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You don’t bounce back , you crawl out of the abyss by your fingernaıls
From racism and Meghan Markle to how she survived three divorces and breast cancer – as she returns to TV, former talk show host Trisha Goddard’s as forthright as ever...
She doesn’t want to tempt fate, but 2021 looks like being a good year for Trisha Goddard. She’ll be back on TV later this month as the subject of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories, and in the autumn she’ll front a new diet show for Channel 5. There’s also talk of her returning as a daytime TV chat show host, and on top of all that she’s in love.
Given the drama that’s attached itself to thrice-married Trisha over the years, Piers must have had plenty to get his teeth into. ‘It was tough,’ she says. ‘Of course I know all the things that have happened to me in my life, but it’s quite different when they’re all strung together like that.
‘And there were videos from people I hadn’t seen for some time. I’m not somebody who cries in public but there were plenty of lumps in my throat. It was more of an ordeal than I’d been expecting. But I’m a grown-up. I’ve interviewed enough people myself. Piers was just doing his job. He was fair. It’s just I’m not used to being asked the questions. I’m sure I’ll be watching it from behind a giant pillow, like I do horror movies.’
It will certainly put Trisha, who lives in Connecticut on the US east coast, back in the nation’s sitting rooms. Although she’s British, she made her mark as the first black presenter on Australian TV in the 90s after working as an air stewardess. Then she moved back to the UK, and in 1998 her chat show Trisha became a success on ITV. When that ended in 2004 she moved to Channel 5 for five years, then headed to the States where she had her own show until 2014.
Now there are rumours Trisha, 63, may return to our screens to fill the hole left by the cancelled Jeremy Kyle Show. ‘Oh, there are always rumours,’ she says. ‘When I did a similar show in America we tackled tougher subjects like white supremacy – and this was long before Black Lives Matter. The world has changed for better and worse. On the plus side, I think more of us have learned how to disagree without being combative.’
What did she think about Kyle’s show being cancelled after one of his guests committed suicide? ‘I was shocked though not surprised. But I don’t think you can trivialise someone taking their own life because of one appearance on a show. There have to be multiple reasons. And Jeremy was hired to growl at people, so you couldn’t reasonably complain when he did just that.’
Whether the talk show happens or not, we’ll definitely see Trisha again in the autumn in a new diet show focusing on the reasons behind our bad eating habits. ‘It’s going to concentrate on our emotional connection to food, which I can talk about from experience,’ she says. ‘I recently lost 16lb, having piled on weight in lockdown. And after the end of my third marriage I lost too much. Weight and emotion are inextricably linked.’
Each of her three marriages has ended in divorce. In 1985 she wed Australian politician Robert Nestdale, who died of AIDS four years later after the marriage ended. Did she know he was gay? ‘Not until after his death. It was only when his friends started talking openly that I realised. I went through some anxious days waiting for the result of my HIV test. In the end though, I felt sorry for him. He had a public profile, but was living a lie. That must have been hard.’ She didn’t fare much better with her second husband, serially unfaithful Australian TV editor Mark Greive, the father of her daughters Billie, now 31, and Madison, 27. Trisha was fronting The 7.30 Report, the Australian equivalent of Newsnight, when an assistant named Joanne suggested an item about female TV presenters being married to men who sleep around. She rang her husband and told him what Joanne had said. ‘He laughed and said, “Oh, I’m sure Jojo didn’t mean it,”’ Trisha recalls. ‘Jojo! I’d never heard anyone call her that. From that moment I knew what was going on.’
By this stage Trisha had given birth to Madison, and at eight weeks she was whisked into intensive care with breathing problems. The combination of a desperately ill child and the failing marriage finally took its toll and Trisha found herself in a psychiatric hospital on suicide watch after taking an overdose. ‘That precaution wasn’t necessary,’ she says. ‘When I took those pills and drank that brandy, I didn’t want to die. After Madi’s illness, Mark’s infidelity, the rows, all I wanted was to be left alone.’
This wasn’t Trisha’s first experience of mental health challenges. Her sister Linda was schizophrenic and died from her injuries after setting fire to herself in a car in 1988. ‘The attitude to mental health has changed
Trisha with daughters Madison (left) and Billie beyond recognition since,’ says Trisha. ‘It’s still changing, which is all to the good when you consider the knock-on effect of isolation triggered by the pandemic. As an ambassador for the mental health charity Mind, it’s why I admire William and Kate and the public voice they’re giving to issues that were taboo. There’s also a whole conversation to be had about Harry and his struggles: losing your mother so dramatically and so young, reintegrating into everyday life from a war zone, it’s been tough for him.’
After she and Mark divorced, Trisha pieced her life back together in
‘I found out my husband was gay after his death’
a stable relationship with Peter Gianfrancesco, an Australian psychotherapist. They married in 1998 but over the next two decades she had to acknowledge the growing imbalance in their relationship. ‘I was always the wage earner by a long, long way. The house, the cars, the holidays, the cooking, the shopping, walking the dogs, everything was down to me.’ The marriage came under further strain when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008. ‘I don’t like to say I’ve beaten it but I go for annual check-ups and so far, so good.’
The cumulative effect of all of this was a growing resentment. ‘I had to do and be everything, and that means the other person isn’t your equal, which isn’t good. And it’s not good for the man, it’s emasculating.’
Trisha announced in January 2018 that she and Peter were now divorced. ‘Looking back, I don’t know how I got through that time,’ she says. ‘Everybody talks about bouncing back, but you don’t bounce. You crawl up out of the abyss by your fingernails, sometimes sliding back down again.’
She met her current partner, a widowed American businessman, via friends. ‘I’m not going to tell you his name,’ she says. ‘He moved in last March at the start of lockdown. It’s lovely. It’s equal. He cooks. I cook. We have a good sex life. He was a single dad and I was a single mum. That’s very bonding. For the first time I feel I have a true companion.’
Current romance aside, Trisha has seemed to attract drama over the years. ‘That’s putting it mildly,’ she says, roaring with laughter. When she was on Australian TV, for example, she was pilloried in a way she could never have predicted. ‘I came home one day and somebody had sprayed KKK on my front door. Who knew there was that level of racism in Australia?’
Much has been made by Meghan Markle, backed up by her husband, of the racism she felt she suffered while living in England, and Trisha believes it’s a fallacy that we all fell in love with the fairytale bride. ‘Oh no, she attracted a lot of racist abuse. You might say it was foolish of her to read what some troll had written about her on Twitter, but she’s only human. You might not see it if you’re not looking for it but you do if you’re black.’
The question of her colour is a subject
‘You might say Meghan was foolish to read Twitter’
Trisha has pondered over the years. Including Linda she had three younger sisters, all paler than her. Her mother Agnes came over from the Caribbean in the 50s. The man Trisha supposed was her father was white, and it was only after her mother’s death she discovered Peter, the man she called Dad, was not her biological father. She still hasn’t identified him.
‘Peter’s still around. We had a complicated relationship when I was growing up because I didn’t seem to be like him at all. But he was my principal male role model and the only constant male in my children’s lives.’
She remembers asking her therapist once why so many obstacles seem to cross her path. ‘He said you can scuttle along in the hedgerows and not be noticed. Or you can walk down the middle of the road with your head thrown back and the sun on your face. The trouble is, if you do that you’ll keep getting hit by trucks.’
Despite all that life’s thrown at her, it’s unlikely we’ll see Trisha retreating to the hedgerows any time soon.