MOTHER’S HELP

Esther Rantzen and her daughter – now on a live tour together – banter and bicker as Rebecca pleads with her mother to slow down

Esther Rantzen and her daughter Rebecca reveal family secrets – including which one of them likes to go swimming in the nude!

Dame Esther Rantzen has a bucket list and an ‘unbucket’ list – ‘or you could start with an F and use asterisks,’ she says. The unbucket list – things she definitely does not want to do before she dies – includes setting foot in Japan or China and smoking a joint.

‘I don’t want any of the hallucinogenic c**p,’ she says. ‘I like being as clear-headed as I can be.’ So much so that when, a few months ago, Esther began putting the kettle in the fridge it frightened her to such a degree that she went to the doctor’s. ‘I said, “I’m a bit worried about my sanity.” So he got me tested. One of the tests I did faster than anyone else had done in 30 years of testing so I stopped worrying.’

It’s probably just as well her daughter, television presenter Rebecca Wilcox, the second of her three grown-up children with the late, brilliant documentary maker Desmond Wilcox, worries enough for the pair of them.

At the end of last year Esther was laid low with pneumonia. She also suffers with crippling migraines. ‘It’s late-onset migraine and is quite disabling,’ she says. ‘If I wake up in the morning and nothing has fallen off I’m OK, although I can’t always remember how many parts of me I should have.’

Esther and the Wilcox tribe, which also includes Rebecca’s siblings Emily and Joshua and five grandchildren, use humour to deflect anxiety. But Rebecca’s face shows how troubled she is – lateonset migraine is very rare and deeply worrying; according to The Migraine Trust, if new migraine-like symptoms develop in people over 60, underlying disease may be responsible. Esther is 77.

‘She works too hard,’ says Rebecca, 38. ‘Two months ago our family intervened. We’d emailed between us to sort out what to do. My sister and I came here to London and my brother was on the phone, because he lives in Devon.

‘We sat her down and said, “You’re too important to the grandchildren and us for anything to happen to you. You are a central trunk to our family tree and you’re working too hard.”

‘I burst into floods of tears. My sister burst into tears. It was a serious, furious moment. She is so involved with her charities [notably Childline and The Silver Line, which offers support to isolated elderly people], and she does all her regular Esther Rantzen work. She works seven days a week and this is always ringing.’ Rebecca picks up her mother’s mobile and slings it back on the table in disgust.

‘She’s always got her emails and her paperwork and it’s too much.’ She looks at her mother. ‘She’s fine right now but she doesn’t look after herself. She doesn’t drink water. People call her a camel. We asked her to do less. It’s not worked.’

Esther disagrees. ‘It has, actually,’ she says.

We’re in Esther’s penthouse apartment in north-west London. She and Rebecca are in the middle of a UK tour, That’s Life, which celebrates Esther’s 50 years in broadcasting and also showcases their mother-daughter relationship. Bickering like a married couple one moment, slippers and Horlicks the next. They share the same hair, teeth, bossiness and a bond that transcends it all.

Rebecca can’t imagine a life without her mother. ‘She’s promised us she’s going to live to 110.’ There are two condolence cards on the dining table for a friend who died recently. Perhaps it’s why Esther is less effervescent than usual, more dare I say, heavy-hearted.

‘I feel odd about life at the moment – which she [ Esther gestures to her daughter] knows. I read obituaries for people younger than me and that reminds me that life is not infinite.’

Does it scare her? ‘It’s one of those things you have to accept,’ she says. ‘I was in complete denial that Desi [her pet name for her husband] would die. He wasn’t. He’d planned his funeral. He liked re-writing it. It’s very satisfying. I recommend people do that. When you die it’s a wonderful gift to leave behind, letting people know what you’d like.’ Rebecca looks alarmed. ‘Have you done that?’ she asks. ‘I did but I might change it,’ says Esther. ‘I decided I wanted Light My Fire as the last piece of music in the crematorium. I think it’s funny.’ Rebecca clearly doesn’t.

Esther’s tidy open-plan kitchencum-sitting room is perched on the top of a swish block with views that stretch from the London Eye to Wembley Stadium. The Spode crockery that was a wedding gift is stacked on the draining board and photographs of the family fill shelves beside the wide windows.

She tells me that on New Year’s Eve the firework displays are spectacular. Sometimes Esther’s ever- expanding family joins her but mostly she likes to be here on her own. ‘Desi’s still around me here,’ she says. ‘Everything I have has memories of him.’

Desmond died from coronary heart disease 18 years ago at the age of 69. He’d wanted her to move out of their big family house in Hampstead before his death. As it was, Esther remained there for ten years. ‘He knew downsizing

‘When Dad died I was in a grief spiral of nuttiness’ REBECCA

from that huge house was going to be horrific,’ says Rebecca. ‘What he didn’t factor in was that his loss would be so great that to be surrounded by him in that house was comforting for all of us for ten years.’ She looks at her mother.

‘We’ve never let him go. Maybe that’s selfish from us [she means her siblings] because you [she looks at Esther] haven’t moved on.’

Esther and Desmond were married for 23 years, following an eight-year affair. He was, she says, her soulmate. His last words to her before his death were, ‘I adore you’, which is ‘a good memory’. Esther hasn’t been romantically involved with anyone since. And that’s taken a bit of joy out of life. ‘I went to Tahiti. Forget it. Pointless not to be there with him. Walking down a beautiful beach with hibiscus blooms and a hammock under palm trees. Pointless. Not doing that again.

‘There’s this saying, “The definition of loneliness is I’ve got plenty of people to do something with but nobody to do nothing with.” It would be very nice to have somebody to do nothing with.

‘I have friends who are widows who have someone. Unfortunately, I don’t. It would be lovely to fall in love. The right person hasn’t come along. It’s a chemical thing, isn’t it? Would I be able to fall for the people my friends have fallen for? No, I wouldn’t. Am I too picky? Vanessa Feltz said to me I was. Well, I was picky the first time round.’

Esther is much tinier, more fragile, than the pushy crusader we’ve seen so often on the TV. She began presenting in 1968 on the BBC’s Braden’s Week which reinvented itself as That’s Life in 1973, soon becoming one of the most popular shows on British television with audiences of more than 18 million. Desmond was its producer. He was also married with three children. Esther tried not to fall in love but says he ‘dazzled’ her. They married in 1977, when she was eight months pregnant.

‘I wonder sometimes if I made him up,’ she says. ‘I think, “Did I invent him?” She scrolls through her mobile phone to show me a photograph of a woodland grove filled with wild flowers. The grove is on a hill behind their

New Forest cottage, where they spent family time away from the demands of two hectic, high-profile careers.

‘We planted it in his memory,’ she says. ‘His ashes are under that oak.’ She taps the screen. ‘The grove was his idea. He said, “When I go, it’s got to be on the hill and I want a chair so you can sit and look at the cottage. This is where I’ll keep my eye on you...”’

Rebecca looks fondly at her mother. ‘“...and when the wind blows through the trees that’s me talking to you.”’ She was bereft when her father died.

‘He opened his eyes – his last lucid moment – and said, “You’re all here, all my lovelies” then he drifted again. I was at Oxford and went mad. My husband [she is married to auditor Jim Moss, with whom she has two sons] was in the year above. He said to a friend, “She’s broken, she needs help.” I drank a lot. I didn’t eat much then I ate a lot. I did what everyone does when they go into a grief spiral of nuttiness – lost, away from home. I was horrible to you,’ she says to Esther.

‘I don’t remember that,’ her mother says. Rebecca continues, ‘I was furious Dad was dead and I was blaming everybody.’ ‘I don’t remember that,’ her mother repeats. Rebecca ploughs on, ‘My tutor gave me the CS Lewis book A Grief Observed. She said, “We’re not going to talk about anything. Sit and read this in a nice, quiet room.” I just howled. Then I started dating my husband. I thought he was a Vinnie Jones and a bit of rough. I didn’t want a relationship but it snuck up on me.’ Is he her soulmate? ‘I don’t know,’ she says with a characteristic honesty. It is the same honesty that is in their That’s Life tour. The script – written by Rebecca and edited by her mum – is a candid insight into their family life. ‘The first question I ask in the show is, “All we really want to know is, am I your favourite child?”’ Rebecca was, in her words, a ‘very paranoid, angsty child’. She missed her parents dreadfully when they were at work. Her older sister, Emily, who has ME and, sadly, after years in remission has suffered a relapse, would wave her parents off in the morning then rush to the bedroom window to wait for them to return. ‘ I didn’t know it then,’ says Esther. ‘But the hours I worked impacted on the children. We used to tell each other the important thing was quality time. Is it?’ She looks at her daughter.

‘I know my kids get really upset when I go out,’ says Rebecca, whose broadcasting career began as an assistant producer on ITV’s Hell’s Kitchen and who has since forged her way as a presenter on consumer affairs programmes such as Watchdog, This Morning and How To Look Good Naked. ‘It causes me physical pain to go to work and be apart from them. I don’t know whether that’s exacerbated by you working so hard when we were younger. But I was totally inspired by you. ‘Mum and Dad discussed work all the time because it was fun and interesting. They met the most fascinating people and told amazing stories. I’d have loved to have had Mum’s career.’

Esther says she is motivated by passion, not ambition, citing the exposure of the paedophiles running the Berkshire school Crookham Court as one of her greatest achievements on That’s Life. ‘I was once asked to apply for Controller of BBC1. No woman had taken that role before,’ she says. ‘It was just before we investigated Crookham Court, and Childline [which she established in 1986] was underway. Desi

‘Nudity is my drug of choice, it’s so liberating’ ESTHER

said what turned me on was the work itself, not enabling others to do the work. I went to see [BBC TV boss] Bill Cotton with two letters, not knowing which one I was going to give him yet.

‘One accepted and one declined. I gave him the one that declined. Had I taken that role, I couldn’t have investigated a school owned and run by a paedophile. It would still exist and generations of boys would still suffer.’

Then, apropos of nothing, she says, ‘Desi at one stage tried to claim he was bisexual, because he thought it was more interesting. This was in the 1960s. He wasn’t.

‘Allegations aren’t always true. There have been wild stories about me and Cliff Richard and Paul Gambaccini. Stories on the internet saying I held parties in the New Forest which were drink- and drug-fuelled. You have to accept not everyone tells the truth.’ Rebecca is outraged on her mother’s behalf.

Today, Esther continues to crusade. ‘Childline has helped four and a half million children,’ she says. Esther received a DBE three years ago for services to children and older people. ‘The Silver Line is transforming lives. We will take our two-millionth call this summer. These are people who have nobody else to talk to...’ Esther is caught up in it and you realise how much she cares.

‘I used to talk to Desi in his sleep,’ she says. ‘He used to have nightmares about us dying. All of us were in a sinking boat. I’d enter the dream and bail it out. Then I’d say, “Who am I?” and he’d wake up.’ Silence follows.

Rebecca reaches for her mum’s hand. ‘You’re so unbelievably necessary to your family. We’d fall into a chasm if something happened to you.’ Esther says, ‘Oh I’m definitely not ready. I have a five-year- old, two three-year-old and two eight-monthold grandchildren. I’ve got to see them get married.’

‘So that’s on your bucket list,’ Rebecca says in a see-you-have-got-something-to-look-forward-to sort of way.

‘The list is short,’ Esther says. ‘I’d like to go to South Africa and South America. But definitely not getting high. Nudity is my drug of choice.’ Esther likes to swim naked in the family pool in the New Forest and sit on her rooftop terrace in London with no clothes on with the city stretched out below. ‘It’s so liberating. Nudity is my high.’

‘And public adulation,’ says Rebecca. ‘Adulation,’ Esther shrieks. ‘How dare you?’ She dares because she is her daughter and it is wondrous to see.

Rebecca with Esther and (inset top) with her mum, late father Desmond Wilcox and older sister Emily