Esther Rantzen and the difference one person can make

There are some people whose death feels unexpectedly personal however famous they are. For me, Dame Esther Rantzen, who has died aged 86, is one of them. For more than half a century she was part of British life: broadcaster, journalist, campaigner, founder of Childline and The Silver Line and, most memorably for millions of us, the face of That’s Life!

But for me and my family, Esther was also the woman who helped us when nobody else would.

I first knew her when I was a journalist on the Ham & High and she lived in Hampstead with her husband, the distinguished documentary-maker Desmond Wilcox. Local journalists inevitably bothered famous residents and Desmond occasionally complained. Esther’s response on my behalf was: “She’s just doing her job.”

It was a small kindness, but very Esther. She understood journalists because she was one — and a very good one.

It was only after my father died that I discovered just how seriously she took the responsibility that came with the job.

My father drowned in a rip current in Israel on 6 October 1989. He was a strong swimmer and his death was devastating and difficult to comprehend. I wanted to raise awareness about beach safety in the hope that what had happened to him might prevent another family suffering the same loss.

I was a journalist, but I could not interest anyone in the story. Then I approached Esther.

She listened, understood its importance and featured my father’s death and the issue of beach safety on That’s Life! What that meant to my late mother is difficult to overstate. She wrote to Esther afterwards to thank her, sent flowers and her name was sacred in our home.

More than 30 years later, when I interviewed Esther, I reminded her of what she had done for us and asked how stories were selected for That’s Life!.

“There were two possible reasons,” she told me. “Either the story was so serious we had to report it and sometimes, as in your case, it was a matter of life and death. Or it was far less serious, a faulty washing machine for instance, but affected many people.”

Then, characteristically, she turned the thanks back on me.

“We depended on the courage of people like you, who told us what had happened in their lives and allowed us to tell their stories in order to protect others.”

It encapsulated the purpose of That’s Life! and the woman who made it.

“Making a difference is addictive,” she told me. For Esther, it clearly was.

Her appetite for campaigning had begun before That’s Life!, when she worked as a researcher on Bernard Braden’s Braden’s Week. Consumer journalism taught her that asking questions wasn’t enough.

“It gave me a taste for finding solutions to protect people in the future. And it meant as a journalist I was not only asking questions but trying to find answers.”

That became the thread running through her extraordinary career.

That’s Life! began in 1973 and made Esther one of the most recognisable women on British television. Its peculiar genius was its ability to move from the ridiculous to the deadly serious without diminishing either. Misshapen vegetables, talking dogs and consumer disasters could sit alongside investigations into subjects that needed public attention.

Esther had the professionalism to make that unlikely mixture work. She was warm but persistent, meticulously prepared and instinctively understood the power of the enormous audience the programme commanded.

She once talked to me about audiences of 15 to 20 million — numbers almost unimaginable now — and what could be achieved when that many people were listening.

Most significantly, That’s Life! led to the creation of Childline in 1986 after the programme investigated child abuse. It became one of Esther’s defining achievements and she didn’t simply put her name to the charity; she remained involved and worked as a volunteer counsellor on the helpline.

Decades later, she recognised another group whose voices were too easily ignored and founded The Silver Line for lonely and isolated older people.

When we talked about it Esther worried particularly about those being left behind by technology.

“Isolated older people run the risk of being even more isolated by the digital switchover,” she told me. “We need to be advised and guided by humans, not just by robots in call centres.”

Then she remembered one of the first people to call The Silver Line. “When we launched the helpline, one of our first callers told us: ‘When I get off the phone I feel like I’ve joined the human race.’” For Esther, that went to the heart of it. “An older person should never feel they are not valued. We all have our place.”

Family was at the centre of Esther’s own life. Her three children with Desmond — Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua — and her five grandchildren were a source of enormous happiness. Her marriage to Desmond, who died in 2000, remained a defining relationship. When I asked if there was a gift from him she particularly treasured, Esther didn’t mention jewellery or some precious possession.

“Our garden in the New Forest,” she said. “It gives me constant pleasure and is filled with memories of our life together.” And when I asked what she most cherished about being a mother and grandmother, her answer was equally uncomplicated.

“The fun of it.” Children laughing, drawing consequences, treasure hunts, storytelling and “the unexpected cuddle. Nothing can be nicer or more precious.”

I saw that sense of fun when I interviewed Esther and Rebecca on their UK stage tour, Esther Rantzen: That’s Life. Rebecca, herself an experienced television producer and presenter, took on the role of interviewer — questioning her mother on stage before handing over to an audience who could ask almost anything.

They were a formidable and very funny double act, with the easy sparring of a mother and daughter who knew each other inside out. Esther loved the unpredictability of a live audience and the tour also gave mother and daughter the rare luxury of guaranteed time together.

Her Jewishness mattered too, even though her religious belief had changed. “I recognise how much I owe to being Jewish,” she told me. “The closeness of my family, the priority of education, the culture we share as Jews are the basis of so many of my values.”

She described herself as agnostic, while her observant daughter kept her connected with the High Holy Days. But she believed strongly that knowing what it was to belong to a minority brought with it a responsibility to extend tolerance and opportunity to others.

And then there was Sir Nicholas Winton.

Of all the remarkable moments created by That’s Life!, the reunion with the children he had helped rescue from Czechoslovakia before the war has endured like no other.

Winton helped save 669 children, most of them Jewish, from the Nazis. In 1988, Esther revealed his story to the nation and he discovered that some of the adults sitting around him were among the children whose lives he had saved.

For a woman renowned for maintaining her composure, it overwhelmed her.

“It was the only occasion when I had to stop the recording,” she told me. “I was in tears, as was the whole audience. Such an inspirational moment. All our team felt privileged to be in the studio.”

It also began a friendship she treasured. To Esther he was Nicky. She loved his modesty, optimism and refusal to believe that apparently impossible problems could not be solved. One of his sayings stayed with her: “If something isn’t blatantly impossible, then there must be a way of doing it.”

There was also a mischievousness she adored. She told me that on his 90th birthday Nicky decided he would no longer turn down an invitation to try something for the first time. It resulted in him going up in a microlight piloted by the daughter of one of the children he had saved. His principal observation afterwards was that it had been very draughty up his trouser legs.

It is easy to understand why Esther loved that story. For all the seriousness of her work, she was funny. She liked people, liked conversation and retained a delight in the absurd that anyone who watched That’s Life! recognised.

When she announced in 2023 that she had lung cancer, which had reached stage four, I cried. Perhaps that sounds strange as her relationship with me was primarily professional, but Esther occupied a different place in my life. I knew what she had done for us. Gratitude like that doesn’t disappear with time.

Illness did not silence Esther. Cancer presented her with one final great campaign. After joining Dignitas in Switzerland, she became one of the most prominent voices calling for a change in the law on assisted dying, arguing that terminally ill people facing unbearable suffering should be allowed a choice over the manner of their death.

It was a difficult and divisive subject, but there was something entirely consistent about Esther choosing to confront it publicly.

She had spent her career asking awkward questions, bringing uncomfortable subjects into people’s living rooms and allowing those directly affected to be heard. Faced with her own mortality, she did the same thing with herself.

There will rightly be much written about Esther’s remarkable career, her campaigns, awards and honours. I remember all of those things, but when I think of Esther, I will also think of my mother. And I cannot help but notice that her passing came so close to my father’s yahrzeit on 6 October.

At the height of her fame, Esther took our family’s tragedy seriously when others did not. She understood that telling the story of my father’s death might prevent another family suffering the same loss, and she used the enormous platform she had to make that possible. It was what she did throughout her life — for frightened children, lonely older people, aggrieved consumers and, in her final years, for those facing an unbearable death.

Making a difference, as Esther once told me, was addictive. She spent a lifetime proving it.

I will never forget her.