Janet Street-Porter talks being off the leash at 80 and bringing her live show to Scotland
The Loose Women panellist has an opionion on everything and she’s not afraid to share it.
It would be easy to be intimidated by Janet Street-Porter, Loose Women legend, broadcaster and author, with her long journalism and TV career, motor mouth and propensity to tell it like it is. Except that she has a great ability to put you immediately at ease with her self-deprecation, humour and grounded geniality. Even when she’s going off on a rant.
There will be plenty of those in her one woman show, Janet Street-Porter Is Still Off The Leash at 80! when the p***ed off pensioner makes good use of her senior railcard and heads north for four Scottish dates at the end of this month.
There will also be comedy, tragedy and gossip, as she talks about her passions and peeves and she’ll be answering audience questions in the shows in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen.
Nothing is off limits as Street-Porter talks about everything from her fractious relationship with her mother to alleged Loose Women ‘feuds’ and says the things she can’t say on live TV. Not that she’s known for holding back over the past decade perched on her swivel stool as a panellist.
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Born in London in 1946 the daughter of an electrician and a school dinner lady turned civil servant, she entered journalism in her early twenties at Petticoat magazine, moved to become a fashion writer and columnist at the Daily Mail then the Evening Standard and by 1999 was editor of The Independent on Sunday. Moving into TV and radio, she became a senior executive at the BBC and has presented TV series on art, walking, cooking and architecture, and appeared on I’m A Celebrity, Masterchef, numerous panel shows, and written two best-selling memoirs, Baggage and Fall Out, as well as two self-help guides, Life’s Too F***ing Short, and Don’t Let the B*****ds Get You Down!
Street-Porter pops up on the screen with her conker-shiny hair and chunky glasses at the home she shares in Norfolk with fifth husband, restaurateur Peter Spanton who she married in January this year, and immediately disarms me with “Hello! I hate what I look like.”
Next she moves on to the state of the wall behind her. “I'm not in a squat. I'm in my office. It was a derelict milking barn and the wall is where all the cows weed. The builders were going ‘what do you want us to do with that wall?’ Well leave it, because that's what it's about. It actually looks like I had it quite expensively painted, but it’s decades of cow wee.”
Architecture is one of her passions and in her time she has commissioned two houses by leading architects, one of which is now Grade 2 listed, and is an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. It was an architect she originally planned to be.
“At school I did history of architecture and had a boyfriend - who needless to say, I dumped when I got to college - who trained as an architect, and I loved it. I was pretty good at English but chose architecture because it was so hard to get into college.”
Street-Porter admits she was bolshy from birth.
“It was so challenging - an entrance examination, long interview and a portfolio of work - and I got into a very prestigious college, the Architectural Association.”
There she became ‘besotted with the idea of going to Columbia University in New York’ for third year and took a year out to prepare, while submitting articles to newspapers and magazines as she’d always enjoyed writing.
“To my astonishment, Petticoat offered me a job as home editor and I could do what I liked about design. This was the end of the Swinging Sixties and I was married to Tim Street-Porter, a photographer who photographed me modelling, and then The Daily Mail offered me a job as deputy fashion editor and gave me a column because I was in their eyes incredibly trendy: I lived in Chelsea, had outrageous clothes and, like now, an opinion about everything.
“The column was absolute drivel. I'd written detailed diaries about all the clubs I went to, mini reviews - ‘Rolling Stones, not bad’ - and about the clothes I’d made and sold in Carnaby Street - silver fake leather mini skirts and coats. Then suddenly I was going to the Paris collections and I absolutely loved it. Well, I was absolutely crazy about fashion. I was very friendly with Zandra Rhodes and remember the first dress I could afford to buy from Chelsea, a Mary Quant, skin-tight, black knitted mini dress.”
Does she still have it?
“No. I couldn’t get it over my knee now.
“After the year at Petticoat there was no going back to architecture. I did two years on The Mail, then it went from broadsheet to tabloid and I was made redundant, but I'd lined up a job on The Evening Standard as deputy fashion editor. I was in my element, in fashionable London, issuing so many edicts.
“I read those things now and it drives me mad! ’The Seven Items You Need For Your Holiday’. Really! For me it would be more like f***ing 77 items, because I'm very much a planner for every eventuality.”
Which means her suitcase for Scotland will be bulging, with Street-Porter familiar with the weather after multiple visits north over the years for the Festival and TV Festival and to indulge in her love of opera and musicals. She performed on the Fringe too, back in 2003, in a one-woman show called Rage.
“I'd written Baggage, about why my mother and I didn't get on and had been to Edinburgh a lot and thought, ‘why don't I write a one-woman show? The bloody arrogance of it! I'd seen a really good show in Edinburgh with an actor called David Benson, My Life with Kenneth Williams, so he directed me and Damien Hirst did the poster, which was good in some ways - me as a vampire, dripping blood - but bad in others - everybody nicked them.”
Now, at almost 80, she’s back with Janet Street-Porter Is Still Off The Leash at 80.
“Yeah, I’m not 80 till December, so my agent's predated me. I think it should say Janet Street-Porter is Off The Leash at Almost 80, but what the f***?
“It’s an exploration of how I've ended up like this. I start the show by complaining, obviously, ranting, with a summation of my mood. A lot of things annoy me.”
Such as?
“Depends what's really p***ed me off in the last 24 hours. One thing is wherever you go to do your show, they've rearranged or are in the middle of rebuilding the one-way system and the theatre or hotel, or both, will be in a system you can't understand and where you can't park.
“The other thing that winds me up is none of the train systems in Great Britain connect. The original railway system fanned out from London and it still works like that so if you dare get off to get on another line, you'll arrive as the next train's pulling out.”
Next up is a Street-Porter health report.
“My generation loves moaning about their health. I give the update on knee and hip replacements. To many people I'm regarded as a national treasure and all that bollocks but the reality is at 80, it's a big illusion. I look all right if I keep talking but if I stop my face settles and I look like one of those Chinese dogs you pay a lot of money for.
“Apart from that I've got pretty good skin and I'm pretty mobile, but that’s also an illusion because I'm propped up by scaffolding with metal in both knees, a hip and my ankle.
“Replacements are competitive. People come up to me and say, well my husband's had two or my dad's had three, so there's no point expecting the audience to feel sorry for you so I talk about after the replacements, the things that go wrong.
“After the knee was replaced I was doing really well until - you know how older people hate the word fall, well I didn't really have a fall - I was knocked over by my own wheelie bag. It’s a danger for older people, overpacking your suitcase, because if you let go, it'll knock you down. Or going to a spa, having a massage, coming out, and falling over the step outside.
“You don't want to walk around like a shuffling pensioner but you’re so f***ing terrified that your eyes are scanning all the time.”
“And stages. I've said put a yellow line on the front because I will not see the edge and I don't want an Ian McKellen moment.”
With the moaning and health updates complete, Street-Porter goes back to the beginning of her story.
“How I came into this world. Which was not by a miracle, a holy birth, but my mother. I've got a big picture of her and she looks relatively normal but she's anything but, and the audience is going to discover how weird she was.
“I bloody love it because a large number of my audience didn’t get on with their mothers either. Everybody’s supposed to love their mother, but my mother was a nightmare.
“There was the competitive element in our relationship. When I wrote Baggage I began to understand why she'd ended up the way she had. She'd had to leave school at 14 because they had no money. My dad had done the same but became an electrical engineer while my mum was marooned and ended up lying about her qualifications to get a job in the civil service.
“I talk about my weird childhood in the 1950s. I didn’t know at the time but my parents weren't married. In fact they were married to other people. It’s a bit like a verbal social history of growing up in the 1950s with parents that have been through war, secrets and lies. My mother spent my entire childhood worrying what the neighbours thought. We don't care anymore do we?”
Street-Porter is a confirmed foodie, as you’d expect with someone who’s been on Masterchef, and also tracks the transformation of British cuisine.
“1950s cuisine? There was no cuisine. They'd come out of rationing and it was pretty basic, plus we didn't have a lot of money. There was the trauma of high tea, this weird meal that happened on Sunday at 5 o'clock that involved something in a tin called pressed tongue. There was the salad that wasn't a salad, just a lettuce leaf, and - I’ve had audiences chanting it - ‘a boiled egg’. Women's Weekly broke the new way with tomatoes, which was the same English tomato ripened in the gloom with a zig zag edge. A new way? It was cutting a f***ing tomato in half’.”
Street-Porter’s tea table was also split along language lines, with a Welsh mother and Aunty Vi speaking in Welsh, ditto the budgie.
“They wanted their language at their end of the dining table. It was a bilingual household, but no crossover. But Welsh people don't have words for anything modern so even in the 1950s, they'd be going, blah, blah, blah, taxi, laundrette, not that anyone in my family got in a taxi.”
As well as those who experienced the Fifties childhood and the liberation of the Sixties, Street-Porter’s audience is also made up of contemporary Loose Women fans.
“I love Loose Women,” she says. I like it now after the changes where we haven't got a live audience because we talk for longer. And I just love winding Coleen [Nolan] up. When she became vegan I said I ate roadkill and that enraged her. And talking about growing vegetables with Brenda [Edwards] is now banned because it degenerates into a very competitive conversation.
“When we got rid of the audience everybody said the show would die, but it's had a new lease of life. Having been a TV producer and executive, I looked on the move as inevitable. I was not going to shed any tears about it, or a reduction in budget, because I've done it to other people as a boss and I'm a realist in terms of what the future of the media looks like.”
Street-Porter is in her element with live television, and long before Loose Women presented a live political programme from Westminster called The Midnight Hour.
“It was great talking about what was discussed in parliament that day. I've always enjoyed live TV because it puts you on the edge. You've got to have a clear sense of what you can say in the current climate, and now everybody's much more cautious than even five years ago, the words you can use and the tone.
“Sometimes the whole thing is wound up by tabloid coverage where they take a screen grab of me looking at Coleen with the headline: ‘Feud!’. It's not a feud! You can have a disagreement without it being a huge feud.”
Has she ever been stuck for anything to say?
“Recently I wanted to talk about Ann Widdecombe’s death, but I found it quite hard. I wanted to articulate the sense of not just outrage, but the impact on me personally because people have always said you're fearless, but actually…
“I kind of admired the fact she was so opinionated and stuck to her religious beliefs. I found her death appalling in so many ways and it absolutely destabilised me. I tried to articulate that sense of she was a woman living alone on the edge of a village and her death will have such an impact on other women in that situation.
“I hope the message got across because I wasn't very articulate. But I suppose I did give it a veracity and it's had 1.8 million views. I just wanted to say to people you're not the only person that feels like that. I felt like that, and it's not something you can forget about.”
She falls silent.
After the tour, there will be more Loose Women, and Street-Porter has considered writing another book, but there’s a problem.
“The thing is, the last book ends in 1976 and I've worked in television more or less ever since - except for the two years I edited the Independent on Sunday - and my feeling is a lot of the people I worked with are still in the industry and I don't want to do a wishy-washy memoir.
“I’ve still got all my diaries and a whole archive of press cuttings. There's the time at the BBC, the time I was a producer, and obviously all the boyfriends and so on. So what kind of memoir could I write? I've thought about it… But I feel that people could sue…”
Janet Street-Porter Is Still Off The Leash at 80!, Monday 28 September, Roxy Edinburgh; Tuesday 29 September,Glee Club Glasgow; Wednesday 30 September, Whitehall Theatre Dundee, Thursday 1 October, Lemon Tree Aberdeen.
TICKETS: www.janetstreetporter.com/tour
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