Not many of us would think of posting on Instagram from a hospital bed after undergoing a major operation. But then most of us are not Vanessa Feltz. A few weeks ago, in true Feltz tell-it-as-it-is style, she took her 396,000 Insta followers through her whole medical ordeal – from the terrible pain she suffered from a kidney stone to the operation to remove it, down to the detail of the offending object.
But then Feltz has never been one to be reticent. Indeed her larger-than-life personality have stood her in good stead throughout her remarkable career, from journalist to presenter of TV’s The Big Breakfast, This Morning and numerous shows of her own.
She’s one of Britain’s top radio broadcasters, working for the best part of two decades as one of the BBC’s flagship presenters, carving out a reputation as one of the hardest working women in media with 4am starts on Radio 2’s This Morning, followed immediately by Radio London’s Breakfast Show at 7am. “I’ve always been a grafter,” Feltz, who now hosts a weekly show on LBC, says. Her incredible work ethic is just one of the fascinating themes of her autobiography, Vanessa Bares All, which is published today.
In the news: at the office of the Daily Mirror
Like Marmite, you either love or hate Vanessa Feltz. I first met her decades ago at a very strait-laced ladies charity lunch in North Yorkshire. I recall the very demure guests were somewhat underwhelmed by Feltz’s mention of the “G spot”. Perhaps that was foretaste of the string of controversies to come, the most notable being the furore surrounding the revelation that “guests” discussing their lives and issues on her TV talk show were actually actors. Even though the blame for this lay squarely on the shoulders of the show’s bookers, Feltz also paid the price when the series was unceremoniously axed. Yet here she is now, still at the top of her game.
When I ask how she feels after her operation, she responds using a Yiddish word: “Er… Azoy [just so]. That’s what I feel really.”
We discuss how Yiddish words often convey what English words can’t and she asks: “Do you think there’s too much Yiddish in the book?” Certainly, it is peppered with Yiddish phrases perhaps familiar to JC readers. I tell her that there is a warmth to it. “That is how I speak. I can’t speak Yiddish,” she says. “I wish I could. And my parents couldn’t either although they used lots of Yiddish phrases and words.”
Feltz told the Guardian in 2017 that she “turned down the offer of quite large amounts of money” to write her autobiography. “I can’t think of anything more ghastly than having to wade through my turgid, rubbish life story, and why anyone else would want to I cannot imagine!” she elaborated. So, what changed her mind?
With Eddie Marsan, Rachel Riley and Dame Maureen Lipman at the March Against Antisemitism
“That’s exactly how I felt until a highly regarded and internationally acclaimed literary agent called Eugenie Furniss, approached me and said, ‘This will be the moment to write your life story.’ I said, ‘I didn’t want to. There’s nothing to say anyway.’
“She suggested putting some feelers out to see if anyone was interested. Then she came back with a sort of barrage of bids from a whole load of different publishing houses. I thought, ‘Well, you know, if I’m if I’m going to do it, this is the moment to do it when people want it. If I wait ten years, I might be dead.’”
Most people who write an autobiography find the process cathartic but Feltz, true to form, makes it clear this was not the case in her experience.
“I know you want me to say ‘yes’ [it was cathartic] but I just can’t. Think about it. Writing about the most difficult parts of your life is not writing fiction. It’s actual life I’m writing about. For example, my mother dying in 1997 at only 57. That doesn’t improve the fact that she’s dead, does it? All it means is that you re-live the pain of the whole thing, and you feel absolutely ghastly about it. I don’t know why anyone thinks it should be cathartic. No, I didn’t find it cathartic at all. I thought it meant I spent far too much time thinking about things that I’ve tried to put behind me.”
As the book tells us, Feltz has certainly endured some tough times. Prominent among these were her troubled childhood, which she traces as being the source of a lifetime of weight and self-esteem issues. Feltz, now 62, was brought up in Totteridge, the daughter of Norman and Valerie. Norman was in the lingerie business and known as “the knicker king of Totteridge”. The couple undoubtedly loved their two daughters – Feltz has a younger sister Julia – but praise in the Feltz household was in short supply. Her parents continually diminished her achievements; even when she graduated from Cambridge with a first-class degree in English, her mother still told her she wished she would lose weight – with barbed suggestions along the lines of “eat that and get fat and be on the singles table at a bar mitzvah”.
The ex: with Michael Kurer
“In other words, no one will want to marry you, you’ll be the unwed, the unchosen, the unloved. You’ll be that person. So don’t be that person. So, for God’s sake, stand up straight. Learn French, put on lipstick. Do this. Do that to be sure that somebody wants you and you’ll get married.”
While she went to Cambridge to get a degree, her parents were simply hoping she would find a husband there – and when she didn’t their disappointment was palpable.
“You sort of feel shame,” Feltz adds, “at the possibility of the prospect of being single. It is devastating that everything else you’ve done doesn’t count for anything, which is definitely wrong. I don’t really believe it but it’s how I was brought up.”
Feltz’s mother might have continually battled with her over her weight, but Feltz says growing up she was probably a comfortable size 14. What is sure is that when she was nine, worrying that she may put weight on, her mother took drastic steps and began limiting her food. At dinner while everyone else present tucked in to chicken soup with kneidlach and lokshen, Feltz was rationed to half a grapefruit. This set Feltz on a cycle of secret bingeing that inevitably led to significant weight gain. By the time she was 20, her mother was giving her amphetamines to shed pounds. All of this is recounted in the book and while Feltz avoids being judgmental, it is clear that the effects of her parents’ behaviour have lasted a lifetime and that she has never gained any real understanding why they behaved in the way they did.
“I really don’t know why. I’m keep being asked to kind of speculate on what was somebody else in my life was thinking or doing and what was their motivation,” she says. “And it’s really very difficult for me to do that. I’m not being difficult, I just don’t know the answer. I don’t know what they really wanted for me or what would have pleased them more. I’m not really sure because I felt as if I was doing absolutely every single thing that they asked me to. Other than not being thin enough, obviously. But I mean, I did get married. I was 21 and I married a Jewish doctor who my grandma chose. I had a baby, a lovely home round the corner.
“I got famous. I don’t know what else I was meant to do, I don’t really.”
She married Michael Kurer, an orthopaedic consultant, in 1983 and, in many ways, she married her father as Kurer was as dismissive of her achievements as her father.
From the moment she was commissioned for her first big piece of journalism in Majesty magazine through to all her TV success he derided what she did as frivolous, unimportant and said it wouldn’t last.
The couple had two daughters, Saskia and Allegra, but they divorced in 2000. Kurer was being unfaithful but challenged Feltz that if she lost weight, he might stay.
Feltz relates in the book how she took a similarly tolerant line with her fiancé of 16 years, musician Ben Ofoedu, though they did eventually part in 2023 over his multiple infidelities.
With her ex Ben Ofoedu Photo: Getty
“I’m squandering whatever talents I’m meant to have on this. This huge waste of time,” she recalls of the relationship.
In the book, Feltz never refers to either of her exes by their names, instead calling them “the Good Doctor” and “the One Hit Wonder”.
“It’s my book. It’s my story of my life,” she explains. “It’s not supposed to be about them. And I didn’t want to have their names splattered and littered all over my book.
“I really didn’t. I just thought it’s mine. It’s my book and I can choose what I put it in and I choose not to put their names in my book. I don’t fancy it.
“I just didn’t like the idea of it. I didn’t see why I should immortalise them in my magnificent book. Why should I? Neither are worthy of it.”
She adds: “You asked me about writing the book being cathartic. It’s almost totally the opposite, really. Because you just look back and think, ‘Gosh, what on earth? Why did I do that? And why did I let it happen so often?
“’Why did I let that person do that? Why are you letting someone talk to you like that and diminish you?’ I don’t think all of the things are me doing something I shouldn’t have done. I think some of them are things that I let other people do.”
For all the ups and downs in her life, I am happy to report that Feltz is not doing too badly now. Her two daughters are happily married and have given her four gorgeous grandchildren. She has very consciously adopted an opposite approach to parenting from her own mother’s.
Family night: Vanessa with her daughter Saskia and two of her grandchildren at a film premiere in June. Photo: Getty
“The absolute opposite! I just tried to encourage them in everything they wanted to do. I tried to appreciate them for exactly who they were. I tried not to try to mould them into somebody else. I tried not being consistently disappointed with every single thing they did.
“Particularly with how they looked because they looked how they looked.
“And they are beautiful. I didn’t want to belittle them or make them feel that looking a certain way or being married was the only thing in life.”
Feltz’s weight is finally under control following a gastric bypass operation. She has her own clothing range, 4LOVE in business, with Linda Plant and happily socialises most nights of the week. When I comment that this would exhaust most people she says: “I’m not out until the small hours at a nightclub. I’m really going out to dinner with friends or to see a film.
“I mean, sometimes I’m dancing the night away. Not very often. It’s just a thing of preferring to be sociable and preferring to be engaged with other people rather than just sit on my own in the silent empty house, which I don’t, and never have, liked.”
If she could turn back time, what would she do differently?
“Obviously I would still have my wonderful daughters and grandchildren. I mean I haven’t really thought about what I wouldn’t do, but I suppose one of the things I could have done to arm myself better, would have been to read law and be a barrister instead of reading English literature, which fits you for nothing.
“I would have had at least a profession. And a certain sort of income and some kind of proper sort of career structure to fall back on. I think maybe that would have been a good idea, right?”
Maybe.
Vanessa Bares All is available now
