Dame Esther Rantzen obituary
Presenter and producer of That’s Life!, a TV series providing entertainment and consumer reporting, out of which came the Childline service
For four decades Esther Rantzen, who has died aged 86, was one of the most recognisable figures on British television. A pioneering and influential female presenter and campaigner, she also set up the Childline telephone hotline for children to report abuse and bullying, and in her later years advocated the right to assisted dying for terminally ill people.
Rantzen became a champion of consumer rights and the central figure on the BBC’s That’s Life! programme, which ran for 21 years from 1973. She went on to present other, shorter-running series, including Hearts of Gold (1988-96) and a chatshow, Esther (1994-2002). She also appeared as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing in 2004 and I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2008.
The style of That’s Life! was distinctly populist, even tabloid, in tone; sometimes mawkish and sanctimonious. But the show pioneered television reporting on consumer problems about dodgy builders, fraudulent businessmen and criminal cheats, and it raised important issues such as the sugar content in drinks, human organ donations and rear seatbelts in cars.
It also leavened the mix with more jokey items – suggestively shaped vegetables sent in by viewers, singing dogs, street vox-pops with engaging pensioners such as the perennially jolly East End woman Annie Mizen, silly headlines and comic songs. The show gave a new lease of life to the veteran rhyming comedian Cyril Fletcher with his Odd Odes, and provided an early showcase for new talents such as Victoria Wood, Richard Stilgoe and Lynsey de Paul. At its peak the show attracted 20 million viewers on Sunday nights, and Rantzen became one of the few TV personalities recognisable by her first name alone.
She was central to the show’s success and was its presiding power. Her onscreen mateyness had a cool edge, and she was not always easy to work with, according to colleagues. Paul Heiney, for a time one of her co-presenters, said: “You were crowded out if you didn’t click. The most annoying thing is that she was always right.”
“I am working on humility,” she confided to the Times in 2008. “That’s another new thing I am doing … I may never get there.”
Childline, now also an online service, grew out of the programme, which discovered that many children were suffering abuse in silence with no natural outlet to express their fears and gain help. On the line’s first night in 1986 it received 50,000 calls, swamping the system.
Rantzen told the Scotsman in 2018: “When I look back I am amazed at those very first calls, often from red phone boxes … in the middle of the night, with drunks banging on the glass. For the first seven years or so the most common problem was sexual abuse, because it had been the great taboo. They had not been able to talk about it to anybody else and thought they would not be believed. They thought it was their fault and didn’t know how to ask for help.”
By the time the charity was absorbed into the NSPCC – the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children – in 2006, Childline claimed to have helped 4 million callers, but acknowledged that one in four of those who called failed to get through.
Born in Berkhamsted, in Hertfordshire, Esther was the daughter of liberal Jewish parents. Her mother, Katherine (nee Leverson), ran a nursery in the East End of London, and her father, Harry Rantzen, was a sound engineer for the BBC, rising later to become the corporation’s head of engineering designs. Esther was educated at the private North London Collegiate school and studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where she became an enthusiastic member of the university dramatic society.
Any ambition of a stage career, however, was curtailed by self-consciousness about her appearance, a hang-up that remained decades later when, becoming the first woman to receive a Bafta Richard Dimbleby award in 1988 for her work on factual programmes, she described herself as “the oldest, plainest woman on television”.
After graduation she worked briefly at a West End advertising agency before joining the BBC as a secretary, then providing dramatic effects as a radio studio manager (1963) and becoming a programme researcher (1965). In 1967 she joined the BBC2 Man Alive documentary team as a trainee director, and there was spotted by the head of documentaries, Desmond Wilcox, who became her boss. The two began an affair three years later, and eventually married in 1977, following Wilcox’s divorce from his first wife, Patsy.
Rantzen’s first onscreen experience came as a reporter from 1968 on the programme Braden’s Week, a gentler precursor of That’s Life!, starring the Canadian-born actor and broadcaster Bernard Braden, who lost his job with the BBC when he advertised margarine on ITV in 1972. Rantzen not only presented her own programme from the start, but also became its producer and scriptwriter.
The success of That’s Life! owed much to her drive and ambition, and she struggled after it ended in 1994 to find an equally successful replacement. The Rantzen Report, which aimed to continue That’s Life’s investigatory ethos, was described in a letter to the Times as “zoo TV”, consisting as it did of “a boisterous studio audience [applauding] as Esther made her accusations” and ran for only three episodes in 1996, one of which was found by the Broadcasting Standards Commission to be “inaccurate, misleading and unfair” in its allegations of neglect at a home for chronically ill people.
As her regular broadcasting career began to wane, Rantzen threw her activities increasingly into charity work, especially for young people. There was support for ME sufferers and the National Deaf Children’s Society, Hospice Care, even a campaign for courtesy: her name was associated with 55 charities in all. She was appointed OBE in 1991, followed by CBE in 2006, and was made a dame in 2015.
As someone who had made a career out of discussing the lives of others, Rantzen was also not shy about sharing details of her own. She frequently described her loneliness as a widow following Wilcox’s death in 2000, and that led in time to setting up the Silver Line in 2013, a telephone counselling service for older people similar to Childline. When she started dating potential partners, that got an airing too, including her humiliation when one dinner date ungallantly described her as elderly.
She cheerfully discussed her OCD, her Botox injections, even a brief 1960s fling with the Tory politician Nicholas Fairbairn. Her appearances on Strictly Come Dancing and I’m a Celebrity were justified, she claimed, to keep her name and charities in front of a youthful audience too young to remember her on That’s Life! She also appeared in the first episode of Celebrity First Dates in 2016, and presented a Channel 5 consumer watchdog series, Esther Rantzen’s House Trap, in 2018.
In the 2010 general election, outraged by the MPs’ expenses row, Rantzen stood as an independent candidate in the Luton South constituency, where the Labour MP Margaret Moran had featured prominently in the scandal. Rantzen’s high-profile campaign was vitiated slightly by the fact that Moran had already resigned, and she eventually came in fourth, with 4% of the vote, well behind the main party candidates.
There were several books, including an autobiography, Esther, in 2001, and two “life guides”: If Not Now, When? (2008) and Older and Bolder: My A-Z of Surviving Almost Everything (2023).
In May 2023 Rantzen announced that she had been diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer. In December that year she called for a change in the law on assisted dying, revealing that she had joined the Dignitas clinic in Zurich.
She welcomed the private member’s bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales that was introduced in October 2024, but it failed to get through the House of Lords. In encouraging its revival in September 2026, she announced that she was too physically fragile to travel to Switzerland. In the event the bill was voted down in the Commons, but she continued to assert that change would come.
She is survived by her children, Miriam, Rebecca and Joshua, and five grandchildren, Benjamin, Alexander, Teddy, Florence and Romilly.
• Esther Louise Rantzen, television broadcaster and campaigner, born 22 June 1940; died 30 September 2026