S8, Ep7: Vanessa Feltz, broadcaster

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Hello there, before we start I wanted to let you know that this episode contains some swearing and themes that may not be appropriate for all listeners. I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian. A podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life. because even as a restaurant critic, I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa. Each week, I ask my guests to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:54Hello, friends. Now today, I've got a TV and radio legend joining me. A woman once known as the British Oprah. She's been crowned the hardest working woman in television. It's Vanessa Feltz. I've just got to get these eyelashes on before she gets here. i can actually put lashes on in the dark in the back of a taxi i've done this many times i've also taken them off coming out of tv studios throwing them rather unattractively on the floor like little spiders now some people and they're wrong say that there's a cut-off age for false eyelashes to which i reply no no there is not things with lashes is for me it's the one thing I have and when I put them on someone will say oh you look nice what have you done and I always say casually oh I just slept so well last night that's absolute rubbish the real answer is these little suckers my trusty false eyelashes I buy them in multiple packs in the middle of the night.

2:09And then they go on like this. Done. Now, broadcaster Vanessa has navigated a 35-year career in the public eye. She cut her teeth on Good Morning, interviewed celebrities on the big breakfast bed, and hosted her own TV show, Vanessa. This was the first ever British US-style talk show. She's presented breakfast shows on BBC Radio 2 and BBC London at the same time. She went from one studio to the other. And these days, she hosts a Saturday show on LBC. Now, beside her broadcasting accomplishments, her weight and her love life has played out across the tabloids for decades. Not least, her very public split from her fiancé.

2:57Her memoir is out now. It's called Vanessa Bears All. Frank, funny and fearless. And she is absolutely all of these things. A motto I have lived by, no joke here, is WWPD. What would Vanessa do? And what would she do in the kitchen too? Whatever she's snacking on, I'm having some.

3:28Vanessa Feltz, welcome to Comfort Eating. This is just fabulous. Thank you so much for having me. Vanessa, I mentioned in my intro that you're publishing your autobiography, but I'd like to take you back to your first foray into writing. Your first book was called What Are These Strawberries Doing On My Nipples? I Need Them For The Fruit Salad. I think I want to ask, have you ever actually balanced strawberries on your nipples? I think it matters if you hull the strawberry or not. I think if you hull the strawberry and you make just the right sort of indentation or cavity, depending on the, I suppose, the perkiness and the sort of gravity element of your nipples, you might be able to.

4:07If you're lying down, I'm sure you'd manage it for a short while. If we were doing a charity event and we had to keep some sort of fruit on our nipples for five, I'm going to say 10 seconds, which one would you choose? A dried apple ring. I think I could keep that there for a few years. Take it out, have a lick, put it back in your bra again. It'd be fine.

4:34The time has come for you to reveal your comfort food. It's wafting from under. It smells wonderful, don't you think? It smells incredible. That smell, you know, will impregnate your curtains and in 30 years' time you'll breathe deeply and think of me. I'll have it, I'll have it. It's never leaving you, never. What have you brought for me today? Reveal your snack for Nesta Phelps. This is what they call, you know, soul food extraordinaire. There are plays about it. There are books about it. They also call it Jewish penicillin. and it's chicken soup. And as you can see, there's beautiful steam and aroma just wafting off it.

5:06We have heard about chicken soup on this podcast before, but never has anyone brought it. See, to me, that looks like the genuine real deal. Yeah, this is the real thing. And it's obviously made with kosher chicken. Now, I'm going to say, I have got Jewish people close to my heart in my life. good and whenever i've attempted to make chicken soup yeah they have just kind of laughed at what i've come up with because what i've always come up with is sometimes a chicken soup you know like uh like a cream of a chicken oh god no no no exactly not that and then i did this now this is a very pale translucent consistency i dared to put floating vegetable in it well you see you could you could have carrots not often it has a whole carrot in it or lots of whole carrots yeah often it has loction in it which is the yiddish word for vermicelli my grandma babs used to make the loction which is you make sheets of very very thin well you call it pasta these days you certainly didn't call it that those days and then you'd hang it over the back of a kitchen chair and then slice it homemade i know and you could also have the jewish equivalent of a wonton which we would call a canadal yes in there or a krepluch so you've so it's very crowded soup you've got you've got your carrot, your loction, your canadol, your krepluch, all floating around.

6:28Then you might put a few little crouton, which are called mandolin. They might be in there. So, you know, you can barely get the spoon in, quite honestly. Okay. So I've been misinformed. You can have floating things in this soup. You not only can, but should. What is the recipe? I cannot tell you because I'd have to kill you. Nobody can ever give anyone their chicken soup recipe. You just can't do it. It can't be done. And if I did, I'd obviously have to leave out a key ingredient and you'd be thinking, that just doesn't taste like Vanessa. Is there something I'm missing here? What is that thing?

6:56And I would never be able to tell you, but I can't tell you because obviously both my grandmas went to the grave forcing me to swear that I would never, never reveal. And my mother too, that's three, three women who would wreak wrath on me from beyond the grave if I were to tell you. It's not that I don't love you or like you. I do or admire you. I do admire you, but it's just something it's too much to ask me to do because I would be haunted forever. Do your daughters know the recipe? Well, I told them I could never tell them. They think they know it. Oh, Vanessa. But they don't really know it.

7:27It's an approximation. I think they think they know how to achieve it, but I can't, I just can't spell it out. Even though they're my freshman. On my deathbed, I might do it. On my deathbed, there's my final thing. The chicken soup recipe. And then with any lack, I'll just keel over just before. You've got to put in the... It'll be like that. Who taught you the recipe? Grandma Sybil. I got it for my grandma's. I had two grandma's, grandma Babs and grandma's Sibyl. And their chicken soup was completely different from one another's. One was very dark. One was very pale. One tasted a bit sweet. One tasted much more salty.

8:01They were very different. One had little globules of oil floating on the top. When you say that was grandma Sibyl's recipe, do you feel a sense of guilt right away that somebody's, that the other grandma is listening? Oh, now that's a very difficult thing to grapple with. Now you mention it that way. I feel terrible about it yes I didn't realize how terrible I felt till you pointed it out now I'm absolutely I mean if you could be Jewish and crucified that's how I feel I mean shocking absolutely shocking yeah it's why would I why would I choose but what if I said I would choose Grandma Babs's chopped liver recipe over Grandma Sybil's chopped liver recipe and very very different chopped livers one one sort of almost like almost golden in color another much darker brown one with the livers much more pungent one with the livers much softer and sweeter same dish tastes totally different.

8:50The person's, this is definitely not your mother, Valerie's recipe, but she did train at Le Cordon Bleu. I know. My mother was a very, very posh cook in the Totteridge, which is where I grew up. I always call it the Beverly Hills of North London, but in the Totteridge of the 60s and 70s, the dinner party was everything, just everything. They threw formal dinner parties. These are these Jewish mercantile classes in Totteridge. I think they thought they were living in Brideshead. I don't know what they thought they were doing, but they had these very formal dinner parties all the time. And you were a little girl.

9:22Could you could you hear that? I was allowed to serve the canapé. When I got to the point where I was really starving because my mother had started dieting me, I used to dash in and just take a couple of the chocolates and then rearrange the chocolates, hoping that they wouldn't realise that some of them had gone. Because while they were eating dinner, the little glass dishes with the chocolates in were in the drawing room, which was called the drawing room, not the sitting room or the lounge. How old were you then? How old were you when you first run in and grab some chocolates? Nine. And my mother used to write down what she'd served, the food that she'd served, the people who'd been invited and the food in a special book, so that if the Goldbergs or the Coens came again, they wouldn't have the same thing.

10:00What are the Coens getting on an average night when your mother's just doing glam, Brideshead revisited, what's on the table? was the hors d 'oeuvre would sometimes be an egg mousse with deviled sauce. And the egg mousse, it was very Abigail's party, that the egg mousse would be a ring, you know, a 3D ring. And then it would be served with deviled sauce, which was a very dark red, violent red Halloween looking kind of devilish tomato sauce, which you would spoon over. But the egg was, you know, just rigid and was cut in slices. I love the fact that she's taken a deviled egg, which is meant to be like a tiny little delicate thing, And what she's made is a really big one.

10:40So that's the starter. Yes, and then the main course might be, I can just hear her voice saying it, she's awfully posh, and her voice would say, Berf en Croute Wellington. Which is not an easy thing to get right. And very expensive to make. She used to say it's very expensive. You need the really, really good cuts of the beef, but then you've got to make your own kind of mushroom puree to go around it and then roll it. Half pastry, a big deal, wasn't it? But delicious. Delicious. but the dessert in retrospect was incredibly funny and actually I was quite young when I realised it was quite funny because it was called Bomb, B-O-M-B-E, Bomb Surprise.

11:15Do you know there is a surprise in a James Bond film and it actually has a bomb in it? No, but my mother probably knew. It's in Diamonds Are Forever. Is it? And someone hides a bomb in the Bomb Surprise. What's in the middle? You get your pudding, Mason. You dip your sponge fingers in your, is it sherry or is it brandy or something? And so then you line the whole of the inside of the pudding basin with the sponge fingers. And then in the middle, you put whipped cream, tinned fruit cocktail drained. Hang on, this is not the end. You fill the bomb with the fruit cocktail and cream. Then you put more sponge fingers dipped in the sherry or the brandy and a plate on the bottom.

11:57And then you put the whole thing in the fridge so it hardens and hardens. Then you melt chocolate in the saucepan. then when it's really really hardened you take it out of the fridge and then you so it looks like a bomb standing and then you pour the chocolate all over it so it's all covered then you put it back in the fridge so the chocolate hardens but you're in heaven this is the 70s isn't it and in the 70s this is so exciting because it's almost like we were living in sepia at that point and then there's this really exciting thing but you're nine years old are you allowed any of it? not much and the older I got the less I was allowed probably none really because my mother was always dieting me.

12:36Was your mother on a diet? Well, my mother, I think, was meant to be on a diet because I think my grandma was dieting my mother. My mother was dieting me. Did your mother ever cook anything normal like just fish? Yeah, but she really resented it. She thought it was just unglamorous, boring, just pedestrian, just an absolute drag. Your mother is like a character from a BBC One Christmas drama. She's a bit like Margot Ledbetter, that type of thing. both of your grandmothers are in and out of the house and you're living in this big jewish community in north london okay i can't get a handle on this how devout was your upbringing not my my upbringing was not devout but it was incredibly vividly jewish every single second did you show face at synagogue yes but not very often a couple about three times a year you said that in your house when you were growing up there was like this greek chorus going on at all times, any time you decided to do anything at all, people just bursting in with opinions of your life.

13:36If you tried to put on a pair of shoes, somebody would come in and go, you can't wear them. That's exactly right. In my autobiography, I've called it the Yiddish chorus. The really peculiar thing about it is that the opinions were mostly critical. They weren't only critical, but they were largely critical. You know, you're washing your hair. What are you washing your hair for? You've just had a cold. Don't wash your hair now, wash it tomorrow. Aren't you going to a party on Saturday? Wait till Saturday. Wash it then. Why don't you go to the hairdresser? Go to the hairdresser. Don't wash your hair.

14:02Valerie, she's washing her hair. Why is she washing? Norman, I don't know why she's washing her hair. And then Grandma Babs would phone up. Grandma Sybil would come round. What's she doing? She's washing her. What's she washing before dinner? Doesn't she want to wait till after dinner? Won't the soup get cold? There was just a whole cacophony of opinion, mostly critical, but I miss it terribly. Without it, life feels so quiet, so utterly pointless. And there's just no point at all doing exactly what you want to do without a few thousand people telling you not to do it. You sailed through school and into Cambridge University where you got first.

14:33In your family, were you the brainiac outlier or was it just always on the cards? My mother had read History at LSE. So, yes, it was always on the cards. And I was highly academic. And I, you know, I was good at school. I was terrible at everything that wasn't academic work. I was terrible at sport, terrible at art. I was terrible at everything except, you know, Latin and Greek and English literature and history and things like that. And I was good at all of that. Not good at maths, not good at science, but good at all of the arts type stuff. It sounds like your mother was incredibly clever. My mum.

15:06She was very clever. And if my father had been more financially successful, she would have really been in her element. She would have been magnificent as the wife of a great benefactor. You're like that. What? You can talk to anybody about anything. I get a bit shy sometimes in real life. I honestly would never have thought that you felt nervous about going to. Because I get very anxious about it. If I was in your position now and I had to go there, I'd feel very anxious. I would style it out. And when I get there, I'll burn bright and fast and be absolutely fantastic. But up until the moment I put my finger on the doorbell, I don't want to go.

15:42Exactly. Same.

15:49This marks your 35th year in the public eye. You have now had more time in the public eye than out of it. you've been entertaining us half of your life and now you've written an autobiography it feels like this enormous moment and I wonder why now because your journey is certainly not over and neither is it 15 years in where by that point most people have written about three yeah I mean they I just thought it would be I just didn't know what to put in it um and also I always remember a translation by Toni Harrison of Molière's Le Misanthrope, where the line that really stood out for me was, why write at all?

16:34So did I feel compelled to tell the world about my life? Absolutely not at all. Did I want to? No, not at all. And then an enterprising literary agent said to me, well, you know, you should really do an autobiography. I said, no one will want it. I don't know what to put in there. I don't think I should. Definitely not. So why don't I go and see if anyone cares less? And they did. And then there was a bidding war for it. And then I suddenly thought, well, look, if I wait 10 more years, A, I might be dead and B, everyone will have forgotten me. But I thought this is the time to do it now. So there is literally nothing in that for about 11 sentences, which wasn't self-doubt.

17:08I didn't think, you know, what people really need to know is my life story. Let them read about me and let them read more about me for another 337 pages. That's what everyone really must do. I didn't feel like that. I really didn't feel like that. Now I've written it. I feel completely differently. Of course, now I feel everyone should read it and they'll all benefit from reading it. It'd be good. I don't know, not that, but I hope they enjoy it is the main thing, I suppose. I think that people come along with, often they talk about their memoirs and they present this picture that it was very cathartic.

17:40It's the exact opposite of cathartic. It's an absolute stinker doing it. You know, the horrible things that have happened to you that you've tried your very, very best to put behind you. You've tried not to dwell on them. You've tried not to think of them. I mean, you paid a therapist thousands and thousands to pilot you and guide you through the bloody thing. But I really found it hard. Did you ever feel like you wished that you'd never signed the bloody deal? Yes. In order to render this absolutely horrible episode of my life worth reading about, I've got to write it with as much oomph and as much kind of pizzazz as I can.

18:11But really, it's incredibly sad and shows all my very poor choices. And, you know. And are you ready for people to start coming up to you, strangers, and talking to you about the things that have happened? I don't know. I wonder what it'll be like. I can't really imagine it. I want to go back to those final moments before your life completely changed. The year is 1988. You're living in a third floor flat in North London with your then husband and a daughter, with the possible glint of a second child on the way. Paint me a picture of that time in your life in the late 80s. Life was about finding the husband.

18:54I was under tremendous pressure to get married and then being married and then having a baby, which I did. And then trying to sort of keep my head above water, our heads above water financially, because it was a junior hospital doctor earning very, very little and there was no means of earning any more. So it was all kind of like looking after the baby and making Friday night dinner. Were you happy? Yeah, I was very happy. and then I and then I wrote an article for the Jewish Chronicle about the fact that the Jewish mother is no more the Jewish mother of legend and fable no longer exists you know she's just at the gym leaving her children with an au pair or something like that and then it looked as though the Jewish Chronicle building was going to be torched by objectors they just couldn't bear me to dismantle this beloved stereotype it was an appalling thing to have done and then I was asked onto the radio to talk about it I was dead scared and never been on the radio in my life I never thought of being on it.

19:42And it was one of those moments where the green light came on. And instead of doing what most people do, which is think, oh, God, now what shall I say? Oh, dear, I'm all fingers and thumbs. I'm coughing. I'm spluttering. I don't know what to do. I was much, much funnier than I'd ever heard myself be before with the microphone on. And I really, really enjoyed it. And all I really wanted to do was go and do that thing again. So life did change in a way. But you got on to radio by writing something that dismantled the idea of the kind of Jewish housewife who's just really happy, cooking and cooking and cooking all the time.

20:13You say money was quite tight. What are you throwing down at that point for people? What are you cooking? I was cooking. Well, that was a marvellous moment. This was a seminal moment when M &S suddenly started producing ready-made, you know, ready to eat. You just put it in the oven, salmon on crout. Oh, we thought that was just, I mean, that was a dinner party in itself. But Marxist food hall back in the day was just... Couldn't really afford it, but for dinner parties, could just get, you know, six salmon on croûts, serve it with, I think, probably salad or new potatoes. I don't know. Probably a bomb surprise for dessert, I should think.

20:50I was going to say, did the bomb surprise make a... Come on, of course. 100%.

21:05you land the Vanessa show on ITV 1994 yeah it is the UK's version of Oprah's tell all talk show I was second year at uni and I remember seeing you for the first time it is a massive hit tell Tell us about the moment you take that call. So it was July the 15th, 1994, and we were moving a house that day. And my mother and my then mother-in-law were helping unpack all the boxes and the crates and everything and telling me off as usual. So I was being told off for every single thing that came out of the crate. I was getting a good telling. I can't believe you're using those casserole dishes. Look at them.

21:44A disgraceful situation. Where's the matching saucepan lid for the saucepan? I was tired. I was being told off, absolutely told off and told off and told off. and also we were moving to a house that really in most really we couldn't afford the mortgage was absolutely huge um and it was in the most terrible nick the kitchen was bright orange there was a grass green carpet in the sitting room the heating was creaking and not really working the everything about it needed to be ripped out and done again every single thing was really really been about i think at least 30 years without them redecorating or anything like that but we didn't have any money to do any of it and we can't afford to buy a punitive strawberries and i could never ever buy a bunch of flowers ever because that's you know frivolous and can't afford it i was yeah really really skinned totally totally skinned because every single penny that we really didn't have had been scraped together to put down for the you know deposit on this house which would have been really nice if we could do it up and my my mother and mother-in-law were just goading me and goading me and it was hot it's fed up and then the landline rang and i didn't think even i knew the landline number it was only we hadn't even been there one hour i don't think so i picked up the phone thinking it must be a call for the old people who lived there before.

22:50And it was the guy who became my boss at Anglia Television saying, Vanessa, they've commissioned the show. We're doing it. In fact, you've got to go to New York the day after tomorrow and, you know, to get all the clothes that you need because you're so fat you can't wear any clothes from England. So there aren't enough in the whole country. So you have to go to New York where they've got enough fat lady clothes that will look okay on the TV. But we need to go over there because it's being co-produced by Multimedia, who is a big American company that make Donahue, Sally, Jesse, Raphael. And Jerry Springer, which at the time was an abject failure.

23:20And, you know, you're going to New York, you know, on Thursday. So I went from I can't afford a bowl of gruel to feed my children in this wreck of a house to having my own TV talk show and flying to America. And I said, can I bring the children? Can I bring my husband? Because we couldn't afford a holiday that year. You must be joking. And they went, yeah, sure. So the next two days later, we were all just flying to New York and staying at the Helmsley Palace Hotel and having a total blast. and it went from absolute abject penury to the potential for great glamour and excitement. If there's ever any part of that story that means that the youth of today should realise they've never had it so good, it's the fact that you ended up in New York because there was no clothes to put on in Britain.

24:06Literally the truth. Suit, a TV suit, because you wore suits in the 90s. Yeah, there weren't any. You could have gone to Evans Outsize and got maybe two max. and then Dawn French had a range called 1647 because 47 % of British women were oversized 16 but that was much more art teachery clothes. It wasn't really television suits. They went snappy. So they literally were not the clothes to buy and multimedia said I had to have a different suit every day for every show must be a new suit. Okay, so you've landed The Vanessa Show and then after that it is go, go, go. What do you remember about that time?

24:39Did food play a part in this whirlwind? The Vanessa show was not hobnobbing at the grouch show or even meeting a single television person. It was just being driven in an empty car, except for the driver and me to Norwich, getting out, making six shows and coming home again. That was it. And apologizing the whole time to my husband, to my parents. I'm sorry I was away. I'm getting back as quickly as I possibly could. Were they happy? Were they happy? No. They were like, what are you doing? It's vulgar. It's crass. It's American. did anybody around you support you um not in in your house not really no and and so I used to leave very very late on the I think it was the Thursday night so after I bathed the children put them to bed then I left and then it was this long at least three hour journey to Norwich and then I come straight back on the Friday having done three shows on you know maybe it was maybe It was Wednesday night.