‘Caron would be dancing on the table’
Gloria throws huge party for tragic daughter’s
GLORIA Hunniford threw a huge party to celebrate what would have been the 60th birthday of her daughter Caron Keating...and said she would have loved every minute of it.
The Rip-Off Britain star, 82, said: “Caron would have been the first to get the party started. She used to dance down the middle of the table and I have got a very strong memory of that.”
Gloria, who lost TV presenter Carol to breast cancer in 2004, said she had a “blast of a dinner” for all their family and Caron’s friends, including her two sons Charlie and Gabriel, now 28 and 25.
She added: “It was a really lovely day full of every kind of feeling that you can imagine. She would have loved it.
“You have to mark these occasions. You must celebrate life, as well as mourn it.”
Gloria grew emotional live on Loose Women last week after the show paid a wonderful tribute to her daughter in a video montage.
Caron, who hosted Blue Peter, was diagnosed in 1997 and had conventional and complementary treatments, as well as spending time on the Gold Coast of Australia before she passed at her mother’s
By Tom Bryant
house in Sevenoaks, Kent. She described how the 15-strong party recently all met at Caron’s graveside at 7.30pm, in nearby Hever.
She said: “It’s pretty dark at half seven so everybody brought a candle or a torch."
They later went over the road to the pub for the party.
Gloria also spoke of the lasting legacy she created after her daughter’s death
“Somebody wrote to me, afterwards, and said: ‘do something positive’, so I did.”
Crisis
She launched the Caron Keating Foundation, which helps cancer suffers and means she can “make some sense out of something that makes no sense at all”.
The star is back at the helm of Rip Off Britain Live all this week, after 14 years in the hot seat with Julia Somerville and Angela Rippon.
She said: “We started in the financial crisis 14 years ago and here we are in one of the worst…we have never been more relevant.”
● Rip Off Britain is on BBC1 at 9.15am, all this week.