Susannah Constantine on Strictly, splitting with Trinny and survival: ‘I’ve just had brain surgery – can you not ask me what’s for dinner tonight?’

Look at this big roll of flab!” cries Susannah Constantine, in absolute horror. It’s a clip from 2004’s What Not to Wear – the now somewhat shocking BBC makeover series she co-hosted with Trinny Woodall throughout the Noughties – and Constantine is grabbing a woman’s midriff through her clothes as though it’s a slab of meat. The show, which ran for five seasons, forced those taking part to dress according to body shape and gave a generation of women complexes about big bums, “sausage arms” or “fried egg tits”. It was also a huge hit, turning its presenters into household names. 

“Oh, can you send me that clip?” asks Constantine, 61, sounding slightly bemused; she has forgotten about that episode.

Back then, she was the more empathetic, approachable one with flaws, whom everyone identified with; Woodall the tall, skinny, bossier one. Both were self-deprecating posh girls, infamous for boob-grabbing. They were catapulted to fame with their brutal fashion advice – and overzealous inspections of their unsuspecting victims. Participants had been nominated by friends and relatives, and were looked over by the duo in a 360-degree mirror room.   

Constantine, always nonchalant, with a slightly faraway, dreamy look – one she still has today – would deliver killer lines, such as, “Your dog is better dressed than you are”.  

Looking back on such scenes today, Constantine explains the boob-grabbing was merely practical. “It wasn’t done for any other reason than it was a very quick way to find out a woman’s breast size without her having to strip off or ask her what her bra size was,” says Constantine matter-of-factly from her West Sussex manor house, where antlers protrude from the walls of the sitting room. 

“It’s all the kind of stuff we tell our best friends,” she insists, still defending the show as one that helped millions of women. She admits, though, that “today, obviously, that [approach] wouldn’t work. And I think people got bored of being told what to do.”  

Much later, in 2018, Constantine endured a disastrous stint onStrictly, when she appeared with a pineapple on her head, and partner Anton Du Beke jumped out from inside her extravagant orange ball dress to do the samba. They were the first couple to be eliminated from the show.  

So bad were the nerves that she took Xanax – a tranquiliser – during live performances, she admits, just to cope with the utter humiliation of being so terrible on the dancefloor. 

“And you can see [the effect of the drug],” says Constantine. The ordeal is one that she describes with characteristic honesty in her brilliant memoir Ready for Absolutely Nothing. “I mean, I look like a startled rabbit... completely rigid. And actually, Anton noticed and said, ‘It’s like you weren’t really there.’” 

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Just as public was her incarnation as a roaring Sloane in the early 1980s when, aged 21, she dated the Queen’s nephew David Linley. She claimed in the Daily Mail to have “reeled him in with my signature pasta pesto bake and banana split chaser” and then waited patiently for him to propose over their five-year relationship. It never happened. 

She was a frequent overnight guest at Kensington Palace with him and his mother Princess Margaret, and holidayed with them in Mustique. The late princess became her surrogate mother, and – wait for it – followed Constantine into a toilet cubicle at the Old Royal Navy College in Greenwich after the loo had become blocked. According to one of the more mind-boggling anecdotes in the book, the princess offered to help Susannah cut up the, erm, blockage that wouldn’t flush with a silver cake knife.

“The publishers actually said, ‘we advise you not to put that in’. And I said, ‘Well, no, I want to put it in’ because for me, it’s an anecdote that reveals more than anything, what an amazingly resourceful, down-to-earth, practical woman she was. 

“And you know, I don’t think it was really so much a reflection on the closeness of our relationship. I think she would have done it with anyone,” she tells me. 

Today, Constantine is just as extraordinarily frank, despite living a more low-key life these days. She lives surrounded by woodland with her husband of 28 years, the Danish investment banker Sten Bertelsen, 59, and their three children, Joe, 24, Esme, 22, and Cece, 19. She pops up on the Zoom screen with a bang ­– “Hello!” she says with her bleach-blonde shoulder-length hair and black-rimmed glasses – and at times is eclipsed by a cloud of smoke from vaping.  

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Wearing a moth-eaten cashmere-mix jumper with rainbow colours and ancient Gap jeans, Constantine sits barefoot with her toes painted red oxtail. “Living in the countryside, you know, we don’t see people for days,” she tells me. “I’ll often not wash my hair for two weeks. But I do care... I won’t just stay in my pyjamas all day...”   

It’s been over a decade since she and Trinny appeared on our TV screens, but she’s still publically speaking her mind. She’s got her own podcast, My Wardrobe Malfunction, and regularly gives her Insta followers heart-to-heart updates on her life and never uses filters. The last year has been difficult, health-wise. Getting a hearing aid earlier this year made her feel “so old”. She’s also just survived a very risky operation to treat blocked blood vessels in her neck and brain; she temporarily lost the use of her left arm and suffered pulsatile tinnitus – a condition characterised by a constant rhythmic thumping rather than ringing in the ears. 

During her recent summer family holiday in Greece, she locked herself in the bathroom and sobbed. “I didn’t want to alarm the children. So you make light of it a bit, but inside you’re going, ‘I’ve just had f***ing brain surgery: can you not ask me what’s for dinner tonight?’” That was her “feeling sorry for myself”, she self-judges, perhaps a little harshly.

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Whatever is going on, she never stands still for long. After two moderately successful semi-autobiographical novels, Ready for Absolutely Nothing was greeted last year by sparkling reviews – the paperback is published on 7 September. While it’s highly entertaining, it’s also full of vulnerability and heartbreak and reads like a novel; a social commentary of a time gone.  

The London-born author had a hugely privileged childhood with her elder sister Annette. Their upper-middle class parents had a “hands off” approach to child rearing that meant Constantine relied on staff to meet her emotional needs – and she found solace in her pony Dandy.  

Her great-grandfather on her father’s side had been the fifth wealthiest man in Britain in 1922 having made his fortune in shipping. But Constantine’s father, Joe, who imported and exported goods from Russia, soon burnt through the family cash with his extravagant lifestyle that aspired to match the aristocracy. Constantine’s mother, Mary-Rose, was bipolar and would “disappear into her illness” – eventually descending into alcoholism.   

The family split their time between their London home in South Kensington and Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, where they rented a farmhouse on the Duke of Rutland’s estate. Constantine was a “society bride in training” and her best friend was the Duke’s daughter Theresa. It was a world where, she observes, children looked the same because all their parents shopped at Peter Jones in Sloane Square – and she took trips on the 52 bus to Harrods food hall. When her Yorkshire terrier died, she convinced her mother to post its body to her Oxfordshire boarding school, St Mary’s in Wantage, so that she could give him “a proper little funeral”.  

Later, as a King’s Road party girl, she moved in rarified circles – while dating Linley in the 1980s she met Elton John who performed for the royals at the late Queen Mother’s home at Royal Lodge in Windsor.  

Constantine became his close friend – and still is. “We are very, very close friends. I probably speak to him more than anyone else – almost daily,” she tells me. But she found his last shows “very odd”. Why? “I find it quite uncomfortable watching him: Elton John on stage. And then there’s Elton John, who’s our friend, and not being able to put the two together.”  

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It was during the dizzying heights of her career, when married to Bertelsen, that Constantine began to unravel and finally hit rock bottom with alcoholism, as her career with Woodall came to an end after 14 years.  

The duo had moved to ITV in 2006 to make Trinny and Susannah Undress – they supposedly helped couples resolve marital problems by improving the spouses’ outfits.  Ratings slumped and the show was axed after two series. It was followed in 2008 by ITVs Trinny and Susannah Undress the Nation – a show known for its “shock tactics” with topless guests shamed as “dowdy milking machines” or “sags and bags”. 

“Compassion wasn’t allowed to shine through,” says Constantine about the TV producers who encouraged them to be mean. “We hated making that show – it was the nail in our coffin.” 

The presenters went their own ways – Woodall now runs a multimillion-pound make-up company. They are still close friends – “but our lifestyles are polar opposite,” says Constantine. “Glamorous doesn’t come into my life – whereas hers is glamorous.” They were a natural double act. While friends would tell Constantine that she was being upstaged by Woodall, it never worried her; Woodall was the more driven one, she claims. “Trinny was the accelerator and I was the brake.” 

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The ending of their partnership was devastating. “It was like having half of me taken away ... We made a whole. And suddenly, she wasn’t there,” says Constantine. She looks a bit bereft. “It was destabilising. And that’s when my drinking really kicked in.” Woodall, herself a recovering alcoholic who has been sober for 33 years, never confronted Constantine as their TV career switched to the shopping channel QVC in 2012. 

In 2013 after a drunken night in Cornwall, Constantine hit rock bottom when she blacked out, broke bones in her back and wet herself. Soon after, she walked into her first AA meeting. She’s now nine years sober, after a few relapses. 

“During my time on television, and... that period of my life, I think I was performing. It was because I was painfully shy, and so it was having to kind of create this persona of someone who was much more confident on the outside, and I’m sure, looking back, that was helped by alcohol. Until the alcohol controlled me rather than the other way around,” she says. 

“And since I’ve stopped drinking, I’ve sort of become the person I was as a child... kind of keeping my head down…” Really? It’s hard to imagine her as a wallflower. She maintains that she was. “It is that thing, almost, of being the girl at the back of the room. It’s actually what the book was going to be called.” Of course, she grew up far too outspoken for that – ready, one might say, for absolutely everything.

‘Ready for Absolutely Nothing’ by Susannah Constantine is out in paperback on 7 September