Vanessa Feltz is twirling around her living room like a whirling dervish, skirts flying. It’s exhausting just watching her.
She is showing off a dress from the collection she has designed, presumably to give every woman more of a Vanessa Feltz flounce about her.
She suggests I try one of her dresses, declaring she has cracked the conundrum of how to ooze femininity and life-affirming vibrancy ‘without getting your bazongas out’.
Moments later I find myself in her downstairs loo, pulling one of her creations over my head. When I shuffle out, even with my jeans still on underneath, she claps her hands, thrilled I have been Feltz-ified.
‘See? You want to twirl, too, don’t you? Don’t you feel pretty? Feminine? If you wore this tonight, your husband – do you have a husband? – would notice, but in a nice way. He’d say, “Oh, you look lovely” rather than “Cor, I can’t wait to rip it off you!” ’
Blimey. You pop into one of Vanessa’s dresses for a minute and you end up in her head.
What on earth is Vanessa – motormouth broadcaster, agony aunt, weight loss (and gain, and loss again) warrior – doing, not only designing dresses but modelling them for an online fashion brand?
‘I know!’ she says. ‘Believe me, I get the irony. I’m the last person qualified to be a model, but I’m doing it for the invisible women who have been left behind by the runaway train of fashion. There are a lot of us around.’
Vanessa Feltz, 61, wears a £139 floral dress from her collection 4Love.uk
It is just over a year since Vanessa’s personal life imploded. She discovered that the singer Ben Ofoedu (pictured together), her partner of 16 years had cheated on her
I’m not sure Vanessa Feltz, 61, has ever been invisible but still, it’s quite the coup to be granted a face-to-face audience at home.
It really is a fabulous home, a Gothic mansion in London’s very desirable St John’s Wood, once owned by Charles Saatchi. The advertising mogul actually lived next door, but used this house ‘just for parties’.
Yet Vanessa has barely been in her amazing living room for the past year. Last Sunday she announced on Instagram that she had finally spent an evening at home, alone, with only a plate of chicken schnitzel and her own thoughts for company.
Before that, she had made a point of being out every single evening – for 390 days running.
Out where exactly? ‘Out at a function, a party, to the cinema, out anywhere. Just out.’
Why? ‘I just didn’t want to come back to an empty house. I thought it would be silent, lonely, and that I’d be miserable.’ The revelation – and she does seem genuinely thrilled about this – is that it was not miserable.
‘It was fine,’ she says, barely able to believe that the ceiling didn’t fall in or that she didn’t have to summon emergency company, possibly in the form of any random man who happened to be passing.
‘I had my schnitzel. I watched a documentary. I can’t remember what it was on, but it was quite interesting. Then I went to bed.’
Like single people do, day in day out, without fanfare?
‘Yes, and I shouldn’t have built it up to be such a big thing, but I’ve done it now. I can move on.’
It is just over a year since Vanessa’s personal life imploded. She discovered that the singer Ben Ofoedu, her partner of 16 years and the person she had built her home life around, had cheated on her.
As the headlines swirled, it was a case of deja vu. Vanessa’s first marriage, to surgeon Michael Kurer, the father of her children, had ended in similar fashion in 2000. This time, she decided to handle the situation face-on. She went public with her heartbreak, reluctantly notching it up as a qualification for a career as a TV agony aunt.
Now? ‘I think it’s fair to say 2023 was not a good year,’ she says.
‘I was crushed, disappointed, shocked, all those horrible things. But I’ve got through a full year now and I’m still standing. What can you do? You have to get up.’ And twirl? ‘And bloody twirl.’ Any woman who has picked the wrong person to trust will feel for her.
Everything is big about Vanessa Feltz (except her waistline these days, but we will get to that). She is bold and opinionated and hilarious, and wears her heart on her sleeve. She is the sort to love (and lust) epically, too.
Every time she did a magazine interview, she’d share details of life with Ben.
She told one: ‘I was peeling the vegetables for dinner one day – and ended up leaving a trail of celery and leeks for him, leading to me, spread-eagled on the bed in what I hoped was an alluring position!’
Now she must be wishing she’d just made soup.
Unusually, she isn’t willing to share too much about what went wrong, short of saying that ‘once trust has gone, there is nothing’, but the loss is palpable.
‘It’s over, gone, done. I’m not talking about him. I don’t even want his name mentioned. Can you call him X?’
One thing she would like to clear up, though, is the idea, suggested by Ben, that her relationship ended because she was marriage averse.
‘It has been alleged that I don’t want to get married, that I’m against marriage in general. That is not the case. I loved being married.
‘Do I want to get married again? Yes, if I found somebody I adored, who wanted to marry me. It’s not marriage that I reject, it’s marriage to the wrong person.’
Vanessa’s initial reaction to being unhappily single was to try to find a new man. A veteran of the reality TV show circuit, she signed up to Celebs Go Dating but was criticised for being ‘rude’ and ‘arrogant’ to the expert romance-matchers on the show.
However, to be fair to her, she was paired with a man very similar to the one who had just broken her heart. She called the producers out. ‘The last thing I want is some itinerant musician. I’ve had that,’ she said, while politely declining the date.
Have there been other dates? ‘Oh yes, loads. All sorts. Some nice, some not. But you want that spark, don’t you? It would take someone really special, I think.
Vanessa with her daughters Allegra and Saskia in 2011
‘I want it all: the romance, the company. The ideal is someone to grow old with,’ she admits – before adding a note of caution: ‘I have to be careful about who I let in. I think I can say, hand on heart, I am not in an abject panic about it.’
The bigger question is why she needs a man at all. She has a beautiful house! Four adorable grandchildren! She is a broadcasting legend who has been on our screens or airwaves since the early ’90s! She has a first-class degree from Cambridge, so is presumably bright enough to work out herself that she doesn’t need a man?
‘No, I don’t need a man,’ she agrees. ‘I just think I’m better with one. I just don’t see any evidence that I am suited to being single.’
She says she admires women like her friend, the Loose Women presenter Linda Robson, who ‘openly says she can’t be ar**d, and is happy with just her children and her family around her’. But Vanessa is cut from another cloth.
‘Is it because I grew up with parents expecting I’d marry, and marry well? Probably. It’s hard-wired.’
Her showbiz pals have rallied since her split. Her first call was to Rylan Clark, who had been through his own split. ‘He was one of the first to step into the breach.’ Also, Myleene Klass has been another ‘great pal, proper pal’.
Myleene pitched up on Vanessa’s doorstep in 2012 when she suddenly found herself a single mum after splitting from her husband. ‘I’ll never forget her sitting here, with a toddler and a baby. I wanted to scoop her up. She has supported me, as I did her.’
Ditto Holly Willoughby: ‘A genuinely intuitive person, the sort who can tell there is something wrong in your life before you even tell them.’
Having endlessly shared details of her excellent sex life when she was with Ben, has – how to put this – the adjustment been difficult?
‘Oh, I’m not living without sex. Bloody hell!’ she shrieks.
So you are single, not celibate?
‘Yes. I don’t think celibate is ever going to be something you can associate with me. But as a lady, extremely refined, I can’t go further than that. Let’s just say… furrows have been ploughed.’
She was always sex-obsessed, she says (her nickname at school was ‘Vanessa The Undresser’), and it peeves her when people assume that, because she is 61, she might be less interested in sex than she was at 21.
Every time Vanessa did a magazine interview, she’d share details of life with Ben. She told one: ‘I was peeling the vegetables for dinner one day – and ended up leaving a trail of celery and leeks for him, leading to me, spread-eagled on the bed in what I hoped was an alluring position!’
Vanessa shows off her engagement ring as Ben Ofoedu embraces her
‘It seems to me that when you get to an age – I’m not sure what age they mean – there is this assumption that you morph into someone who has “old person” thoughts and feelings.
‘But you don’t. If you liked chocolate mousse before, you’ll still like chocolate mousse. If you loved sex, you’ll still love sex. You don’t suddenly have a yearning to knit a jumper or bake a pie.’
The other thing Vanessa is associated with is weight. She’s been obese, she’s been thin. ‘My problem has always been that I lose weight – then celebrate with a big slice of cake,’ she says, glumly.
She is now a small size 12, but in no mood to celebrate. ‘I haven’t had the appetite to eat for the past year. That’s the other irony. When I am happy, I’m always larger.’
But it never impacted on her body image in bed, she says. ‘God, no! I know it does with a lot of women, and I say to them – relax. If a man wants to have sex with you, he wants to have sex with you.
‘Don’t torture yourself about your belly or your boobs, about the light on or off, about whether you wear a negligee or Spanx. Just enjoy it. Sex? I’m all for it. It’s good for the skin, for the figure, for the soul.’
She does have very good skin.
Little wonder she was once given her own American-style talk show. One of her earliest showbiz interviews was with two young pop stars, who discovered they had gone to number one when she was in the room with them. They were George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.
‘I was only 21. It was one of my first jobs, and they were dancing on the sofa, pulling me up with them.’
A career low was interviewing Madonna, who was seven hours late and incredibly rude. ‘I did have the urge to strike her.’
She spent the bulk of her career – 33 years – at the BBC, and proudly so, even though it meant accepting ‘that I’d probably never do Newsnight, because that’s not how things were at the BBC. You never stepped outside your box.’
Would she have wanted to do Newsnight?
‘I’d have been excellent, but there was no point even asking.’
For 12 years she did two radio shows a day every weekday for the BBC (Early Breakfast on Radio 2 at 4am followed by Breakfast on Radio London at 7am), and was also a frequent face on TV.
In 2022 she quit, defecting to Talk TV. She went, she says, ‘before they got the chance to push me. I’m not saying that would have happened but I did not want to be a sitting duck.’
Why would the BBC have wanted rid of a seasoned and popular broadcaster? Age? Gender?
‘Both of those, and if they could do it to Steve Wright [she’s referencing the controversial letting go of the DJ – one of the BBC’s jewels-in-the-crown] and Ken Bruce. I know he says it was his choice, but I think Ken was like me – he jumped before he was pushed.’
It rankles. ‘The day before I left, I was standing in for Jeremy Vine and I did a stonking interview with the Prime Minister. So should the BBC have let me go?’ She shrugs.
The postscript is that the other day, while at one of those premieres that were keeping her out of the house, who should she spy but the Prime Minister?
‘I was going up the escalator, and there he was. I blew him a kiss. He blew one back. Then we had a chat and he said, “That was a bloody good interview you did on Radio 2.” ’
I can’t quite get past the idea of this love-in with Vanessa and Rishi Sunak, but she charges on.
‘Talk TV offered me my own show. The last time that happened was 1994. Isn’t it funny, you think you’re on the scrapheap, and then another adventure opens up. Who’d have thought you could still be having adventures at this age?’
Vanessa’s clothing collection is available at 4love.uk
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