CHRIS TARRANT: Sex god of Surrey
Until two days ago the R Bar in Esher seemed an innocuous place; the kind of glass-fronted, chrome-plated gin palace in which wealthy Surrey housewives came to be sophisticated, to chain-drink Martinis (only £5 on Mondays) or cut-price champagne (Tuesdays) on leather banquettes.
What they also came to do is stalk their local sex god, a celebrity whose 15-year marriage is now in the doldrums, thanks to these lusty pariahs — who wore no knickers, by the way. If the celebrity in question were Sean Connery or Clive Owen, all this would be understandable perhaps. But it isn’t. The object of housewives’ fantasies in the green belt is Chris Tarrant, 59. Just think, right now thousands of women are longing for a sexual encounter with Chris Tarrant. His piercing blue eyes drove into her: “Is that your final answer?” he whispered . . .
We knew that Tarrant was very rich (£3 million a year); that before that he was once very poor, having lived for a time in a mini-van in the grounds of the school where he was a teacher; that he then decided to bombard television stations with letters which said: “I am the face of the Seventies and this is your last chance to snap me up”, and so got a foot on the ladder and was soon co-presenting Tiswas; that his line in easy, occasionally cruel, buffoonery was so popular on the Capital Radio breakfast show that half a million fewer listeners bother tuning in to his successor, Johnny Vaughan; and that everyone wants to be a millionaire, only most people think an impala is a kind of duck. What we did not know about Tarrant is what his wife, Ingrid, now claims: “I’ve been there when completely drunk women throw themselves at him. They lift their skirts up and have no knickers on”. Ingrid’s verdict? “ It’s disgusting.”
Tarrant is presumably less repulsed, having wound up in a clinch with a busty blonde at the R Bar, before shouting: “This is the woman I want to be the next Mrs Tarrant!” The current Mrs Tarrrant called him a twit, chucked him out of the house, and, loyally, blamed his assailant. “I think he was so drunk he wouldn’t have known what he did,” she told numerous tabloids over the weekend. “I’m very bad at communicating my thoughts to my wife,” he has admitted. “In moments of weakness I pull myself a long drink.”
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Tarrant’s most recent drinking binge, Ingrid said, followed an argument. Over what, she wouldn’t say. The red tops are in a frenzy of speculation. Her husband’s passion for fishing grates on her nerves. So is his hanging about the house since he left Capital in 2004. So is his being away so much from the children, of whom there are four, his workaholicism; his laziness; his punishing work schedule . . . isn’t it time that Jude and Sienna had another bust-up?