It’s The Shift podcast Tuesday!
My guest today is the broadcaster Vanessa Feltz. Ever since the mid-90s, Vanessa has been a fixture on British TV and radio - and also, for better or worse, our front pages.
She became known as the “British Oprah” and that applied not just to her consummate skills as a broadcaster and talent for saying the unsayable, but also what she describes as her “pernicious public cycle of yoyo dieting.”
She cut her teeth on This Morning, interviewed stars on the Big Breakfast Bed and hosted her own hit show Vanessa, the first British US-style talk show. She’s also presented breakfast shows on BBC Radio 2 and BBC London and now hosts a Saturday show on LBC.
But like many women in the public eye, her professional achievements have often played second fiddle to media scrutiny of her private life.
Vanessa joined me to talk about the frank, funny, fearless autobiography she said she’d never write, Vanessa Bares All. We also discussed growing up with a chorus of critics and how weirdly conflicted she feels now that chorus has gone, dealing with the toxic media attention paid to her weight. Plus divorce, being back in the dating game at 62 (and why she doesn’t dare use a dating app), why she wishes she’d been able to take Ozempic, finally losing her inhibitions and why what she’d really like is a great big love.
* A note: this post contains affiliate links, which means that a very small percentage of any sale goes to help fund The Shift. If it’s orange, it links! (But not all orange links are affiliates…)
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