Fearne Cotton has a warning for anyone who wants to be famous. The TV and radio presenter has spent a quarter of a century in the spotlight, becoming a household name in her twenties, and is blunt about the toll the accompanying scrutiny has taken.
“If you want to get a whole host of mental health problems, get in the public eye really young, because you get them all,” she says. “There’s no way you can get through it in one piece … All my mental health lows are because of my job. Nothing else. It is not conducive to a balanced mind.”
It feels strange to hear this coming from the same voice that used to brighten up mornings on Radio 1 and Radio 2. But Cotton, who was once routinely described as “bubbly” and photographed looking like the ultimate party girl, seems determined to knock down every false idea I have of her.
“I’m a real introvert,” she tells me. “I have such a small social life.” All those events where she was smiling on the red carpet? “They’re nerve-racking and everyone’s looking for who’s more famous over your shoulder. It doesn’t feel safe to me, that sort of environment.” Safe, she adds, is “at home with my cats”.
We have met in Soho, where Cotton is promoting her debut novel, Scripted. It’s about a woman who starts to find scripts outside her flat, predicting what will happen in her life — from arguments with her self-obsessed boyfriend to her bridezilla sister being demanding. She had the idea while out running, spent two years writing it and calls it the joy of her life. “You have autonomy over what you are doing — there’s no hierarchy of people like in TV, where everyone’s got an opinion.”
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At 42 she has largely retreated from television and radio, focusing instead on her wellness empire, Happy Place. It encompasses a chart-topping podcast, where she talks to people about their mental health (recent interviewees include Zayn Malik and Alain de Botton), festivals and a publishing imprint that has been turning out Sunday Times non-fiction bestsellers, including Bigger than Us, a book of spiritual lessons for everyday happiness.
For much of the late 2000s and early 2010s, though, Cotton was ubiquitous. Born in Hillingdon, west London, she started her career aged 15 on children’s TV and in her twenties hosted Top of the Pops and the first iteration of Love Island. She presented Radio 1’s weekday morning show from 2009 to 2015, before filling in for Zoe Ball on Radio 2. Fame came with all the usual trappings — clothing lines, famous boyfriends (including Ian Watkins from Lostprophets, now in prison for sex offences), public break-ups and regular tabloid appearances — and a high price: she suffered from bulimia in her twenties and had what she now believes was a nervous breakdown.
As a teenager in television, working on GMTV’s The Disney Club, she felt looked after. It was in her twenties that the trouble started. “I think it’s when you become tabloid-y that it all starts to go wrong,” she says. “You conflate what you know to be true about yourself with other people’s opinions and that’s dangerous.” Her fame predated most social media, but she recalls the torment of live radio criticism. “On Radio 1 … you had a big screen with all the text messages coming in. It’s ghastly speaking live with people going ‘You’re a knob!’ I took over from Jo Whiley — the queen of radio — so imagine the abuse.”
In her early thirties, while her career was flourishing, her mental health deteriorated, manifesting itself in extreme anxiety before going on air. “I can do live radio with my eyes closed, but I could not sleep the night before,” she recalls. “I’d get a week down the line and go, ‘I feel ill — I can’t do this.’” The anxiety escalated into panic attacks. “I got to the point where I just thought, ‘Why am I doing this to myself? Am I that desperate to be seen or heard?’”
Now she has other avenues she can pursue — thanks to Happy Place — but 15 years ago this would have derailed her career. “I’d have been screwed, because I had nothing else,” she admits. “There was a point where I didn’t have much work. It’s been a big old slog to get Happy Place to where it is, but I built it out of absolute necessity.”
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She remains in therapy. “I’ve learnt that I couldn’t do live radio or TV today for any money in the world,” she says. “The thought of going on to someone else’s platform [with] that level of risk and judgment, and that element of the unknown? My nervous system can’t take it — it’s absolutely shot. Putting myself in that is like putting me in a pit of lions.”
What exactly is she afraid of? “Because cancel culture exists, it’s that you could do one thing and you’re done, you’re dead. Bye! Everyone’s waiting for you to cock up so they can all point fingers and say that you’ve always been terrible.”
Is this tall poppy syndrome? She nods. “It’s in our culture to try to level people out. We celebrate the new person on the scene, but then as soon as you’re established, people cannot wait for you to f*** up … I also think I’ve had positive feedback from what I’m doing now because I’ve actively chosen to step away from the shiny stuff [TV and radio] — and people like that. But I can’t put myself back on TV now — I’ve got too much to lose. I’ve a family to support.”
In 2014 she married the musician Jesse Wood, with whom she has two children, Rex, 11, and Honey, 8. They live in Richmond, southwest London, with three cats and a 55-year-old tortoise called George. Wood also has two children, Arthur and Lola, from his first marriage.
Cotton struggles with the juggle of work and children. “We’re the first generation with women who not only have jobs, but can be CEOs — for my mum’s generation, that was very rare,” she says. “And we put all this pressure of ‘We’ve got to reach for the stars!’ but it’s also, ‘Does you kid go to eight extracurricular things and eat kale?’ Because if not, you’re really f***ing up. We feel responsible for the next generation of women to see ‘You’ve got all these opportunities’ but I don’t think we provide them with the tools to go, ‘This is how you do it and stay sane’, because we don’t know how to.”
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She sees her own life as a pie chart. “It has two halves [family and career] and there’s no room for anything else. I work my tits off, I look after my kids to the best of my ability and then I go to bed at nine.” The Cotton-Woods don’t have a nanny, so they plan out who is doing the school-run well in advance: “We hate these little meetups, where everything gets really paperwork-y but they’re essential, because otherwise it would fall to shit.”
Wood is the son of the Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, and growing up around fame, Cotton feels, has made him immune to its lure. “He thinks it’s a load of nonsense,” she says. “With his dad’s level of fame, people become a strange version of themselves. And he didn’t grow up being around his dad much: it was him and his mum in a flat and he got shipped out to see his dad in all these different locations around the world.”
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Scripted is Cotton’s 15th book — others have been non-fiction and focused on cooking and mental health — but the first that Wood has read. “He was intrigued because I hadn’t written fiction before,” she explains. “With the others, he has heard me wanging on about everything else, so he doesn’t need to. I’m not offended.”
Cotton says she understands the stigma about celebrity authors but doesn’t feel her being published takes anything away from anyone. “Just because I’m releasing a book doesn’t mean that another novelist isn’t going to do well with their book. There’s room for everyone to do everything.”
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She doesn’t miss that brutality of TV. “I’ve been sacked a million times,” she says. “I’ve been sacked and not told I’ve been sacked. You just turn the telly on and someone else is doing your job.” She won’t name the shows, but says that has happened twice in the past ten years. “It’s all a big game. You’ve got the Monopoly board out and you’re moving around [trying to] dodge the danger.” For now, Cotton says she has found her happy place — and it’s a long way from our TV screens.
Scripted by Fearne Cotton (Penguin £18.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members
