Born in 1944 in Plymouth, Angela Rippon is a British journalist, newsreader and presenter. Her career began at 17 as a photojournalist for the Western Morning News. In 1975, she became the first female journalist to permanently present the BBC national news; she has since hosted Top Gear, Antiques Roadshow and Rip-Off Britain as well as becoming the oldest contestant to compete on Strictly Come Dancing, in 2023. She is an ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society and is supporting the charity’sForget Me Not appeal.
This photo was takenfor the cover of the 1980s exercise LP Shape Up and Dance. Normally, I would have had bare feet if I were dancing, but the producers asked me to wear little pink shoes, which seemed incongruous. Nevertheless, I was quite happy in this outfit. What’s fascinating is that I still meet women who ask me, “Have you got a spare copy? Mine’s worn out.”
At the time, I was married and living in Devon. I had a horse, two dogs and two cats, and a large garden. I was just about to stop reading the news as I was going to be one of the “famous five” on ITV’s TV-am, along with Michael Parkinson, David Frost, Anna Ford and Robert Kee. We’d not had breakfast television in Britain before, so the show felt quite revolutionary. It all ended in tears, however, because they decided they couldn’t afford Anna and me, which was crazy. As we discovered subsequently, we were the cheapest of the five. But they still got rid of us.
For a whole year after this debacle, I thought my career was over. In fact, one of the BBC executives is on record as saying, “Angela Rippon will never work for the BBC again.” Back then there was no way that if you worked for ITV, you could also work for BBC. Then, one day my agent called and said, “Angela, how would you like to work in America?” I was flown to Boston and became an arts and entertainment correspondent for WHDH-TV. I eventually returned home, armed with an Emmy I had won for a documentary I’d made, and I was able to work again. That whole period was very chaotic, at times scary, but exciting. What would I have done if it was the end of my career? I would have just picked up a camera and applied for jobs as a photojournalist again.
Esther Rantzen, who’s a great mate, and her husband, Desmond, when he was alive, always used to say, “I don’t know anybody who’s reinvented themselves as much as you.” I don’t see it as reinventing. It’s just that I’ve been around for a long time, and as television has evolved, I’ve been fortunate to be able to move with it. Take, for example, when I appeared on the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show in 1976. Certain people in the press asked, “How can you ever go back to reading the news again?” If I’d gone back to the desk wearing dangly earrings and sequins, yes, maybe there would have been a problem. But just because newsreaders broadcast doom and gloom, it doesn’t mean that is who we are. There’s another side to our characters, and maybe I opened the door to show that we’re all human underneath.
No matter where I wasor what I was doing, I would ring my parents every week. There were jobs I wouldn’t let my mother, Edna, know about. Such as when I went diving with great white sharks. Or when I went to Northern Ireland – a dangerous place to work in the 1970s.
In 2003, I had just come off air at LBC when I noticed lots of missed calls from my mum. When I called her back, she said, “Angela, you’ve got to be very brave, but your father’s died.” He’d had a massive heart attack. My parents had been married for 62 years and they were joined at the hip. His death was a huge blow for my mum. After that, she started to have transient ischemic attacks – mini strokes – and I think that’s what triggered her dementia. Gradually, her behaviour became more erratic and her character changed. She became agoraphobic and very distrustful of people. She used to have bursts of temper and say the most terrible things. In 2004, a doctor told us she had vascular dementia and had been declining for about a year. She died in 2009.
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It took me a long time to realise how this disease was going to affect her and what it was going to mean for me as her main carer. Not many people talked about dementia publicly in the 2000s, and I remember being interviewed by someone from the Daily Mail. The journalist said to me, “Aren’t you embarrassed to be talking about this?” I said, “No, why should I be? This is a disease of the brain. It’s the brain being eaten away and dying.” There was such a stigma back then, and it is so important we do not keep dementia hidden.
I had to learn quickly that you can’t take offence when someone with dementia says something cruel. Instead, you work with it. There was one occasion when my mum was in hospital and I could hear her before I got into the ward. She was screaming and being very abusive to the nurse, who was trying to take her blood pressure. I walked in and said, “Mummy, play nice.” She started shouting at me, “Get me out of this place. What have you put me in here for?” I just let her rage for a little while, and then I said, “Mummy, I’ve just come from home, and I have to tell you, the camellias are looking amazing at the moment. The garden is fantastic.” That brought her down, and I asked the nurse to bring her a cup of tea. When she came back, my mother said, “Angela, have you met my young friend here? She’s the nicest nurse on the ward.”
When it comes to getting older, I have decided I want to age disgracefully. It’s much more fun. Age is just a number on a piece of paper and I have to keep energised to do my job. I covered Her Majesty the Queen’s funeral for Australian television and I was on air live for over 14 hours. We had to start at two o’clock in the morning. You can’t do that if you’re not fit.
How do I stay in shape? I still dance – I go to ballet class, and I do pilates. Yesterday, at tennis, there were four of us playing doubles and I was the youngest. We played for two hours. Diet is important, too. I have an intolerance to dairy products, so I have hot water with lemon, herb teas, or maybe just a couple of cups of black coffee, and lots and lots of water.
When this was taken, I would not have expected to still be working at 80. My accountant laughs at me all the time because ever since I was 50, I’ve been saying, “Well, I may not be working next year.” Of course, there will be a point at which I retire. The moment I think, “Ah, for crying out loud, I really don’t want to do this today,” I’ll know it’s over. Or maybe the phone will just stop ringing. What then? I’ll adopt a dog. A mature one – there’s no point in me having a puppy as I’m single and I should die before it. But for now there’s no need.
I still wake up every morning, stretch for 10 minutes, and think, “Excellent. Another great day ahead.”