Janet Street-Porter: Sorry, I'm a shame free zone

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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She's had four disastrous marriages and - as she reveals in her brazenly defiant memoirs - countless affairs. Yet Janet Street-Porter doesn't feel a shred of guilt

When Janet Street-Porter turns 60 in December, she plans to throw a big party which, from the sound of it, just about sums up her whole attitude to growing old. "We'll have pass the parcel, a tombola and musical chairs, although we may have to cancel that because at my last party it descended into violence," says Janet, who has booked the village hall near the Yorkshire cottage she has owned for 20 years.

"The hall will look like circa 1953 and a mixture between an Alan Ayckbourn farce and an Alan Bennett play with bunting and fairy lights. There'll be a big trestle table for dinner.

"Ray, a chef who lives down the road, will do the starters, I'll do the main course and a couple of friends will make the trifles - loads of trifles - and there will be a battle of the trifles.

"Oh, and there'll be a disco on the stage afterwards!" she concludes rather excitedly.

But wouldn't Janet - media personality, ex-newspaper editor and once the most powerful woman executive in British television - prefer something a little more glitzy? Something slightly more appropriate to her age and status?

"I can have a glitzy bash any time," she scoffs. "I've done the same thing for the past couple of years and it's become a bit of a tradition. I never had a party like this as a child and it's what I want. Is that weird?"

Clearly, the four-times married, famously 'frilly toothed' inventor of 'Yoof TV', with a voice once described as sounding as if she were 'consuming a plate of spaghetti with a fork and spoon', intends to stay forever young - psychologically, if not biologically.

"I couldn't care less about being 60. I look all right for 60 - I must do, otherwise people wouldn't keep asking if I've had plastic surgery, and I haven't because if I did I'd have the bags under my eyes removed," she says.

"There are so many women who have messed around with their faces and I find it really weird that bits of people's faces don't move because of Botox.

"This obsession with appearance is like a tyranny, and it's going to have a terrible effect on the teenagers of today.

"When I was a producer on telly, I'd book all these big Hollywood stars, but when you see them you think: 'What happened?' They just don't look like you expect them to."

The day we meet at the trendy North London Zetter hotel, near her architect-designed home

in Clerkenwell, Janet looks remarkably fresh for someone who was up until 2.30am the night before socialising with friends.

Six feet tall, slim, with gangly limbs and a glossy bob of plummy-coloured hair, she devours a bacon sandwich smothered in tomato sauce like a teenager shrugging off the residue of a hangover.

She has a reputation for being brash, snobbish, loudmouthed, ruthless, driven, opinionated, acid-tongued, stroppy and more than a little scary, but today she is unexpectedly girlish and self-deprecating.

However, she does rather relish her reputation as a ball-breaker.

"Elton phoned me the other day to tell me he and his husband David named one of his new Alsatian puppies after me. He said it was because she's very aggressive and bossy," she guffaws. "I wasn't offended, I thought it was funny. It's true!"

She is here to talk about her riveting new book, Fall Out, serialised in the Mail next week. It is the sequel to her controversial childhood memoirs, Baggage, in which she recounted the misery of growing up in working-class suburbia, and the narrow world of her late parents, Cherrie and Stan Bull.

Her first book, which is deeply scathing about her mother and father, ends with the fiercely ambitious and intelligent 19-year-old Janet, an architecture student, turning her back on her family and heartlessly dumping her first fiance, Rex, after undergoing two abortions.

Fall Out, which is equally raw and honest, charts the next phase in her colourful life and career from 1967 to 1978 ('the decade which started with the Rolling Stones and ended with the Sex Pistols') and witnesses Janet, newly married to her first husband, photographer Tim Street-Porter, establishing herself in London as a budding journalist.

That decade saw her moving from home editor on Petticoat magazine to deputy fashion editor of the Daily Mail, before going into radio to become one of LBC's first presenters, then a TV star on the London Weekend Show.

But it is her love life during these years which really startles, and today she reveals for the first time how she cheated on Tim Street-Porter with a variety of lovers within a couple of years of their wedding, which had been celebrated with a party where dope was smoked and a 'nudie' film entertained drunken guests.

It is, one discovers, just the beginning of a staggering catalogue of infidelity on her part.

One of her flings was with the actor John Hurt, another with the tailor Doug Hayward and a third with the unnamed son of a famous painter - a champion oarsman - with whom she had a romp in his hospital bed as he recovered from hepatitis.

The marriage ended in 1974 when Tim caught her spending the weekend with her newest lover, Time Out founder Tony Elliott, who would later become her second husband. Tim issued an ultimatum - if she didn't leave with him in ten minutes, their relationship was over.

As Janet argued with Tim about the 'unfairness' of the time limit, the clock ticked.

Then, when the deadline passed, he and his Porsche roared off into the distance.

"What a stupid way to end my marriage," she writes. "I'd been married for nearly seven years to a man I still really adored. The only trouble was I seemed incapable of being faithful to him."

So does Janet, with the wisdom of hindsight, now feel ashamed of the way she treated Street-Porter?

"Shame!" she explodes. "Shame! I'm a shame-free zone, I'm afraid. I know that's not going to endear me to some people, but shame is not a word in my vocabulary. I have had a bloody good time and I'm not going to bloody well apologise about it either."

She moved in with Tony, which, she admits, was a bit unfortunate in retrospect.

"I didn't give Tony any options. One minute he was a single man running Time Out, living the bachelor life, the next I was there with all my luggage. I should have got a flat and lived by myself, because it's not a good idea to move straight in with your lover.

"Tim was very upset but within six months we resumed our friendship and he started going out with some very glamorous models and eventually I bought him out of our house in Limehouse.

"We are still friends. I kept his name because that had been my first by-line and it was a hell of a lot better than Bull.

"There's nothing to be gained by picking over what I should have done or didn't do. What struck me was that I had been incredibly unfair to Tony Elliott," adds Janet, who admits in her memoirs that she was also enjoying a second secret affair at the time with an unnamed 'sexy publisher'.

Janet's subsequent marriage to Tony also ended badly as their careers pulled them in different directions, but it was Tony's decision to make Janet deputy editor of Time Out that sounded the death knell.

Despite Janet's impressive CV, the staff on Time Out regarded her as nothing more than 'the boss's tart', an impression not helped when an angry Tim Street-Porter had 40 bin liners of her possessions delivered to the magazine's offices in King's Cross after discovering their affair.

Her marriage to Tony - during which she had yet another fling, with a friend in America - ended in 1977.

The split followed a furious row the morning after a drunken party at their home when Janet - by this time fed up with Tony's increasing discomfort with her burgeoning fame - shouted "I've had enough" as she mopped the kitchen floor.

Her third marriage, to Canadian film-maker Frank Cvitanovich - which will no doubt feature in the next volume of memoirs - ended in similarly spectacular fashion when he found her with a lover, Tony James of the Eighties pop group Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

It says something about Janet that she managed to retain the friendship of all her ex-husbands despite her sexual waywardness.

"Fidelity? It's not a big value to me. I think friendship is the most important thing," she says. "I would rather stay friends with my ex-husbands - that means a lot to me. They are my replacement family."

The one exception is her fourth husband, David Sorkin, an unemployed salesman 22 years her junior, whom she wed on impulse in Las Vegas when she was 50 after meeting him at a party. The 20-month union ended when he squirted her with salad cream during a row.

She has since dismissed the whole episode as midlife madness. "I never see my last husband. I wouldn't know where he is. And no, it doesn't upset me when he pops up every now and again in the papers," she says.

Sorkin once claimed Janet was a demanding harridan who used him for sex.

"When I came out of the jungle after doing I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, my friend Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys got me a T-shirt with the headline 'Jungle Janet Was A Beast In Bed' printed on the front, which is what Sorkin told the News of the World," she says. "I think I wore it for my last birthday. I had a good laugh about that one."

Today, she is happily ensconced with her boyfriend of seven years, restaurateur Peter Spanton, 52, but has absolutely no plans to marry again.

Given that she is, in her own words 'a shame-free zone' for whom fidelity holds no importance, is she faithful to him?

Slightly embarrassed for once, she rather reluctantly admits she is.

"I have grown up now, which is a relief. I've grown up to about 18, put it that way," she says. "I don't know why I married so many times. I've been married to tall men, short fat men, young men and old men who have got nothing in common except that they were pathetically grateful.

"I don't really analyse myself. I don't carry the baggage from my past, I'm a shedder.

"No, it would be embarrassing to get married again. It's something we've never talked about. Anyway, we've got our gay friends, they are all getting married, people like Elton. They have taken the load off all us heterosexuals living in sin."

For those whose only experience of Janet is her appearance on I'm A Celebrity, or Gordon Ramsay's The F Word, her 40-year media career is testament to hard work, a thick skin, reinvention and a knack for being in the right place at the right time with the right people.

Of course, she has been written off many times, yet has always managed to bounce back. She left the BBC, where she was the fabulously successful head of youth programmes, after she lost the coveted job of controller of BBC2 to Michael Jackson.

In 1994, she joined the Mirror to set up Live! TV, but famously fell out with former Sun editor Kelvin McKenzie, who was intent on dumbing down the new television station and who was later to declare that she couldn't edit a bus ticket.

Her editorship of the Independent on Sunday - considered a surprise appointment - ended after two years, but today she seems busier than ever.

"You can call me ruthless, driven, single-minded and selfcentred and you'd be right", she writes in Fall Out, which she intends as a homage to the influential friends, colleagues, husbands and lovers - she calls them 'enablers' - whom she has left by the wayside over the years.

"When you go through life, you shed people without even realising it. It's not a conscious process. I hope I don't come across as a career-obsessed harpie - it was more a case of seizing the opportunity and having a lot of fun along the way than plundering others' talents in my pursuit of success."

Today, she says her working life is just about perfect. She writes a newspaper column and as a keen rambler she is president of the Globetrotters Club. She is also rarely off our screens, be it on Question Time, Grumpy Old Women, I'm A Celebrity or The Midnight Hour.

In the meantime, she is filming a new Channel Five series in which she works as a nurse in Barnsley General Hospital to find out what life is like for NHS employees and the patients they care for.

"All I can say is if you are in Barnsley, just don't get ill," she says.

Just like Mick Jagger, whom she admires, Janet wants to go on for ever.

"One of the things that really annoys me," she says, "is when people write: 'Oh, you've been really lucky.' No bloody luck comes into it, it's hard work. I just applied myself. I tried to extend what I could do and not be afraid to fail.

"I've always been aggressive and opinionated. Some of the criticism of me, particularly my voice, has been difficult to cope with, but when I came to London I'd put that aside and think 'This is terrific' because it was such an exciting time."

Janet has never regretted not having children of her own. In her teens, when she was engaged to Rex, she had two abortions - neither of which appears to have caused her much emotional turmoil.

"Honest to God," she says, "there's not a day when I wake up and think: 'Wouldn't it be nice to have a mini me.'"

Rex was one of the people Janet 'shed' and never expected to meet again. But a few weeks ago she was reunited with her first fiance, the father of her aborted child, whom she cheated on and then dumped. She hadn't seen him for 40 years.

Naturally, being the media person that she is, this was for a new TV series - which reunites celebrities with people they lost touch with long ago - to be screened next year.

"It was one of the most intimidating things I have ever done. I thought I was going to be physically ill... it was something I had no control over. You think 'This could all go wrong, it could all be messy and emotional,'" she says.

"He's an architect now. I can't say too much about it, but I was astonished he agreed to take part. I did feel guilty about Rex.

"It was childish behaviour on my part the way I behaved when we were together, but then again I was only a teenager, so you could say I was still a child. But I did feel compelled to say sorry to him."

For a woman who declares she's a shame-free zone, this sounds like the closest she'll ever get to expressing regret. Not, I suspect, that Janet's going to lose sleep over him or any of her other 'enablers'.

In the Mail on Monday: THE DAY I WAS BUSTED FOR DRUGS

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