Esther Rantzen

Dame Esther Louise Rantzen DBE (born 22 June 1940) is an English journalist and television presenter, who presented the BBC television series That's Life! for 21 years, from 1973 until 1994. For several decades, she has worked with charitable causes and founded the charities Childline, a helpline for children, which she founded in 1986, and The Silver Line, designed to combat loneliness in older people's lives, which she established in November 2012.

Quotes

• My older daughter, Emily, had ME for 14 years. Thankfully she is better now and lives with me. She recently joined Kabbalah and changed her named to a more biblical name, "Miriam" – a little hard for me as she was named after my maternal grandmother, Emily, whom I adored. But I get round it by calling her "Em".
  • "My family values: Esther Rantzen", The Guardian (24 April 2010).

• The Nationwide editor, Michael Bunce, asked me if there was any particular film I'd like to make for them, so I asked if they would send me to Belfast to report on the Troubles. He said he would need time to think about it. Then he rang me back: "The thing is, Esther, what would you wear?" It was such a serious dilemma, he decided I couldn't film there.
  • "Esther Rantzen on misogyny in broadcasting — 'women's roles were as handmaidens'", The Times (14 December 2021).
  • Extract from a lecture delivered to the Royal Television Society.

• The episode of February 28, 1988, was just a normal one in the BBC’s consumer series That's Life!. ... But deep in the centre of the programme, where we always placed our most serious items, we had a unique moment that 35 years later still has the power to move and inspire.
  Nicholas Winton was revealed for the first time to have rescued more than 660 children, most of them Jewish, from being murdered in the Holocaust. And three of those children learnt for the first time who had saved them, how he had done it and, sitting with him in our studio audience, turned to him and thanked him for their lives.
  It was the only time in my professional life when, as a presenter, the emotion stopped me. I had to break off our recording, leave my chair and take a moment to wipe my eyes. We were the only factual programme that would have told his story that way because we were the only one with a studio audience.
  And we were thrilled to be able to stage another surprise for Nicky one week later, when we invited him back. This time I asked members of our audience to stand if they owed their lives to him. Nicky was once again sitting in the front row, so I asked him to turn round to see the whole ground floor audience in the television theatre standing.
  • "How we broke the story of Holocaust hero Nicholas Winton", The Times (16 December 2023).
  • The biographical feature film One Life (2023 film), dedicated to Winton's humanitarian work, was released in the UK in January 2024.

• I have joined Dignitas. I have in my brain thought, well, if the next scan says nothing's working I might buzz off to Zurich – but it puts my family and friends in a difficult position because they would want to go with me.
  And that means that the police might prosecute them. So we've got to do something. At the moment, it’s not really working, is it?
  • From an interview on the Today programme (19 December 2023), as cited in "Esther Rantzen 'considering assisted dying' if cancer treatment fails", The Guardian (19 December 2023).
  • Rantzen had reached stage four lung cancer and was considering a means of assisted dying, which is illegal in the UK.

• When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
  • "Esther Rantzen: 'An editor at the BBC, a self-confessed misogynist, used to aim his air gun at a can balanced just over my head'", The Guardian (17 February 2024).
  • In her RTS lecture (cited above), Rantzen recounts her experience naming the "misogynist" as Derrick Amoore.