Jan Leeming
Why I don’t watch the news any more
‘Get to a certain age here as a woman and you’re thrown on the scrapheap’
Jan Leeming won’t watch the news any more. For a former Newscaster of the Year, it’s a surprising admission, but there it is: “Most TV news irritates me,” she shrugs. “It’s become a sort of docudrama.” Instead, she picks up the headlines from the bulletins on Classic FM. Now 74, Leeming left the BBC in 1987, but returns to our screens later this month in a three-part BBC documentary, The Real Marigold
Hotel, in which eight celebrity pensioners are whisked off to India for three weeks to see how they’d fare there as retirees. Although she was flattered to be involved in the show, her assessment of today’s television output is far from glowing.
“I was in television when it had standards,” she says. “Call me an old fogey, but in my day we’d have got through, say, 15 stories in a major news bulletin, but without all the arm-waving and histrionics.” If she does watch anything, it will be
Channel 4 News. “I like Jon Snow. He enunciates properly. He’s got gravitas. I like his presentational style.”
Might the same not be said of Fiona Bruce or Huw Edwards? “I’ve never seen Fiona read the news,” says Leeming. “And I’m not a fan of Huw’s. I don’t like his voice.” As for Tom Bradby, ITV’s newly minted, standalone housewives’ favourite, “I think he’s very good. He’s got a nice voice, a pleasant manner and he’s smart.”
Not that she’s a fan of newscasters becoming celebrities. And don’t start her on presenters who assume they’re more important than their guests. “Look at Jonathan Ross. I can’t stand him. And I can never forgive what he and Russell Brand did to that poor Andrew Sachs’s granddaughter. They all but destroyed that family.”
We are sitting in Leeming’s sunfilled seaside flat in Deal on the Kent coast. She’s a pretty woman, trim and remarkably well-preserved. But for all her dismissal of TV’s current crop, might there not lie beneath a slight hint of wistfulness? A hankering after, if not a bitterness about, what might have been? She was in her mid-forties when her newsreading gig ended, with many good years still ahead of her. A familiar scenario indeed. Last week Siân Williams, newly despatching the news on Channel 5, became the latest to complain that far too few women of a certain age are to be seen in TV current affairs.
“And she’s right,” says Leeming. “It’s unfair and it always has been. Look at Barbara Walters and Diane Sawyer in America. They’re 86 and 70 respectively and they’re hired for their experience, their wisdom. But they don’t have British equivalents. Get to a certain age here, as a woman, and you’re thrown on the scrapheap. I don’t understand it. We’re an ageing population; not everyone wants to see nubile young women. Anna Ford, Angela Rippon and I have had 50 years or more of TV experience. Why aren’t we reading the news?”
Meanwhile, to her irritation, certain men seem to carry on fronting key TV shows well into their dotage. “I saw that Joan Bakewell was recently wondering why David Dimbleby should have his Question Time contract renewed when it runs out. Well, she’s got a point. And she also suggested he could be replaced by a woman. Right again.”
Just back from visiting her only child, Jonathan, 34, in Australia, there is hint of jetlag as she reflects on the twists and turns in her corkscrew life. Leeming has been single for 12 years, after five failed marriages and an engagement cut short by a fatal car crash. As she’s fond of saying, “I’m like Elizabeth Taylor, but without the diamonds. “Still,” she adds stoically, “better first-class loneliness than second-class company.”
Which is not to say that she wouldn’t like to meet someone with whom she could go on holiday and to the theatre, even if a sixth marriage is not on the cards.
“I never thought I’d end up on my own,” she says. “Sometimes [I do get lonely]. I’ve done internet dating, I make no bones about it. But as soon as men look me up on Wikipedia, they’re off. Well, look at my track record.”
There’s also the public perception of Leeming’s apparent worth. People imagine she racked up a small fortune as a national newscaster, an assumption that’s wide of the mark. “Ha!” she laughs. “When I started reading the news in 1980 I was paid £10,000 a year, out of which I had to buy my own wardrobe. And because I was on contract, I had the worst of all possible worlds. I was paid PAYE but I wasn’t part of the pension fund.”
There has been other work since then, if not always high-profile. In 2006 she took part in ITV’s I’m a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! and she’s made guest appearances on fixtures such as The Harry Hill Show and So Graham Norton. Leeming has seen both Best Exotic
Marigold Hotel films and was keen on the Indian experience. Her fellow travellers for the programme were actress Miriam Margolyes, TV chef Rosemary Shrager, singer Patti Boulaye, darts player Bobby George, actor Sylvester McCoy, comedian Roy Walker and dancer Wayne Sleep. She met them in September in the departures lounge at Heathrow. “I knew no one except Wayne – we’d been in panto together at Windsor in 2007,” she says.
Of all her fellow travellers, she was most nervous of spending time with the outspoken Margolyes. But in the event, Miriam proved to be Leeming’s most entertaining travelling companion. “She says the most outlandish things, which may be a mask for an inner insecurity, but I quickly came to see that she’s got a kind heart,” she says. Not to mention a quick wit. Roy Walker, Leeming claims, initially never missed an opportunity to jokingly needle her. But Margolyes gave her the perfect solution. Next time he did this, she shot back with a quip about why men lacking in a certain area of their physiognomy enjoy putting women down. “I’ve no idea, of course, what size he is, but it did the trick,” she says. “The programmemakers seemed keen for Roy and me to start a romance, but it was never going to happen.”
Nor was she happy with the way she sometimes felt set up for the cameras. On one occasion, she confided in a cameraman that the day the group was at the Taj Mahal was not a good one for her because Eric Steenson, ex-husband number four – a former Red Arrows pilot and the love of her life – had died and was being cremated back in Britain.
“Well, he must have told the production people, because I was then pushed and goaded until of course I ended up in tears on camera,” she says. “They got what they wanted.”
Back in Britain, she’s now to be found every Sunday at Canterbury Cathedral, acting as an unpaid assistant guide. “I’ve always been fascinated by history,” she says. “And I’m very proud of my heritage.”
So much so that the electoral roll frustrates her: “There are boxes to tick if you’re Scottish or Welsh or Irish or Caribbean. But, when it comes to me, I have to tick British. Well, I’m not. Which is why, every year, I write at the top of the form: ‘Why can’t I be English?’ ”