We are about five minutes in and Janet Street-Porter, former journalist, former TV exec, former newspaper editor, current star of Loose Women is being, well, very Janet Street-Porter.
She’s currently onto OAPs, a label that also applies to her (and has for some time now).
“They love talking about all the illnesses, the fact that as you get older you get obsessed with all those irritating things like farting all the time but being constipated. All the men who don’t wear their hearing aids … They buy them, but they don’t switch them on. There’s background music every f****** place you go.
“I’m getting on a train and no one is standing up for me. Alright, I might not look crumbly, but I would appreciate a seat.
“And getting in a taxi … How am I supposed to get into that? Are they made by Chinese or Japanese people? The new taxis. You literally have to crawl inside.”
The star of Grumpy Old Women (remember that?) is now, at 79, a Grumpy Older Woman. “I’ve become a pensioner,” she says. “I never thought I’d say those words. I thought I was somehow exempt from that.”
But here she is, “the former queen of youth television and all that bollocks”, on the cusp of her ninth decade on the planet. I think it’s fair to say she is not preparing to go gentle into that good night
“I’ve changed and I’m not happy about it. I did all these things like walking across England and Wales and Scotland. I walked from Edinburgh to London. And now all my joints are f*****. I’m literally supported by scaffolding.”
We are sitting together in a Starbucks opposite Pacific Quay and I’m trying and mostly failing to get a word in edgewise. Street-Porter is in Glasgow to promote her stage show which is coming to Scotland this autumn and right now she is in full performance mode. But then maybe she always is. As she speaks – about the downsides of old age and husbands good and bad and the BBC and her Welsh mum and anything else that occurs to her – it occurs to me that it’s difficult to imagine Street-Porter in a moment of reflection.
She says she has changed and physically that may be the case. We all get older. And yet in many ways she seems the same outspoken, self-assured, opinionated woman she has always been.
Those attributes haven’t served her badly. If these days she’s best known for Loose Women, it should be remembered she was a huge figure in British television throughout the 1980s and 1990s. She was also once editor of The Independent on Sunday. There are some who only hear her distinctive London accent and don’t see the immense achievement.
This is not a rare trip north. “I come to Scotland every year anyway. I come up to Glasgow to see friends. I love going to restaurants. I also love just travelling around. Obviously, it gives me loads of material to moan about. The hotels. When they say, ‘We’ve upgraded you,’ and your heart sinks. When they say, ‘You’ve got a four-poster bed.’ Why? A four-poster bed that fills the entire room that you can’t get around? Where the lamp is so far behind you. The showers that are those horrible rain showers that get your hair wet … I get a lot of material. I’d love to do a series of Hotel Inspector.”
My, but she is entertaining company, kvetching when she is not name-dropping left, right and centre. She is full of stories polished up for presentation to any audience.
Does she like being onstage? “I’m really enjoying it now. I think when I did the first one in 2005 it was like jumping off a diving board. I was so arrogant. I had a director, David Benson, who did a one-man show about Kenneth Williams. I learned a lot about stagecraft, which you don’t learn in a TV studio because it’s largely about sitting down.”
“It is tiring, but what’s the alternative? Go to the gym? I’m not going to do that anymore. I had a gym in my house and I had a personal trainer. And now I’ve replaced it with going on tour.”
Who comes to see her, I wonder? “Actually, the age range is bigger than you might think because the Loose Women audience has become quite a broad audience. It’s women of all different ages. At the top end it’s senior pensioners and at the bottom end it’s mums with their daughters. But it’s a lot of women. It’s some men. It’s the gays. It’s quite an interesting audience.”
Tour apart, this has been quite the year for Street-Porter. In January in Great Yarmouth she finally married her long-time partner and former restaurateur Peter Spanton.
Janet Street-Porter (Image: Paul Stuart)
“I’ve been with him since 1999. There’s some debate about when it started. What do you call the start of a relationship?
“We’ve had our ups and downs, for sure. We had some bad times, mainly when he decided he wanted a dog and I didn’t. He had to go and live at his mother’s with the puppy. There was another time when he wrote the car off. So, we’ve been volatile, but not in the last 10 years, I can assure you.”
It’s her fifth marriage. She kept the surname of her first husband Tim Street-Porter. She later married Tony Elliott, the founder of Time Out, Canadian film-maker Frank Cvitanovich and then David Sorkin, who was 22 years her junior.
Why has this marriage worked when the previous ones didn’t, Janet?
“Well, the fourth one [she conspicuously doesn’t say Sorkin’s name] was never going to work. The fourth one wasn’t going to work before it happened and immediately after it happened.
“I was in Las Vegas, it was 3.30 in the morning, I was 49 years old. All my friends hated this person, so I married him. It was like a cry for help.
“And three days later we went to Los Angeles and we had dinner with a friend of mine, a photographer, Helmut Newton. And he asked me who the miserable man was at the end of the table? I said ‘a mistake’.
Janet Street-Porter after receiving her Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for service to her industry at Buckingham Palace in London (Image: PA)
“So, the minute we got back to England I realised to my horror that I could not split up with this person easily. In law you had to be married for a year. It was dreadful. Eventually it was concluded. I got him out of my house but only by serving the divorce papers on him in the house and ringing up his mother and saying, ‘Come and get him.’
“I have apologised to all my friends for it because I put them through hell and it is not a year of my life I’m proud of. I think everybody has a mad year and that was it.”
Is it possible that the success of her current relationship with Spanton could be because Street-Porter has begun to soften now that she is well into her third age?
“Well, Colleen thinks I’ve mellowed even while I’ve been on Loose Women,” she replies, citing her fellow panelist Colleen Nolan.
“Colleen thinks that since I’ve married … She says, ‘You’re nicer.”
“Maybe I’m a bit more tolerant, I don’t know. But not that tolerant.”
Well, yes. There’s a section of her show when she will talk about her TV career and reveal the moments where, as she says, “I’ve got my revenge.”
Without going into details, she adds, “There have been moments where men I have worked with have gone from being my co-hosts to, ‘I’m the boss.’ Those are fantastic moments in my life.”
At which point, dear reader, she genuinely cackles.
Does the notion of revenge drive her? “I’m not so bad on revenge now. I used to be quite bad on revenge. I used to draw the person I hated and …” She mimes sticking pins into an imaginary drawing.
“I cursed them.”
Working at the BBC, she suggests, was very Machiavellian. “My time at the BBC did teach me a lot of strategy and game theory. It served me in good stead at the newspaper as well.”
Where did all this ambition and ruthlessness come from, you might ask? Ah well, for that you have to go back to childhood.
Janet Street-Porter, Willy Whitelaw, David Jacobs, Katherine Whitehorn and Jim Callaghan, Brighton 1986 (Image: unknown)
There’s a photograph on the cover of Janet Street-Porter’s first memoir Baggage. It’s a picture of Street-Porter at the age of eight in a gingham dress and glasses. “Look at the eyes,” she says when I bring it up. “They’re looking at you and they are calculated. That girl is me. That girl is me.
“I’m on the outside, always. That’s why I’m not a big hugger. In my industry now there’s all this touchy feely horrible fake emotion. I can’t do it.”
She draws a direct line between the woman she is and the girl she was, raised in a volatile house in Fulham with her parents and her sister. “I am the product of my background, absolute 100 per cent,” she says.
“I grew up in a house where my father had been through the war in Burma. It left him emotionally cold. Now we would say he was suffering from post-traumatic stress.
“My dad was very withdrawn and would refuse to talk about the war at all. And my mother was Welsh, a very over-emotional woman. And also quite melodramatic. I think it was an unusual relationship anyway, certainly very volatile. We would have to go upstairs to our bedroom while they had the row. Then she would have gone. She’d come back about three days later.”
The word she uses to describe her upbringing is weird. “And I didn’t know a lot about how weird it was until after my dad died and I discovered that my mum and dad when they met were married to other people. And they had me and my sister and they were still married to other people. Then they got divorced and married, but they never told us.”
Street-Porter’s relationship with her mother Cherrie was, let’s say, difficult. Her mum, she says, was from North Wales and reckoned anywhere south of Caernarvon was another country.
“The biggest snob about the Welsh language and Welshness. She bought a budgie and taught it Welsh. So I grew up in a house where I’ve got a budgie speaking Welsh, mum speaking Welsh and then she got her sister down to live with us. They were Welsh speakers and my dad, my sister and I didn’t know what they were talking about.
“So it was a weird upbringing and I became like an observer. I think that’s where the journalism started. I would write notebooks. I would detail everything and I kept very detailed diaries of my teenage years; what clothes I was making, what I wanted to buy.
“I became a Mod at 14 and I was very particular about how I dressed and my hair. Endless stuff in the diaries about shampoo. Endless.
“And then as I got more into my teenage years and I started going out with an architect then I started going to art exhibitions. I was kind of a junior critic.”
Street-Porter studied architecture herself. Was a career as an architect ever a possibility? Not really, she says. “I wasn’t the best in the class. The person who was the best designed my house. Piers Gough. I am still friends with him.”
Instead, Street-Porter started writing for magazines and newspapers and then joined LBC commercial radio when it launched.
“Immediately I got this flak from critics, from people like AN Wilson, from Private Eye, sneering at my accent as if I was thick. I was a London woman with a London accent talking to Londoners. It’s not as if I was forcing it on you lot up here in Glasgow.”
Soon she was also appearing on LWT in London and by the end of the 1970s she was well enough known to be impersonated by Pamela Stephenson on Not the Nine 0’Clock News. By the end of the 1980s a Janet Street-Porter puppet was popping up on Spitting Image.
But behind the accent was an ambitious, intelligent woman who would go on to run a BBC department with a multi-million pound budget. The cartoon version of Street-Porter that is sometimes presented to the world tends to overlook that.
Janet Street-Porter puppet was popping up on Spitting Image (Image: Spitting Image)
She thinks she could probably have ended up in a very senior position if she hadn’t resigned after failing to get the position of Controller of BBC Two.
“The end of my time at the BBC was my fault. I take the responsibility for that. Because I was ruthlessly ambitious while I was at the BBC. I trod on lots of people’s toes.
“I built up my department from being about youth programmes to being about entertainment, taking on comedy and shows like Fantasy Football League.
“I had programmes being made in Manchester, programmes being made in London, programmes being made in Scotland. I was the executive producer of Red Dwarf, Men Behaving Badly and I launched This is Your Life when the BBC did it. So I had a very wide brief and it was all running well.
“But then Alan Yentob became controller of BBC One and I applied to be controller of BBC Two and my opposition was Michael Jackson, who did the Late Show.”
She didn’t get the job and left the BBC as a result. Now she thinks she should have stayed. “I know the way the BBC works. I would have got rewarded.
“I flounced off. That was my big career mistake. Because then I did L!ve TV.” Ah, yes, the short-lived home of the News Bunny and Topless Darts (both introduced by Street-Porter’s nemesis Kelvin MacKenzie.) She left the job within a matter of months.
She shakes her head. I don’t want to revisit all of that.”
Instead, she returns to why she left the BBC. “I was in my element, so why did I do it?” she asks herself. “I just couldn’t take the rejection.”
Despite her time at the BBC and despite two decades of media experience on her CV, when she was asked to take over as editor at the Independent on Sunday in 1999 there were many questioning her suitability.
“I didn’t doubt I could do that job. But then I got flak from people like Andrew Neil saying, ‘What experience has she had to run a newspaper, with a news desk and a foreign desk?’ I had presented The Midnight Hour on BBC Two for however many years on the next night to Andrew Neil, so he knew I could do live politics.”
Janet Street-Porter on Loose Women with Ruth Langsford, Coleen Nolan, and Brenda Edwards (Image: ITV)
After two years at the newspaper she left to return to television, but this time in front of the camera. She has been a regular on Loose Women for the last 15 years now.
I want to circle back to her parents, I say. They’ve both gone now and I wonder if their deaths made her look at them or her relationship with them at all differently?
It’s a question that doesn’t seem to interest her. Or maybe her relationship with her parents was set in stone in her childhood and never really changed.
“When my mother died,” Street-Porter begins, “she had been so irritating in her final years. When she died she said, ‘I’ve had enough. I want to go. Can’t I just go on Friday?’ That was very much her attitude. I just could not imagine that life had become that drab for her that she wanted to end it.
“Also she did quite a lot of score-settling in her final days, like some people do. ‘Oh your auntie’s this and your nan’s that.’ Awful crap.
“I wasn’t there when she died. I had gone to see her because she was in hospital, but then I resumed my holiday I’m afraid. I went back and I discovered she’d had the funeral arranged by someone she was in school with in North Wales and as far as I could see it would have all been in Welsh, which my sister and I don’t even speak.
“So, we managed to get the Lord’s Prayer and the 23rd psalm in English.
“My dad had already died before her and his funeral happened on the Canary Islands. He had gone to visit her in their flat and had a heart attack and died while playing cards. She just rang me up and said he’d gone. Thanks. My sister and I flew out there.
Janet Street-Porter is Still Off The Leash at 80! (Image: Impressive PR)
“So, I arranged my dad’s funeral because my mother couldn’t speak Spanish. I went and bought a coffin, found a vicar, got a service together. He is buried in the Canary Islands in Tenerife and then she came back to England and I think my sister shouldered most of the responsibility of speaking to her, dealing with her. My mother still had a sister who she was so close to, but she started pushing her away.”
“So, all of this led me to think I will not age like that. I’m living my life in the present being positive. I might have a face that looks like I’m pissed off, but, believe me, I am a positive person.”
Maybe this is what makes Janet run. She refuses to turn into her mother.
Has she planned her own funeral, I ask? “Beyond writing a will, not at all. When I die I’ve gone. Just boil me up, stick me in a bag. I don’t want a funeral. I hate funerals. I don’t want a memorial service.”
Do you want to be remembered, Janet? “I don’t care. I don’t care. I’m not someone who edits their Wikipedia page.”
Janet Street-Porter is Still Off The Leash at 80! Is on at the Assembly Roxy, Edinburgh, September 28; Glee Theatre, Glasgow, September 29; Whitehall Theatre, Dundee, September 30 and Lemon Tree, Aberdeen, October 1. Visit janetstreetporter.com for details and tickets.