VANESSA FELTZ stated an emotional goodbye to her self-titled Channel 5 speak show on Friday – however she is going to quickly be again on display with a model new YouTube programme.
In a profession transfer that rivals Holly Willoughby’s, the veteran presenter, 64, is popping to the web to air At Home With Vanessa, which she is going to movie at her North London pad.
She is already making a TV studio on the home, the place movie star friends might be invited to climb into Vanessa’s pink superking-sized mattress for a chat.
And as I sit down with the star — who discovered fame on ITV in 1994 together with her self-titled first speak show — builders are busy putting in lighting and units prepared for the enterprise, which launches subsequent month.
Not solely is she again on the mattress, she’s again on the courting scene and is opening up about her courting disasters for the primary time.
Even although Vanessa is worked up about the longer term, she is clearly nonetheless damage about her Channel 5 sacking after solely a yr on air.
She was referred to as into a gathering with TV bosses final month to be informed her daytime show was getting the chop to make approach for a day film.
Instead of wallowing in self-pity or taking a well-earned relaxation, workaholic Vanessa started planning a new show format.
It comes as Holly prepares to make an enormous comeback with a YouTube journal show Together following greater than a yr out of the highlight — which can rival her former show This Morning.
Of her Channel 5 axing, Vanessa tells me: “I didn’t cry once they informed me. I simply bought very quiet.
“I used to be completely devastated and utterly gutted and very shocked and very dissatisfied. It was completely crushing.
“Every time something awful happens, and boy does it happen, either you fold up, curl up and disappear, or you try and come back fighting.”
And combating she definitely is, ploughing 1000’s of kilos into turning her Victorian gothic folly into an enormous TV studio.
Vanessa reveals her new show could have echoes of On The Bed, her phase on Nineties Channel 4 hit The Big Breakfast, by which she interviewed stars together with Charlton Heston, Jim Carrey, Andie MacDowell and Goldie Hawn in a mattress.
Now she has ambitions to resurrect the phase for YouTube — however this time, she is going to host it from her very personal boudoir.
Recalling how she sprang into motion after studying her C5 show was being dropped, she stated: “I used to be informed on the Wednesday and, by Friday, I had the builders in.
“I couldn’t assume what to do. And then I assumed, ‘YouTube’.
“That’s what Piers Morgan’s doing with colossal success. Holly Willoughby is about to do it, too”
Piers, who has 4.4million subscribers on the platform, has even given Vanessa his backing, telling her to go for it at a current summer season get together.
She stated the enterprise is “not cheap”, however added: “I’m not a natural entrepreneur. I’ve never wanted to risk it. I’ve never dared to. But I am backing myself.”
Launching a new show at a swanky TV studio is one factor, however opening her house up to prying eyes is one thing else.
However, Vanessa is unperturbed, telling me: “I really feel like I’ve made my total profession out of different individuals’s lives. Callers and listeners and viewers and friends telling me about their very own lives and every little thing else.
“I believe it’s a bit hypocritical and s****y if I don’t allow them to in to mine. I believe everyone already is aware of far an excessive amount of about me.
“I don’t think there’s going to be any revelation just by looking at my curtains or my wallpaper or whatever. I hope it will feel real, because it is.”
Vanessa tells me I’m the primary customer to her bed room for a very long time.
The star left her fiancé, ex Ben Ofoedu, in 2023 after practically 17 years collectively when she found he was dishonest on her.
Having discovered love and marriage with a new girl, the Phats & Smalls singer, who’s a decade youthful than Vanessa, has frequently criticised his ex and has plans for a tell-all memoir.
Vanessa is reluctant to speak about him, however the emotional toll is evident.
“I’m trying not to ever mention him or talk about him at all, you see,” she says.
“But the reality is, a lady that he was seeing on the facet trolled my daughter on Christmas Day. So due to this fact my woman knew. I couldn’t cover it and fake it wasn’t taking place.
“So I ended it. When I did so, the earlier incumbent gave a volley of interviews saying how enormously pleased he’d been, how he’d ruined his personal life, how he would do something to get again with me and so on.
“But since then, sadly, his stream of more and more disagreeable revelations about me preserve showing. I’m imagining the intention is to rattle and hang-out me or presumably to hunt to destroy any fame I’ve constructed up, which is, to me, completely extraordinary.
“Because what really occurred was I ended it and that individual was determined to return again.
“Also, I consider that individual is supposed to be fortunately married.
“So by all means focus on being married and have a beautiful life and reside fortunately ever after.
“But why would you say horrible things about someone that you were with for 16-and-a-half years?”
Vanessa, who can be a weekend LBC radio host, has tentatively thrown herself again into courting after virtually twenty years.
But she has not been tempted to hitch any courting apps, terrified that suitors could spill the beans about their encounters.
She says: “Imagine that you simply stroll into Wetherspoons and it’s me. You know, you’re going to textual content each considered one of your mates.
“I’ve got four grandchildren. I’ve got to maintain some level of dignity. So I don’t really want my sexcapades to end up in the papers. So, no. I’m not apping.”
Instead, she has let pals and colleagues introduce her to potential companions — on one situation.
“They have to be men of a certain age,” she insists. “I’ve dabbled with a younger model before and that worked out quite disastrously.”
But Vanessa admits her new technique has its downsides.
“We go for a suitable age, suitable consort, but they don’t seem to have an ounce of game or banter or humour or flirtation,” she says.
“I think they think it’s a big achievement to be still alive.”
Attempting to place a constructive spin on her courting disasters, I level out that a minimum of her romantic pursuits are choosing up the invoice.
“I thought that I would love that, but it is not worth it,” she replies.
“I assumed it could be a really huge change to have a person pay for me. A really huge change. So I assumed it could be fabulous, nevertheless it’s not.
“Luckily, I can afford my own dinner. I don’t need anyone, thank God, to buy me dinner. And if I did, I’d rather stay at home and have a cheese sandwich than sell myself for a dinner.”
The presenter says a few of her current encounters have been “shocking”.
“They look like they’re going to crumble like a really stale Jacob’s cream cracker,” she reveals.
“It was not that way back, the gentleman involved was driving me from right here to the restaurant, which is about a mile and a half, and took about six minutes.
“In that period of time, when I’d only just met him, he told me all about his hellish divorce, his mother dying, the operation he’d just had, his doctor. You just think, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, where’s the bit where I get to flutter my eyelashes at you?’. They’re certainly not, so far, the gentleman of my dreams — more nightmares, I’d say. But I have not, as ever, given up hope.”
Vanessa is oozing confidence after shedding 7st following a gastric bypass op in 2019.
The star dropped from a measurement 22 to a measurement 10, however confesses she has thought-about weight-loss injections.
She says: “If I might use the fats jabs, consider me, I might. I’d have them in a heartbeat as a result of I consider it takes away the meals noise.
“And the meals noise is torture. I’m all the time pondering, ‘Shall I have a Cornetto, shan’t I’ve a Cornetto?’. And that’s even with a gastric band. I’ve bought a bypass, however I’m all the time pondering, ‘I shouldn’t have that. Why did I eat that? Why?’.
“It’s that horrible monologue in your head where you can never, ever forgive yourself. You’re always wondering why. So anything that gets rid of that — how great.”
But she provides of the jabs: “I’ve been informed I shouldn’t have them as a result of I’ve had a gastric bypass. I don’t wish to do one thing silly and behave like a bloody fool. So I’m not doing that. But am I in favour of them? Yes. Do I believe each celeb who’s ever used them owes the world a proof? No.
“But I think these days, when you look at someone who was much bigger and now looks a lot smaller, you can’t help thinking they’re probably on the jabs, can you?”
For a lady who has spent her three-decade profession on the BBC, ITV, plus Channels 4 and 5, Vanessa is worked up to see what her viewers will make of her new digital providing.
“I hope people like it,” she says. “But in the end, it’s only TV. If they don’t, I’ll think of something else.”
