Mariella Frostrup: ‘The BBC let their stars get away with things they shouldn’t’

I’m due to meet Mariella Frostrup at her Notting Hill flat at 5pm. But a series of texts chart her slow progress from Bruton in Somerset – where she lives with her lawyer husband Jason McCue and two children Molly 20 and Danny 19 – to London.

When we finally meet, she is stressed: “I’m a walking advertisement for NOT moving to the country,” she says. “The train service is so bad I often come up to town the day before my appointments because I just can’t bank on being here. You can track my fury with GWR on Twitter – it’s all I ever tweet about.” Only this week she was railing against GWR after being forced to sit on the train floor, despite a first class ticket.

She leads me up to her London bolthole. It is full of amazing art (I’m sworn to secrecy on exactly what) and lined with Scandi white bookshelves rammed with intellectual tomes. We settle at an elegantly dishevelled dining table, off the modern kitchen, replete with leather benches.

At 61, the TV presenter, journalist and one of the closest things the UK has to what the French call a ‘public intellectual’ is bronzed and elegant in a chic white T-shirt and brown cords. She’s tiny and endearingly confiding. “I’ve had the luxury of having this flat to myself for nine years but my 19-year-old son is moving in and I’m dreading it because he’s SO untidy. I hate mess.”

As a leftie Labour insider (Frostrup was close to Sarah Brown, wife of former Labour PM Gordon Brown after campaigning together on rights for women and girls in Africa) I’m dying to know what she makes of the freebie clothes row that has engulfed Sir Keir Starmer and his wife; does she think they were right to take them?

Frostrup shakes her head. “When it comes to dressgate I can’t help feeling that if politicians were publicly funded like the royal family they would be given a clothes allowance for public events.”

“But as the Prime Minister’s wife you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t – you’ve got the media pouring over your clothes. It’s so unfair. If you are the Prime Minister’s husband you don’t have any focus on what you are wearing at all. So it’s ridiculous that we don’t have what they have in America, which is a sort of First Lady’s budget – we should just accept that it is a job.”

She gets up to make tea and fetch some fizzy water. “That said – Lady Starmer should probably have declared the gifts earlier…” she says.

We’re meeting today not to chat politics, however, but business. Frostrup – who appeared at Davos earlier this year speaking about how to make companies more female-friendly, is now the co-chair, presenter and founder of the Women in Work Conference, which takes place in London on Thursday and in New York next spring.

This year’s conference will feature speeches from grandees including Sir Stuart Rose, Sue Fox, president of Estée Lauder and Alex Mahon CEO of Channel 4 and is dedicated to “making a female-shaped space in the workplace”.

The essence of it is that work was designed for and by men, and businesses need to feminise their practices by offering not just flexible working but fully paid parental leave for both sexes, menstrual, fertility and menopause policies – as well as reducing their gender pay gap, having equality on boards and at the top.

A new Women in Work Survey (called the WIW Gender Equity Measure) ranks 400 of Britain’s top companies against these WIW gender benchmarks. It finds that only four big UK corporates tick all these female-friendly boxes: Diageo, Accenture, Estée Lauder and Channel 4 with Vodafone getting a special mention too. Interestingly all of these companies (except for Estée Lauder) have female CEOs, although the report recognises many companies with male CEOs who see that to attract top talent they need to make these accommodations.

“This is still a colossal issue,” says Frostrup. “Almost four out of five employers still pay women less than men and the median gender pay gap remains stubbornly wide at 9.4 per cent, the same as five years ago. But it’s not just about pay, the financial and social penalties women face throughout their biological journey whether they are parents or not are significant and multifaceted.” She explains women are still battling the “prohibitive cost of childcare to a lack of menstrual or menopause support”.

Frostrup, with her seductive husky voice (once voted the sexiest on telly) and winsome blonde party-girl look, was always the thinking person’s pin-up. I am interested to understand how she has segued from pop and presenting to fronting a business conference. She explains that she has always been interested in smashing taboos: “the more unspeakable something is, the more I think I have to say it. It’s why I did Channel 4’s Sex Box. I just thought: people on TV talking about normal sex... great idea! It’s also why I tackled the menopause.”

She puts her desire for straight talking and frank discussion down to her Scandinavian roots – Frostrup was born in Oslo, Norway but moved with her family and four siblings to Ireland in 1969. Her dad, Peter, was Foreign Editor on The Irish Times (he died aged 44 when Frostrup was 15,) and her mum an artist so she had culture in her blood.

In her 20s, Frostrup worked as a PR executive for Phonogram Records, responsible for keeping everyone from Dire Straits to UB40, Bananarama to the Boom Town Rats out of trouble and only in the papers for the right reasons. She proved so adept that she was asked to coordinate press for perhaps the biggest rock concert of all time, Live Aid at Wembley in 1985. She is currently working on a documentary about the Nineties scene – it is centred on one particular character but she says any other details are currently secret. Is she excited about Oasis getting back together, she partied with them back in the day?

“To be quite honest. I really like Noel. And I know Liam…. But I saw Oasis play in Manchester in the 90s and I was not alone in thinking that it wasn’t the most exciting live act I’d ever seen…I wasn’t first in line in the queue to get tickets.”

She looks thoughtful “With my old agony aunt hat on” – she did that gig for over 20 years at The Observer – “these feuds just show how stupid it is to get stuck in a fight with someone… With time these disputes just start to look smaller and sillier. The whole Oasis debacle is an advert for not having big fights with siblings or old friends. I’m still amazed when women my age go, ‘I’m not speaking to her…” I just think get over it..”

Ah, ageing. She is in her sixties now – how is it for her? Does she feel invisible as so many other women begin to when they hit midlife?

“Mick Jagger is my ageing ideal. He just keeps going. Or my neighbour in Somerset [the war photographer] Don McCullin who is still taking amazing pictures at 90 – he’d be in Gaza if he could, but he can’t run anymore.

“I’ll never retire, people retire and often die – we need to constantly be learning new things, challenging ourselves. And anyway ageing is different for my generation – it’s less judgmental, we’re doing it our way and it’s not denting my cocktail consumption: I keep going to 60th birthday parties where we’re all still leaping around the dance floor at 4am.”

Does she think there is enough of a positive narrative though about the lives of older women?

“There are so many rules about what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do. Take this sleeveless T-shirt. My arms are wrinkly, but I don’t care. This is me. But I admit it’s a tussle. We’re told by much of the media that visible signs of ageing in women are so repulsive they should be hidden from sight – so do you cover up? As an older woman you are constantly told to take up less space: don’t wear a vest top unless you have a super-human body from exercising 18 hours a day… It’s exhausting.”

I ask if things are changing. “[Not really] not enough. This view of older women won’t change quickly. It’s deeply rooted in the core of our culture.”

As a woman in the public eye is she treated differently now she’s older? “Yes, everything changes. I have much less currency in the broadcasting world.”

I find this surprising; she is one of our best known and best loved arts broadcasters. Since the 1990s (when she jumped from music PR to the small screen) she has presented everything from The Little Picture show for ITV to BBC2’s The Green Room and Radio 4’s Open Book via Have I Got News for You and Absolutely Fabulous. As well as judging the Booker Prize, Orange Prize and numerous other arts awards.

She continues: “As older women, we’re judged differently. We’re seen as demanding and difficult as we get older even if it’s just us having experience and being good at what we do. Men who are demanding are never described as difficult...”

We talk about the double standard when it comes to men and women. Her rumoured ex George Clooney at 63 is still seen as a silver fox. While Huw Edwards the now disgraced BBC presenter was, at the same age the biggest news presenter on TV.

At the mention of Edwards she makes a face.

“The Huw Edwards case, I think it’s such a horrible, horrible story and his reaction has made it worse. He blamed everyone else, his family – saying that they should have noticed he was taking medication and stopped him, and he blamed his bullying father and not getting into Oxford for being bad for his self-esteem. He’s a middle-aged man, he needs to take some responsibility for his actions. It’s clear he has no remorse, he doesn’t understand that HE is responsible.”

This intersection of news and politics and culture is what most interests her, she says. It was what she loved most about her daily show on Times Radio. I wonder why she left? She sighs. “It just ate up too much time, doing it four days a week. I hate rolling news and there was more of that, and there wasn’t enough time for all the other projects I want to do.. and it’s important not to get stuck. Broadcasting tries to put you in a box – I was Music Mariella, then Films Mariella, then Books Mariella… then Menopause Mariella.”

Ah yes, menopause. In November 2018 Frostrup made a documentary for the BBC called ‘The Truth about the Menopause’ about her own struggle to get the right treatment; she tells me how she suffered “two years of sleeplessness and anxiety and only got the HRT” she needed when she paid to visit a private Harley Street gynaecologist.

“Talking about it was just taboo. At dinner at this very table I remember trying to talk to a man about my perimenopause struggles and he literally turned his back on me. I became incensed. As a lifelong feminist it was just the biggest injustice that 80 per cent of women didn’t know about the impacts of menopause even though they were being affected so badly. It’s shameful.

“I tried for three years to get the BBC to do the documentary. I went to five different male commissioners who said: ‘Yeah, menopause, how do you make THAT sexy?’ And I was like: ‘Umm.. All your viewers are women over 50.’ I was very grateful to Charlotte Moore who in the end just went: ‘Do it!’ But it was frustrating to have to do it as a science documentary not something broader”.

Since then, Frostrup has co-written a book called Cracking the Menopause – it is coming out in the US in January retitled Menopause is Hot – and is chair of her campaigning organisation Menopause Mandate (whose patrons include Carolyn Harris MP, Davina McCall, and Penny Lancaster). Menopause Mandate has blasted the menopause out of the metaphorical cupboard, lobbied parliament and business and made it compulsory for doctors to study it in medical school.

The Women in Work conference grew out of the Menopause Mandate – the road to equality in business, she believes, is through companies taking women’s health seriously and also in getting men to share responsibility for any children equally with their partners. One of the big areas of focus in her Women in Work survey – released this week to accompany the summit – is a focus on shared parental leave.

She would like more companies to become like Diageo, which, she explains, now offers 52 weeks of parental leave, 26 of them paid, to all employees “regardless of gender, sexual orientation and whether the employee becomes a parent biologically, through surrogacy or through adoption”. Since the change in 2019, uptake by men has gone from 23 days to 105, sharing the responsibility of family life equally right from the get go, something she says younger men are particularly keen to do.

“I have quite an equal relationship with my husband” – the pair met on a charity trek in Nepal, when she was 39, they were married two years later. “He’s good with the kids, and he does a lot of cooking, but our entire domestic life, our social life, our holidays, all revolve around me doing it. So it’s not a fair division really. And that starts with shared parental leave because there’s no reason why a dad can’t do everything you can do.”

Bringing in more of these kinds of policies, the report argues, can have massive benefits for UK Plc.. “Women are leaving work in their droves,” Frostrup says, “and that’s talent business can’t afford to lose. Just a 5 per cent increase in the total number of women in employment could boost UK GDP by up to £125 billion every year. Did you know that a quarter of mothers leave the workforce in the first year and the majority are yet to return 10 years post birth….”

But what about the mothers who choose to stay home to raise their own children, I wonder. Or those women who, while they welcome doctors actually diagnosing their menopausal symptoms, don’t want to be seen through a purely menopausal lens?

For the first time she looks a bit frosty, telling me about an older woman she talked to at a dinner party. “She said to me: ‘I don’t know why you keep banging on about menopause, in my day we just got on with it’ and then two glasses of wine later she was telling me about her suicidal ideation and menopause-related depression.”

I want to ask her what her ambitions are from here but no sooner do we get started on her exciting idea for a books podcast featuring such huge names as Tom Hanks than she looks at her watch and announces: “I have to be in Kensington for dinner at 8.30pm”. As she puts on her scarf we go back to chatting about the BBC – how the Huw Edwards debacle and the fuss around Strictly Come Dancing make it seem that top talent there has acted with impunity.

“Well because we all pay for the BBC we have a much more vested interest in it than other big media companies,” she says. “But we’ve got the same basic problem everywhere, of elevating people and worshipping them for reasons that are gossamer thin. The idea of stars behaving badly is as old as time itself… But the BBC gets viewers from stars, so they let them get away with things they shouldn’t.”

As she puts on a coat to scoot out the door, she turns, surveying me thoughtfully.

“Fame is really toxic – it makes people feel like they can do anything and get away with it; it gives them a strange power – which they kind of do have on a day to day basis. But in the end it’s like Icarus, innit. They get burnt.”

And with that she is gone.

Eleanor Mills is the Founder of Noon – home of the Queenager and the author of Much More to Come, Lessons on the mayhem and magnificence of midlife published by Harper Collins