RIP Dame Esther Rantzen

[George 1978]

There was something about Sunday nights in the 1980s; the panic of having school in the morning (something which is not as bad from Monday to Thursday nights); and, what I would regard as Private Eye magazine on the television which was usually on around 9.50 pm of a Sunday evening. Sunday evening television was not too bad; Mastermind; Heart of the Matter or Everyman on BBC One, or Spitting Image; Hale and Pace or The South Bank Show on ITV. But there was a shining beacon on Sunday nights which we all looked forwards to, and sometimes it even made us think that tomorrow was not a school day. That beacon was presented for over two decades by Dame Esther Rantzen who has died of lung cancer aged 86. We were given plenty of warning about her illness in the media over the last couple of years, and in particular the debates about assisted dying in the UK Parliament. Ironically for a programme called Thats Life! The person most associated with the show is no longer alive any more. And no, I will not be morbid on here and make any Thats Death! jokes either.

Satirical cartoons by Rod Jordan; Doc Cox singing songs about foreign cuisine; pictures sent in from farmers and gardeners growing carrots which looked like gentlemens' genitalia; misprints from the local and regional press; they all felt like the contents of an average edition of Private Eye, and likewise, the serious content of the show, such as reports of child abuse, the consumer Jobsworth campaign (complete with gold feather cap), and issues of parking vehicles and caravans outside ones home could have easily fitted within the In the Back pages of the same magazine, and I suppose it is the main reason why I have read Private Eye since the late 1990s.

Prior to Thats Life! Rantzen was a reporter and could be heard if not seen in a 1972 World in Action on thalidomide; cue Dame Esther interviewing a parent of a child who had the disease which was rebroadcast many years later on the same programme. It was around this time that she married journalist Desmond Wilcox who died in 2000. Ironically, this led to making a documentary on palliative care called How To Have a Good Death for BBC Two. At some point, she got into some bother as a BBC presenter when she appeared in a margarine commercial on The Other Side i.e. the ITV network, and I think that she might have appeared in a washing powder commercial many years later as well.

Thats Life! (please remember the exclamation mark as it is so important!), ran for 21 years from 1973 to 1994, founded along with the original Nancies of actor and writer George Layton and Nationwide presenter Bob Wellings. Layton and Wellings only lasted the first series before handing over to Kieran Prendeville and Glyn Wornsip in the second series. Gavin Campbell and Adrian Mills were the incumbent Nancies when I was first allowed to stay up for the show (as well as Mollie Sugden in the Cyril Fletcher chair, dating it to the 1986 series), as long as I went to bad afterwards as it was school in the morning. (Oh, and Grant Baynham had a bucket of water tipped over him because he would not stop smoking), Indeed, Cyril Fletcher also joined in series two and stayed on until 1981, quite often sitting in a rather comfortable brown Chesterfield leather armchair while reading out his Odd Odes.

Although associated with Sunday evenings, Thats Life! was on Saturday evenings from its first series until 1976, and then back to Saturdays from 1992 to the end in 1994. I suppose that the programme was influenced by Bradens Week and On the Braden Beat who Rantzen worked with for many years, not to mention the chat show Parkinson as well. I have always felt that it was at home on Sundays and I had never for used to it being on Saturdays, in a sub-Match of the Day slot. I suppose that one did not worry about school in the morning when it was on Saturday nights, unless it was Sunday school.

Dame Esther was no wimp; she used Thats Life! as a defence against life and humanity itself in the 1970s and 1980s. Also in 1981 she was doing one of her vox-pops and was arrested by a police officer and was taken away in a police van. In 1994 just after the series ended for good, and Thats Life All Over! Was transmitted, the then retired policeman paid tribute to Rantzen in very much a water under the bridge approach. Another report involved being confronted by some dogs, and shouting we are leaving, we are leaving, as she made her swift exit.

Pregnancy in 1982 for Rantzen meant that the series of Thats Life! was moved to the autumn; (newcomer Gavin Campbell joined just a few months after appearing in the Chessington Zoo episode of Grange Hill earlier on that year which was also the first Zammo and Fay episode to be filmed - and saw a no-relation to him - Naomi Campbell seen as a rival pupil as well). Rantzen was also supposed to be one of the Famous Five of TV-am presenters who were due to launch in February 1983; however, her pregnancy was presumably also the reason why she decided not to join the breakfast television station as well as not wanting to leave the BBC and have Thats Life continue with another anchor.

Continued in the next post...

[George 1978]

Continued from the previous post...

Rantzen's own legacy in hindsight was the foundation of the telephone helpline charity Childline in 1986; a very similar helpline to the Samaritans which supported children and young people with regards to child abuse and bullying at school, as well as peer pressure and problems with anything on their mind. This was extended to the other end of the age bracket when The Silver Line was founded; something that should benefit me when the time eventually comes. Another strong memory was in 1987 when the Thats Life! team covered the safety of childrens playgrounds and the introduction of the wood chips (something which kids used to put down my back when I visited the local playground on Saturday afternoons perhaps that was one for Childline?) The alternative was also to have rubber-type flooring underneath swings and slides. Cue Dame Esther demonstrating the effectiveness by dropping a dinner plate on the rubber flooring and it remained intact; she dropped the same plate onto a slab of concrete at the same height and the plate smashed. Very dramatic, I thought at the time.

Another legacy was that Rantzen was also responsible for the X-Factor of 1980, called The Big Time, and discovering Sheena Easton; the Scottish singer who had a few hits in the early 1980s including Nine-to-Five (or 9 to 5), referred to as Morning Train in the United States in order to avoid confusion with the late Dolly Parton song (who we also lost in August).

In around May 1988 I put a TDK D90 in my bedroom radio cassette recorder specially for the Bruno Brookes-era Top 40 so that I could record the Childline charity single; the first one in that year was Wet Wet Wet and With a Little Help From My Friends; a cover version from both Joes Cocker and Brown. (Having Marty Pellow and his autograph somewhere was some defence of doing just that!) Two years later I received the second Childline single for my birthday which had Big Fun and Sonia doing the lyrics; (managed to get Sonia for her autograph when she did panto in the early 2010s). I never had to call Childline, but I still feel for the youngsters who have to.

It was also in 1988 when Dame Esther started to present Hearts of Gold which also featured Nancies Michael Groth and Gavin Campbell. This was more Surprise, Surprise rather than anyone fixing it, and it was remembered so well for having Sir Nicholas Winton appearing on it, aka the British Schindler, rescuing so many children and vulnerable people during the Second World War; Winton himself lived to be 106 when he passed away in 2015.

Thats Life! ended in 1994 with a retrospective a few weeks later called Thats Life All Over! Most Nancies from George Layton to Kevin Devine (who slept outdoors for around 36 hours whilst queuing to become a new co-presenter. replacing Adrian Mills, although Mills returned alongside him), turned up. Glyn Wornsnip was absent from the final show due to ill health which claimed his life two years later. Even Terry Wogan turned up, and he was not even a presenter on the show! Later that year, she moved to BBC Two to present the human interest series Esther which ran for around eight years, where she did the sub-Vanessa Feltz agony aunt format, mostly dealing with emotional issues and personal topics.

In the mid-1990s, Rantzen presented and produced for Meridian on ITV the Sunday lunchtime show Thats Esther which was a deliberate tribute to her BBC Sunday evening series. Here she dealt with social welfare and disability issues, and the programme itself was a link to the Sunday evening drama Walking on the Moon seen in August 1999 which was about being bullied at school.

By the first decade of the third millennium had arrived, Dame Esther Rantzen kept a low profile, only appearing in guest roles and interviews aside from the continuing series of Esther and Thats Esther. In 2004 during the second series (the first autumn series) of Strictly Come Dancing, Rantzen took part and was paired up with Anton du Beke, and they became the third couple to be eliminated. After the death of husband Desmond Wilcox she took part in reality TV series Would Like to Meet in 2006.

Early in 2010, she announced on Stephen Rhodes' Consumer Programme on BBC Three Counties Radio that she was to stand as an Independent candidate at the General Election because of the Margaret Moran election expenses situation. Not only did she do just that, but Stephen Rhodes himself (the voice of Les Dennis-era Family Fortunes for many years frequently repeated on Challenge; main catchphrase: you have just won yourself a super sleuth weekend) also decided to become a candidate as well! Rantzen was in fourth place, beating the BNP and UKIP candidates, and just 0.6% short of retaining her deposit, while Rhodes ended in seventh place behind all of them. Rhodes was replaced by Jonathan Vernon-Smith in Beds, Herts and Bucks, and even Yours Truly has been on his programme, taking part from the BBC Radio Nottingham studios - a great guy is JVS!

In 2012 she was interviewed about Jimmy Savile and his abuse of other women after the Savile death, leading to Operation Yewtree and other associated projects. It showed that she was not afraid to speak up when something was not quite right.

Dame Esther Rantzen was always the one with the Big Teeth (trademark) as caricatured by Spitting Image (quite often a show which clashed with Thats Life! in the Sunday night TV schedules, and I knew which one I would rather watch!) Thats Life was so familiar that even Not the Nine OClock News parodied it. I feel that she will be remembered for Thats Life! as well as the founding of Childline and helping vulnerable people, improving their lives and helping them to be positive about life. My own mother died of lung cancer and so I really feel for her family at the moment.

Thank you, Dame Esther Rantzen - you will always be a shining beacon to British humanity. You have done good for so many people.