Fern Britton: ‘My mum died, my dad died, then my marriage died'

Telegraph

3 days ago

Fern Britton beams at me through my laptop screen, looking joyful and glowy, with a light tan thanks to the blissful spring weather she's been enjoying at her home, close to Padstow in Cornwall.
Looking easily a decade younger than her 67 years – she'll be 68 next month – Britton is here to talk to me (bar interruption by one of her three cats) about her latest novel, her 11th, A Cornish Legacy. But of course there is a lot of other ground to cover as well.
Britton is after all one of our best loved TV presenters, who co-presented Breakfast Time in the 1980s before moving onto Ready Steady Cook – where she met now ex-husband Phil Vickery – and then to This Morning, where she co-hosted with Phillip Schofield until 2009, leaving amid reports of a feud.
Last year she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother, coming fifth, and as well as regularly popping up on our screens since her This Morning departure, she's also dedicated herself to her novel-writing. Several are set in Cornwall, where she moved after her split from Vickery, father of her child Winnie. She also has grown up children – twins Harry and Jack and daughter Grace – from her marriage to Clive Jones.
As we chat, she explains her latest plot centres around a character, Cordelia Jago, who has lost everything but is then left a house in Cornwall. With Britton having experienced a very difficult few years herself, is the plot semi-autobiographical? 'Not intentionally so, but I think the unconscious mind talks to you. I didn't realise it for a while and then I thought, hang on, this is sort of the life I've had for the last few years – but without the sprawling old mansion. In contrast, my house is very normal and only 30 years old.'
Though she determinedly makes light of it, life has thrown one misfortune after another in her direction over the past decade. Having undergone a hysterectomy in 2016, she contracted sepsis and very nearly died.
'Then my mum died in 2018 and my dad died in 2019 and then my marriage [to chef Phil Vickery] died. Next, I discovered that my phone had been hacked for 15 years [by News of the World ]. And last year a man who was stalking me for several years went to court and was given a restraining order. For a while, I was wondering what else could possibly happen. But lots of women endure difficult stuff and we just live with it and keep going.'
Key to her resilience and recovery from all the tumult has been, much like her latest heroine, her surroundings. She can walk to the beach in under half an hour and when she sleeps with the windows open, she can hear the sea from her bed. 'Cornwall is my medicine. It feels like a very comforting, healing place to me,' she says.
So much so that, despite previously talking openly about needing anti-depressants for several years, she is now medication-free, her last prescription being some three or four years ago. 'I'm in a good place. I know the difference between depression and a kind of overloaded anxiety that we all get. I feel that I've found the person that I used to be and I'm enjoying life and having fun.'
There's no hankering after her former Buckinghamshire home and, although she acknowledges she didn't anticipate being single and needing to work in her mid-60s, there's no bitterness when she talks about the end of her second marriage.
' Divorce is not a breeze. No matter how you hope it's going to be easy and pain-free, inevitably it isn't. It's difficult and brings up a lot of unpleasant characteristics in everybody. Then, when it's finally over, there's a little bit of time where you have to just let the emotions subside. And then you can start looking back on how things were good and it was unfortunate that it just ran out of steam or whatever it was.'
So, working on her novels comes from a place of need – as well as enjoying writing, Britton reveals she's disciplined at making herself sit at her desk every morning for a few hours before spending time with friends or out in nature in the afternoon.
'I have to be motivated because no one's going to look after me, and it's vital that women are financially independent. We can't say it loudly or more often enough to young women, and there's no shame in it. We need to be able to earn money and look after ourselves.'
She's also become very motivated when it comes to looking after her health, she says. Just before the pandemic, in early 2020, she injured her right shoulder badly while emptying her bin and endured more than two years of severe pain. Partly as a result of this and the repeated lockdowns of that time, she started smoking and didn't focus on exercise or diet.
It was thanks to the NHS surgeon who recommended a full shoulder replacement that she took herself in hand, she says. In the initial consultation he told her to quit smoking and suggested she lose some weight to best prepare for the operation. 'I had a year to get fit for the operation, so did the Couch to 5km app and gave up smoking. That and being pain-free after the operation has been a great gift. It's given me such a boost.'
Now, as well as jogging three times a week, she is also doing weights and stretches to keep herself in good shape and she's noticed her legs getting noticeably stronger and her tummy getting flatter. 'Actually, I'm very proud of myself. People are obsessed with what size you are and this isn't about that. This is about staying fit for my kids so they don't have to worry about me and it's about enjoying this stage of life.'
When I ask what she thinks of the current craze for midlifers to turn to drugs such as Ozempic and Mounjaro to control their weight rather than how she's doing it, Britton is entirely non-judgemental and says everyone needs to choose what is right for them. Moreover, she is passionate about people being allowed to keep their diet tactics private, rather than feeling they must tell everyone about it. She clearly still feels bruised by the tabloid stories about her own choice to have a gastric band back in the days she was presenting This Morning – stories that she now knows only came to light because her phone was hacked.
'I would say to anyone, do what you feel you need to feel good about yourself. If you want to take a medicine to kick start your weight loss then do it and you don't have to tell anyone about it,' she says. 'After my gastric band, I never felt guilty about it. I just thought, I'd do this one thing for me. But that privacy was taken away from me. And I couldn't work out who was saying these things. It had an awful impact on my life. And it damaged my relationship with my mother, who died before the truth came to light.'
Among the pastimes helping her put such terrible hurt behind her is hanging out with a couple of very close friends who live nearby, going by the nicknames of Two Cups and Boo – the three of them enjoying weekly line-dancing classes together complete with 'proper cowboy boots'. And being a regular churchgoer has also become an important part of her life, providing a 'lovely, supportive community of people'.
We can also look forward to Britton being back on our screens from July, when she presents a new programme, Fern Britton: Inside The Vet's, on ITV1 and ITVX, something she's loved filming. This reveals what happens to beloved pets behind closed doors when they need medical treatment. 'We see it all – I've been in on lots of operations and there are some really good stories,' she says. 'It's uplifting and very warm.'
So, looking ahead, what ambitions does she have both professionally and personally?
Her dream, she shares, would be for one of her novels to be made into a movie – possibly The Good Servant, published in 2022, which told the story of a royal governess in the 1930s. 'I'm not betting the ranch on it, but there's some interest and it would be amazing if that happened.' She's also working on the next novel, which she says is currently flowing easily.
Meanwhile, when it comes to family Britton says she's learnt not to ask any of her four adult children about the prospect of grandchildren; 'They all say to me, 'Mother, don't even ask!''
But for herself she isn't ruling out the prospect of finding new love – 'the door is unlocked to that. Not exactly open, but unlocked,' she says. 'In A Cornish Legacy, you'll have to read to the end, but a very nice man arrives for Cordelia. He's called Ray – normal name, normal guy. What you see is what you get and he's great. Someone like that would do.'