The Daily Telegraph - Features
‘I was put among the audience in a leotard – I’ve never felt so uncomfortable’
As Gladiators returns to our screens after a long absence, Ulrika Jonsson recalls her time on the original series and its impact on her life.
You can smell the sweaty Spandex from here. On Saturday evening, the Gladiators will come grappling, swinging and pugil-sticking back on to British prime time.
For Ulrika Jonsson, it is a reflective moment. As the presenter of the original series, with John Fashanu, Jonsson was one of the most visible figures on British TV in the 1990s: a talented live broadcaster who also happened to be a blonde, blue-eyed Swedish siren. At its peak, Gladiators
attracted more than 14million viewers, the kinds of numbers that these days only a royal wedding, funeral or coronation can draw.
“Gladiators was as rock and roll as you can imagine,” says Jonsson, 56, at the roomy home just outside Oxford she shares with her youngest son and two bulldogs. She is not involved in the new version, but is eager to see it after a promising trailer. “It looks like they’ve done a good job,” she says.
Imported from America, at first Gladiators did not seem a sure-fire hit. It was filmed in front of a live audience at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham, where initial audience numbers were so poor that they had to be moved around to create a full impression on TV. But viewers took to its mix of high camp, physical competition and sculpted bodies.
“It was like they were on drugs,” says Jonsson. “Well, they were probably on different kinds of drugs. But they were so excitable. You don’t build a body like that without bucketfuls of vanity. But this was their moment and they got very excited. There was a lot of bed-hopping [she herself dated Hunter, real name James Crossley, for a year]. The producers put them all on one floor in the hotel, which made it easy.”
Looking back, Gladiators was a product of its era. The new iteration has a lack of cheerleaders, which were a feature of the ITV version. Nor does it give its black Gladiators names like Shadow and Rhino.
“There are so many things like that you just wouldn’t do now,” says Jonsson. “It was a completely different time. In the first series Nigel Lythgoe [the producer and director, who was recently accused of sexual assault by Paula Abdul while she worked on American Idol
and So You Think You Can Dance,
claims he denies] put me in a leotard and tight leggings and placed me in among the audience. I’ve never been so uncomfortable in my life.
‘They were so excitable. You don’t build a body like that without bucketfuls of vanity’
I was probably a bit of totty in his eyes, so he put me in really slinky clothes. I remember standing there with my boobs up here thinking, this is horrible. Nowadays you’d put your foot down straight away, but it wasn’t the climate. And also, I’d just been given a big show to do, so you don’t want to kick up a fuss.”
As well as making stars of the Gladiators, the programme’s success put Jonsson in the Sauron’s Eye of the British tabloid press at its most intrusive. Born in 1967, Jonsson moved to the UK at the age of 12, following her mother, who had left when Ulrika was eight. Her first job on TV was in 1989 as a “weather girl” on Good Morning Britain, but it was clear she was cut out for more. Beautiful, funny and disarmingly frank, perhaps down to her Scandinavian upbringing, Jonsson was a producer’s dream.
Perhaps her other best-known gig was on Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer’s anarchic, surrealist BBC quiz show Shooting Stars, where she was a team captain from 1995 to 2002 and then again for a revival from 2009 to 2011.
“Their humour is so quirky and bizarre,” she says. “But there were lots of things we did that I wonder about now. I did a sketch where Matt Lucas and I were Jamie and Jools Oliver and I had this prosthetic nose and he had a lisp, which Jamie has. I just don’t know what you’d be able to get away with, even with wigs, and sweeping generalisations – which were hilarious. We’d do Geordie genes or a Welsh accent. You become so paranoid about what’s allowed and not.
“We all need educating, but trying to control comedy too much is going to break it. It won’t work. I like people who speak a little bit out of turn and say the wrong things, because I think it’s human nature. I’ve never been offended when people have taken the piss out of me. If it’s funny I’ll laugh regardless. With Jim [Moir, Vic Reeves’ real name] and Bob, every week it was like ‘she’s football crazy, she’s football mad, I can’t think of a footballer Ulrika hasn’t had’. Why would you not laugh at that? It’s hilarious.”
In her downstairs lavatory I spy a signed picture from Vic and Bob. Jim has written: “Ulrika, you always look $100.” Bob has added: “I say 100 lira.”
She caught up with Mortimer for the 2020 Christmas special of Gone Fishing, the improbable hit series he presents with Paul Whitehouse. The two men go fishing and cook each other nutritious meals while gently reminiscing. “Who would have thought that would become a massive hit?” Jonsson says. “Two middle-aged men going fishing. But not only is it beautifully shot, it’s so lovely to listen to them.
“But I doubt two women would be commissioned to do that. I’ve been frustrated for years by the inability of commissioners to see the strength in women being able to do [those kinds of ] shows… Things are getting better, because we are all getting better at diversity, but it still feels very male dominated and unjust.”
Jonsson’s rise in the 1990s came alongside a tumultuous personal life. Often it played out in full view of the press, accompanied by Jonsson’s refreshingly straightshooting disclosure.
“Honesty is my currency,” she says. “I find it easy to be honest. Everybody has to make mistakes or endure things. I feel like giving a piece of myself is not a sacrifice. Even if it’s to my detriment.” But it has come at a price. “If you give a piece of yourself, people believe they should have access to all of you.”
She has been married three times, and has four children by four different fathers, which have made her a target for press sniping. Her first husband was John Turnbull, a
cameraman, whom she married in 1990 and with whom she has a son, Cameron. They divorced in 1995. In 2000, she had a daughter, Bo, with a German hotelier, Markus Kempen, but he walked out when Bo was a baby. Today Bo is a qualified Norland Nanny.
In 2002, when Jonsson was at the height of her fame, she confessed to an affair with Sven Göran-Eriksson, the Swedish football manager who was in charge of the England team. The story caused a scandal, not least because he was in a relationship with Nancy Dell’Olio. Yesterday, it was reported that he has terminal cancer and has been given less than a year to live.
“I have nothing to say,” Jonsson says. “He didn’t exactly cover himself in glory when it came to me.”
The following year she married Lance Gerrard-Wright, but they divorced in 2006, having had a daughter, Martha, born in 2004. Jonsson’s longest marriage was to Brian Monet, an advertising executive to whom she was wed from 2008 to 2019 and with whom she has a son, Malcolm, who is studying for his GCSEs. “Parents are scared of their children [now],” she says. “They feel they have to stimulate them all the time and have activities all the time. Kids need to be allowed to be bored. I know kids are annoying at the table but if they don’t learn to communicate they’ll never do it. They’ll have a constant demand for entertainment.”
As well as her marriages, she has said she was raped by someone in television, mistakenly identified for a while as John Leslie. In 1998 she was physically attacked by the footballer Stan Collymore in a Paris wine bar. While she always understood that intrusion into private life was part of her career, she says it took its toll on those around her, and at times went too far. “The worst times were when your personal life is splashed across the papers,” she says. “That feeling of not having control, and also how it affected other people. I’d made the choice to have the career, but maybe people around you don’t know how to handle it. I aged a few years over some of the anxiety. But I always knew the deal, that this intrusion was part of the gig.”
She is in no hurry to marry again, but has been online dating and is keen to write a book about her experiences. “It has been a rollercoaster and a steep learning curve,” she says. “People aren’t truthful [on apps]. It’s a shock. I worry about how we are forming relationships going forward because they take a lot of the humanity out of it and there’s no accountability. It’s theWild West out there. It’s like Jurassic Park.”
As for Gladiators, she will be tuning in. “My advice to the new Gladiators is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If you want to do this, you have to have a good understanding that it’s going to ask things of you that you may not want to give. So choose wisely and don’t be lazy.”
‘Gladiators’ starts on BBC One tomorrow at 5.50pm