Fern Britton teeters
into the room on stilt-like stilettos, self-consciously tugging the hem of her
skintight Alexander McQueen mini dress. She looks radiant. Seven years after
controversially losing five stones with the aid of a gastric band, she still
enjoys showing off an hourglass figure.
‘I think it’s important
that women are able to dress the way they wish to dress,’ says the former Good
Morning television presenter. ‘If I want to wear a short skirt, then I’m going
to.’
She is, of course,
correct. Simply because a woman wears figure-hugging or revealing clothes, she
shouldn’t be accused of inviting unwelcome attention. And that is a
subject with which Fern is all too familiar.
All week an argument
has raged over Nick Ross’s controversial remarks in his new book, Crime,
serialised in The Mail on Sunday.
Discussing the
incendiary issue of rape, he pointed out that ‘not even in the licentious days
of Charles II in the 17th Century was it acceptable for women to dress as
provocatively as they have done in Western culture since the 1960s.’
Predictably, his
analysis provoked outrage – and some degree of support, too – when he reported
that, for some women at least, ‘rape isn’t always rape’.
While the offence is
always reprehensible, he said, some women must take a share of responsibility
for what happened to them.
Fern, 55, is
well-qualified to contribute to this difficult debate. She knows from bitter
personal experience the dilemma many women face after suffering the traumatic
ordeal of a sexual assault.
At 21 she was raped in
her home by a man who had asked her on a date. She didn’t report it to police
because she felt she had been at fault.
She chooses her words
with care. ‘Nick’s a great guy, but he’s not a woman... he’s not somebody who
has been invaded in a way that he didn’t wish to be invaded.The fact is that
rape is rape. If you don’t want it, but someone does it against your wish, then
it is a violation.
‘Even if you get a bit
drunk or if you go back to the person’s flat, once you say no then it’s no.
‘In my case I was stone
cold sober. The man came to my flat and didn’t want to leave, even when I told
him to. He was someone I had recently met and who had come to pick me up and
take me to dinner.
‘Afterwards I shut
down. I didn’t want anyone to know about it. I just wanted to pretend it never
happened.’
It was an act of
kindness when she was living in Cambridge that led to the terrifying attack.
She had taken two lost dogs to a police station and their owner had obtained her phone number to say thank you.
The man seemed
‘pleasant and nice’ and she accepted his invitation to dine out – twice. On the
second occasion he arrived at her flat to pick her up bearing two bottles of
champagne. She took them to the fridge and when she returned to the living
room, he was doing press-ups wearing only his underwear.
‘My first thought was
that it was a joke, but within seconds my ha-ha! turned into Oh God,’ she later
wrote.
‘I didn’t have a phone
at the flat, mobiles hadn’t been invented, and before I knew what was happening
he was up on his feet and trying to kiss me – pushing me against the wall, then
down on to the floor. I was absolutely terrified and thought, “I’m done for –
what do I do?” She said no, but he overpowered her.
The attack lasted all
night and in the morning the man dressed and left. Fern did not speak publicly
about it until she included it in her memoirs in 2008.
She didn’t report the
attack to the police because she felt she had put herself in a dangerous
position by letting a stranger into her flat and because: ‘I didn’t have
bruises and he didn’t hit me.’
The trauma remained
with her for years. ‘I didn’t go out with a man for a very long
time. I shut it out, blocked it from my mind and got on with my life. I didn’t
tell anyone.
‘Somehow you can still
feel guilty. I felt that I should have done something. I think the majority of
women who find themselves in a situation where something happens that they
didn’t want, even if it was not full-blown rape, they won’t report it.’
It took many years for
her to understand that she had been raped and it wasn’t her fault. ‘I didn’t
have any therapy. I just put it down to experience, learned from it and moved
on,’ she adds.
It’s not a response she
advocates for everyone but she says it’s time women stopped seeing themselves
simply as victims.
‘We must all take some
responsibility for our actions. When you’re very young you don’t know the
message you’re sending. You don’t know you’re sexually attractive, but the
messages are being received.’
Younger women, she
insists, should be aware of how they are perceived and the situations they find
themselves in – a point with which, as it happens, Ross would very much agree.
Now the author of seven
books – three on cookery, one autobiography and three novels – Fern has
concentrated on her writing career since leaving daytime television in 2009.
We meet in a hotel in
Powys, Wales, where she is promoting her third fictional work, The Holiday
Home, at a literary lunch organised by Good Housekeeping magazine.
She is due back on
television this month in a new ITV series, Secrets From The Workhouse, in which
celebrities discover ancestors from the wrong side of the tracks.
Fern was devastated to
find out that her maternal great, great, great grandfather, Friend Carter,
scraped a living working on the land but was forced to enter the workhouse to
get free medical treatment when his son, Jesse, was taken ill.
Jesse was then sent to
a teaching hospital, where he died and his body was given up for dissection as
the family could not afford a funeral.
She was distraught to
learn of her relatives’ struggle to make ends meet and the harsh conditions
they faced. Friend Carter found himself back in the workhouse at the age of 91,
shortly before he died.
The experience has left
her thinking more about her own mortality and the way society views
death. Most people, she says, are in denial about the end of life.
‘We don’t want to talk
about it and we don’t plan for it. The trouble is that medicine has told us
that we can beat anything, live longer and stay young forever.’
She thinks death should
be embraced and has planned her own funeral. ‘It’s all written down in my will
and the kids have been briefed,’ says Fern. ‘After the service, I want to be
cremated and my ashes tipped from a speedboat off the coast of Cornwall on a
moonlight night out over the waves. The boat and urn must be covered by lots of
fairy lights, because I love fairy lights.’
Friend Carter would be
proud to know that his descendants went on to prosper.
Sitcom actor Tony
Britton is Fern’s father and her mother Ruth was also an actress. Fern’s TV
career began as a continuity announcer in Plymouth for Westward TV more than 30
years ago. Since then she has presented BBC’s Breakfast Time, GMTV, London News
Network’s London Tonight, Ready Steady Cook and This Morning.
Fern, who is rumoured
to have left This Morning after discovering that co-presenter Phillip
Schofield was getting paid more than her, is keen for people to realise she is
a more than a friendly, smiling face.
‘People think I’m just
a silly old girl next door, but I do have a brain. I’m no Stephen Hawking, but
I’m a member of Mensa and I have a doctorate for services to broadcasting from
Buckinghamshire New University. All right it’s honorary, but I’m a doctor.’
Such things, she says,
give her a ‘quiet internal boost’ because she feels she squandered her years in
school and never went to university. It is her family, however, that provides
the essential ballast in her life, especially her husband, chef Phil Vickery,
52. They have been married for 13 years and share their sprawling
Buckinghamshire home with their daughter Winnie, 11, and Fern’s children by her
previous marriage, twins Jack and Harry, 18, and daughter Grace, 16.
The couple met while
working on Ready Steady Cook.
‘It was fabulous to
have found someone I was hopelessly in love with and who was prepared to take
on a divorced woman with three children. He’s very loving, funny and great with
the kids. He’s my best mate.’ But does the comfort of domesticity match the
excitement of live television? She smiles and replies with a pragmatism that
suggests she knew it was time to move on after more than 30 years of daily
television appearances.
‘Honestly, I don’t have
hunger to return to that. I think that when you’ve had your turn then you’ve
got to let somebody else have a turn,’ she says. While agreeing that some men
have a longer turn than women, she insists that a lot don’t.
‘Of course it’s not
fair that once women start knocking on a bit their experience is kicked out the
door. But then women are usually more pragmatic and we have lives that mean we
don’t need the constant attention from work. I’m really still productive in so
many other ways.’
Age and life
experiences have brought confidence and contentment. But it took Fern many
years and much personal anguish to come to terms with the assault she suffered
as an innocent young woman. Yet she still thinks her decision not to go to the
authorities after her rape was the right one for her.
Secrets From The
Workhouse, ITV, June 25
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