting ingredients. Afterwards my skin glowed. In Soho I had something called a ‘soft peel’, which is basically a chemical face peel for wimps. Afterwards my skin was so taut that it almost looked shiny, in a good way. But I had to wear full sunblock for weeks afterwards because my complexion is ultrasensitive to sun damage. I took advice on Botox. One surgeon said it was the greatest thing ever, while another warned: ‘With your tiny forehead, you probably shouldn’t go near it. Your brow is already low-set and Botox could make it even worse.’ This was all rather bewildering.
No more than a flash in the pants
Now it was time to think about clothes. ‘If you want to look good, younger and up to date, you have to get your underwear right,’ said my stylist friend Nigel Bond. I flashed back to the time I hosted the TV Quick awards with Richard Arnold and the team at Debenhams in Oxford Street wanted to dress us.
In the Debenhams personal dressing department, Richard tried on a purple suit and looked great in it, so he was sorted. I then tried on a variety of purple and burgundy dresses to match his outfit. I found one that looked fantastic, but when I tried to take it off, the waistband got stuck on my breasts, which in those days were really perky. I could not budge the dress over them.
I was sweating like mad and yelling ‘I can’t get it off!’ when Richard came in. All the Debenhams personal stylists were clustered around me, trying to help.
‘We’re just going to have to cut it off,’ Richard said eventually.
‘We can’t!’ they cried. ‘It’ll ruin the dress and it costs a fortune.’
In the end, poor Richard had to kneel at my feet, put his hands up the dress, and squish my breasts flat, while the store people pulled the dress over my head. Thank goodness he’s gay, I thought.
As for Richard, well, I suspect his thoughts were unprintable. ‘This is so the last place I want to be right now!’ he wailed.
Fifteen years after that debacle, I found myself in a store with Nigel wearing a stretchy, fleshcoloured garment with shoulder straps, a high back and a low front that swooped under my bra, sheathed my tummy and hips and ended mid-thigh in a pair of sortof cycling shorts. I was wearing knickers so big they went from my bra down to just above my knee. How had that happened? ‘You’ll love them,’ Nigel said. ‘They’ll make all the difference in the world.’
I did. They were a revelation. I could buy a 10-quid dress from H&M in the flimsiest fabric and it would look much more expensive, a better cut and quality, because it glided over the lumps and bumps. They were a joy! After that, I was addicted. I wore my spandex body girdles all the time. I was hardpressed to peel them off.
Best of all, as Nigel said, ‘nobody will ever know’. Or so I thought.
In early March last year, we were doing an item on Good Morning Britain that involved contestants jumping into an ice bath. As Susanna Reid and Ben Shephard ended the show, we suddenly had an extra 20 seconds left after they said goodbye.
Just then, without any warning, Ben picked me up and swirled me round with the obvious intention of chucking me in the ice bath. I started screaming my head off. He obviously thought better of it and swirled me back down to the ground. Susanna said: ‘That’s it, goodbye.’ Everybody smiled at the camera.
As we finished, I looked up at the two floor managers. They looked as if they’d seen a ghost.
‘Oh dear, that was terrible!’ they said, shaking their heads. ‘When he picked you up, we saw everything – and we mean everything.’
My phone started pinging in my pocket as people tweeted pictures they had taken from their TV screens. Then the full horror dawned on me. The body girdle I was wearing was crotchless – just for practicality, otherwise how could you wee without getting completely undressed?
This was a lot worse than revealing big nude spandex pants to the world. I have often been compared to Bridget Jones, because her dating disasters and calamitous moments seem to mirror my life. For the first Bridget Jones film, Renée Zellweger was sent tapes of GMTV, as it was then, with me presenting it, to prepare for the scenes where Bridget was working on Big Up Britain. Before she filmed the third movie, she came back and shadowed us again, and I spent time with her on set. When I arrived, she said: ‘Ahh, the real Bridget Jones – welcome home!
‘I think you have done everything that Bridget Jones has done, or maybe she has done everything you have done – apart from flash your knickers live on TV!’ Maybe she tempted fate! Because now I had.
© Kate Garraway, 2017 The Joy Of Big Knickers: Or Learning To Love The Rest Of Your Life, by Kate Garraway, is published March 9, priced €21
My underwear went from my bra to my knees – a revelation!