Vanessa Feltz: ‘My ex of 16 years was an utter publicity fiend’

I’m utterly adored by lesbians,” beams Vanessa Feltz. It is the first in a number of breathless tales from the daytime TV and radio stalwart. “Once I got to introduce the Weather Girls singing ‘It’s Raining Men’ at the gay and lesbian something-or-other in Finsbury Park and I was driven through the lesbian crowd in a sort of lesbo-mobile being inundated with offers of all kinds of sexual gratification and it was absolutely excellent and I genuinely don’t think I’ve enjoyed anything quite as much in my entire life.”

Feltz doesn’t believe in the pause or the whisper. The full stop either, frankly. We’re meeting in a restaurant near her home in St John’s Wood, for an interview that was nearly derailed by an emergency trip to the hospital. Feltz had kidney stones and now, just a few days post-surgery, she admits to not feeling her best. But Vanessa Feltz operating at a solid four or five is still akin to a mere mortal operating at a nine. Dressed in a flowery pink dress and mismatched gold earrings, she is alert, enthusiastic and as camp as a row of tents. Of course she showed up for her interview. Feltz is potentially the busiest woman in show business, after all. There’s her LBC radio show every Saturday and the near-daily cycle of being a professional talker on This Morning and Jeremy Vine on 5. She’s a fixture at London’s book launches, charity dinners and film premieres, too. Illness forced her to stay home two nights in a row this week. “It’s not like me at all, I couldn’t bear it.”

Somehow, amid her hectic schedule, the 62-year-old has written a memoir. Vanessa Bares All is a tragicomic bombardment of gossip, glamour and heartbreak, a book that propels the reader through Feltz’s vaguely traumatic upbringing, her sexcapades at Cambridge, the successes and scandals of her Nineties TV stardom, the yo-yo dieting that made her tabloid catnip, her very public divorce from a handsome Jewish doctor and subsequent relationship with the pop star Ben Ofoedu, their messy split in 2023, and all the high and low culture in between. The book is funny, frank and moves blissfully fast, Feltz as relentless on the page as she is in person. But ask her to actually sell the thing and she falters.

“Who on earth wants to read a book about me?” she asks, quite sincerely. “I didn’t feel the world would be a bleaker place without it.” She’d written one before – who can forget her 1994 tome of sex tips titled What Are These Strawberries Doing On My Nipples? … I Need Them For The Fruit Salad! – but this one had to be proper. Something juicy and honest and substantive. That’s what a literary agent had told her, anyway. They’d also insisted that people would be interested in her life story. So why not, Feltz reckoned. “And I thought I’d better write it now before I’m so irrelevant that nobody gives a f***.” The fee helped, too. “I’ve always done everything for the money and to pay my mortgage,” she admits, before experiencing a pang of nerves. “Do you think there’s too much in the book about money?” Not really, I tell her, bar a few figures sprinkled here and there. And don’t we all work to pay the bills? “Yes, but you’re not allowed to say it, are you?”

She blames her father for her attitude to money. He was in the lingerie business – and known as “the knicker king of Totteridge” – and instilled in Feltz a deep fear of going broke. “He convinced us the family were always about to starve to death,” she says. “If you think I’m dramatic – and you probably do – just know that he was exceedingly dramatic. Everything seemed an equal level of risk and danger and horror at all times, and that’s why I keep working.” She takes a rare breath. “It’s a basic compulsion!”

Home was chaotic. She was taught to aspire to nothing but landing a husband, while her mother foisted upon her a lifetime of body issues. From the age of nine, Feltz was instructed to diet. The family would be served feasts. Feltz would get a slice of melon. “It felt like a punishment,” she writes. “I didn’t know what I’d done to deserve it.” Today Feltz harbours no ill will towards her mum, who died in 1995. In fact, she misses her and her familial “Yiddish chorus” terribly. Since her split from Ofoedu, she gets lonely – that’s why she leaves the house so often, and makes sure her diary is filled at all times.

“Without that noise, there is just this vacuum of silence,” she tells me. “Isn’t it just an abyss of nothing when no one cares?” She efficiently orders an elderflower cordial from the waitress and immediately picks up where she left off. “I could go to meet you or not meet you. I could wear a dress or I could go naked. No one cares.” She’s been on numerous dates since the end of her relationship, but nothing yet has stuck. “People tell me I should feel liberated and great about it but I feel awful, completely cut adrift, a castaway, isolated, and it’s a horrid feeling.” The register of Feltz’s voice rarely changes, whether discussing lascivious lesbians or deep-seated ennui. It’s always at a steady level of full-on.

Feltz’s career was a bit of an accident. After graduating from Cambridge, where she studied English literature, she bagged the handsome doctor husband her family had wanted for her, and had two daughters. She found writing work in magazines and newspapers. In 1991, a column she wrote for The Jewish Chronicle about the slow extinction of the stereotypical Jewish mother sparked such outrage that she was asked to defend herself on GLR’s (Greater London Radio’s) Jewish London. She did it so well that she kept being invited back. Eighteen months later, she was asked to host the entire show.

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By 1994, she was presenting her own ITV chat show, where she spoke to regular people, and Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast, where she spoke to stars. She became known as a troublemaker, asking a freshly postpartum Madonna if she still had an active sex life, or flirting on-air with actors she fancied. (“I bloody well should have shagged Wesley Snipes,” she opines in the book.) But as her profile grew, so did the criticism. Feltz was gleefully torn apart in the press, and often for her weight. She says today that much of it came as a surprise.

“I genuinely thought that people would think I was quite nice. I didn’t think I was an irritant, or doing anything particularly bad.” She was fine with the criticism of her work but found the personal jibes upsetting. “It was extraordinarily unkind. ‘How dare you be a size eight or 10 and have the temerity to inflict yourself on the public?’ And there was no break from it. This was pre-woke, pre-cancellation, pre-everything! Any woman back then was fair game.”

One gossip rag ran with the immortal headline: “VANESSA TWO STONE BIGGER – FRIENDS FEAR SHE’S DRINKING CUSTARD AGAIN.” She remembers it well. “A Sun reporter accosted me outside the radio [station] at two or three in the morning with a big tub of custard and said, ‘Go on, drink it’.” She rolls her eyes. “How does one even drink custard? It’s so viscous and clingy that it’s not going to trickle down your throat. It’s too thick!” She sighs. “But that wasn’t hurtful, that was just silly. And ultimately you’ve got to just rock on, don’t you?”

In 1998, she was poached by the BBC for a reported £2.7m but it proved to be a poisoned chalice. The Vanessa Show was broadcast after the staid Kilroy, Trisha Goddard was drawing big numbers over on ITV, and then it turned out that some of Feltz’s guests were hired actors. Along with the time she had a meltdown and scrawled nonsense words onto the kitchen table in the inaugural Celebrity Big Brother in 2001, it’s one of those unshakeable touchstones in Vanessa Feltz lore, pounced upon by her critics to this day. She had no idea they were fake, though, and to this day doesn’t know who’d hired them. Although she’s always maintained she did not know they were fake, she became the face of the scandal and the show was swiftly axed. While she doesn’t want pity, she believes she wasn’t adequately supported by her bosses.

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“If The Vanessa Show had been a hit, the BBC would have protected me,” she says. “But it wasn’t. And if you’re not making someone money, they sure as f*** don’t look after you. I went rather speedily from this absolutely fabulous high to being completely deserted in a maelstrom of utter misery. Everything fell apart after that.”

In 1999, Feltz’s husband left her, running off with a younger woman. “It was honestly the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Feltz says. Celebrity Big Brother came after, then a parade of fitness videos, talking-head gigs and love affairs. She began dating Ofoedu – famous for “Turn Around”, his song with the dance music group Phats & Small – in 2005, getting engaged a year later. They were together for 16 years before Ofoedu confessed to multiple affairs. She refers to him in the book not by his name but as “The One-Hit Wonder”. She’s not much more diplomatic today. “He was an utter publicity fiend and therefore exceptionally keen to pop up this red carpet and that red carpet gurning away at the camera,” she says.

Throughout that time, she kept busy. At her peak, she was hosting a show on BBC Radio 2 at 4am, another show on Radio London at 7am, then darting across London on the back of a motorcycle to appear on This Morning. In 2022, she left both stations for a drivetime slot on TalkTV, before leaving that station this year for LBC. She credits her longevity to the fact that she’s still interested. “I don’t see why you’d still speak to people if you weren’t curious about what their answers might be. ‘What’s happened?’ ‘What’s got to be done?’ ‘What’s going on with you?’ ‘Why are you so angry?’ Often you hear people interviewing and they couldn’t care less. But I really, really want to know!”

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Now, though, Feltz has to go – she has dinner plans – but somehow still keeps talking. First about Rolf Harris, who groped her live on air during The Big Breakfast, forcing Feltz to cut to a commercial break. That’s in the book. “He sang his little song, he joined in all the activities – absolutely no one knew what he was up to.” We talk about Mohamed al-Fayed, the late businessman who’s been posthumously accused of sexual misconduct by more than 200 women. “He didn’t rape me or assault me but he certainly had a good bash at getting me up to his bedroom,” she says, of an encounter with him in 2002. It’s not mentioned in the book. “There were lots more I didn’t put in, but I also didn’t want the book to just be list after list of all the people who’ve molested me.”

The check arrives. Feltz talks a bit more. She returns to the subject of feeling underappreciated by the BBC. “I didn’t feel as if I was entitled to have a job until I died, but I always thought that if someone has a unique radio voice and personality, they’d be shown respect.” We talk about “Turn Around”. “I was with him nearly 17 years – just imagine how many times I’ve heard that f***ing song.”

OK, Feltz announces, now she really has to go. But first, she admits that she’s worried. “I’ve felt so limp and listless during this,” she says with a glorious huff. “Was I boring?”

‘Vanessa Bares All’ is available now