The Guardian81%
‘Frank Bough told me: I do have a very big cock’: how Fern Britton survived in TV in the 1980s – and beyond 12%
By Emine Saner47%
7/15/2026, 9:00:50 AM
Keywords: Daytime Tv, Television And Radio, Life And Style, Women, Divorce, Rape And Sexual Assault, Celebrity
BS Summary: This article contains 11 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Negativity Bias, and Hindsight Bias, with Halo Effect as the most egregious example at 21.7% saturation with 412 hits. Analysis detected 1,498 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,901 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 28.4% and a BS Rank of 12% (14,205 of 15,985 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 88.90% of the article peer group.
On the daytime TV behemoth that is This Morning, Fern Britton always had an appealing mix of warmth, no-nonsense capability and a hint of danger, as if she could decide to blow it all up at any moment.
And then she did.
On the day she resigned in 2009, Britton didn’t know she was going to do it, but amid rumours of a feud with co-host Phillip Schofield, she took the scorched-earth route and walked away from her high-profile, high-paying job with nothing to take its place.
Was she not worried about what she would do next?
“No, there’s something in me that decides very fast when I’ve got to get out.
I’m not scared of the future.
I’m not scared of stepping into nothing.
A couple of people went, ‘What are you going to do?’
I’ll be fine.”
And she was.
Britton went on to present her own chatshow, and had a run of truly heartwarming jobs – among them, BBC Two’s The Big Allotment Challenge – before becoming a successful author.
Today, she is at home in Cornwall, and appears gratifyingly as you’d expect – unstarry (she has a cup of tea and a slice of Marks & Spencer fruit loaf on the go) and upbeat, with a steeliness that surfaces when a question she doesn’t like comes up.
Britton turns 69 on Friday.
Her 60s began turbulently – her mother died, then her father, and, when she was 63, her marriage of more than 20 years to the TV chef Phil Vickery fell apart.
Then she went through her “era of indolence”, as she describes it in her 2024 book.
She stopped exercising, ate too much and even took up smoking, all of which she has now reversed.
She brushes it off now.
“You get through troubled water,” she says.
“I’m getting tougher and less worried about things, and if you have any hurt or anger or anything, there’s no point in carrying it with you.
I found it very easy, actually, to just …” She pauses.
“That was then, and this is now.”
Britton does seem in a much better place.
She loves living in her Cornish village, where she is working on her 12th novel, has great friends, and has embraced all the freedoms of single life.
Her latest passion is bellringing at her local church: “It’s marvellous,” she says.
Her mother always reminded her that bad times will pass.
“And she’s absolutely right.
You’ve just got to keep putting one foot after another, that’s it.
When you get to this age, you can look back over your catalogue of errors, excitements, the good, the bad, the sad, the happy, and think: ‘I learned a lot there.’”
Weekly therapy has helped: “Life feels lighter and easier, and you can be kinder.”
She smiles.
“Forgiving people, and hope that they will forgive you for the shit you’ve done.”
When “the odd TV thing comes up”, she says, “that’s delightful”.
Her latest is the second series of the self-the-vet’s on ITV.
It’s a lovely watch – a dog has a grape-related emergency, a bulldog has a knee injury, and a cat needs some dental work.
I could watch it all day, soothed by the calm care of these Bristol vets.
Britton started her TV career in the early 1980s.
She had moved from her Buckinghamshire village to London to attend the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she studied stage management, then worked in theatre for a while, before sending more than 70 letters to every TV and radio station, asking to be a newsreader.
Her naivety might have been comical, but it worked – she got a job at Westward Television, a regional franchise based in Plymouth, as a continuity announcer.
(I’m reminded of the TV company in Rivals, the TV adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel set in the 80s: Britton laughs and says it was exactly like that.)
From there, she became a presenter on BBC local news, and was seconded to London for a few weeks, where she found herself out of her depth, not having trained as a journalist.
The newsreader Moira Stuart helped her.
“She was great,” says Britton.
“She might not like me saying this, but there was a certain racist, sexist element in newsrooms in those times, and I think she felt it.
She said to me one day: ‘This lot, they can’t organise a fart in a paper bag’, and that’s just genius.
I love her.”
Shortly afterwards, Britton was offered a job as a stand-in presenter on the BBC’s newly launched morning show, Breakfast Time.
It can’t have been easy to be a young woman in TV in the 80s.
“Well, looking back, yes, but at the time … We were really resilient, and it was just, well, that happens, these idiots.”
One of the Breakfast Time anchors was Frank Bough, a phenomenally famous TV presenter at the time, who would later be sacked by the BBC after a scandal involving drugs and sex workers.
“Frank just measured women by how attractive and ‘fuckable’ they were,” says Britton.
At a team lunch, she sat next to Bough.
“He turned to me, lying back in his chair, [and said] ‘I wonder how long it’ll be before I’m having an affair with you.
Because I do have a very big cock’.
And you just go …” She makes a disgusted face.
“So you had to have a lot of resilience but I just thought ‘strange, silly man’.”
How did it not crush her confidence?
Britton smiles.
“I don’t have any confidence.
I look as if I have.”
When she delivered her latest novel, she says, “I was sweating, [thinking] this is the book where they just find out I’m shit.”
When good reviews from readers started coming in, she says, “I just burst into tears.
You think, yeah, but they’re still just being nice.”
It probably started in childhood, she thinks.
Her father was the actor Tony Britton, who had already left her mother and older sister and was living with another woman; Britton was conceived on a visit he paid to her mother, and he was rarely in her life as she was growing up.
She once convinced her English teacher to take her class on a trip to see him perform in a play in London, and managed to contact him through the theatre; he invited them to meet him backstage and Britton, so frightened he wouldn’t even recognise her, made sure to push herself to the front.
Her mother, she says, “was amazing, glamorous, gorgeous, and funny.
My sister, beautiful, slender, she could have been an actor, a model.
And there was me, little tubby child, not knowing what the fuck was going to happen next.”
When she told her father she was going to work in television, he told her “you’re too fat to be [broadcaster] Sue Lawley”.
Britton laughs.
“So you just take these things on the chin and off you go.”
Britton, of course, created a very successful career in television, most notably her 10 years on This Morning, and she has also presented numerous shows, including Ready, Steady, Cook and her own interview show Fern Britton Meets … even though she says impostor syndrome has followed her throughout.
“Oh, God, yes.”
Off-screen, life could be challenging – IVF, then postnatal depression after the birth of her twins, then divorce, then the birth of her third child.
Because of her high profile as a TV presenter, she was also heavily scrutinised, particularly her appearance and weight (one columnist, shockingly, called her an “obese old slapper”).
It was particularly intense for a couple of years in the mid 00s.
How did she cope?
“Not very well.
Good at putting a face on, but not doing very well.”
The lowest point was in 2008 when she was revealed to have had gastric band surgery, and was vilified in the press; later, she found out her phone had been hacked, and in 2024 she was paid damages by News Group Newspapers, the owners of the now-defunct News of the World.
“I never understood why the paps were at places where I was.
Terrifying for the kids, horrible.”
Does she think it’s strange there is far more tolerance for celebrities using weight-loss injections now?
“I don’t care, people can do what they want,” she says breezily.
“What happened to me was criminal, literally.”
Britton’s resignation from This Morning in 2009 was abrupt and scant on details.
“I don’t really want to go into that,” she says.
“I probably won’t ever, but yes, it was a day that turned on a sixpence, and suddenly I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here’.”
There had long been rumours of a rift with her co-host Phillip Schofield.
In her autobiography, which had come out the year before, she was nothing but complimentary about him, saying she loved working with him.
But something went wrong.
“It was hard, it was very difficult, very upsetting.”
They had a good friendship, says Britton.
“I don’t backtrack on that, but then, you know, give it time, and it wasn’t right.”
Schofield’s successful TV career was ruined after he admitted to a relationship with a much younger ITV employee.
“It was very mixed emotions for me, that one.
I can’t really explain it, because we did have a very good working relationship, until we didn’t, so it was tricky.
I wish him well.
I hope it all settles down, and he finds some happiness.”
Her children are grown up and, in what I’m increasingly viewing as a useful way to judge celebrities, none so far appear to be nepo babies and instead have useful jobs – her youngest daughter is a builder, her other daughter is training to be a nurse; one of her sons teaches, the other “is doing a child psychology thing”.
How has she managed to avoid raising, say, four influencers?
Britton laughs.
“They’ve never been like that.
My elder daughter said to me when she was quite young, ‘I don’t want to be offensive, but your job’s really boring, isn’t it?’”
And so, Britton, child-free and husband-free for the first time in years, appears to be enjoying life.
It’s like being back at that specific moment, she says, “between leaving school and having to work or go to university or whatever.
I think about how I was when I was 17, 18, 19, and everything was so much fun.”
It’s friends, and silliness, and a little more joy (including bellringing!).
“I think back to the person who’s still inside me, who I was when I was younger, and it’s still there.
And that cheers you up for the day.”
Fern Britton: Inside the Vet’s airs on ITV1 at 11.30am on Sundays and is available on ITVX
Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations.
In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222 in England and Wales, 0808 801 0302 in Scotland, or 0800 0246 991 in Northern Ireland.
In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673.
In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732).
Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html
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