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Dame Esther Rantzen has been planning her funeral and, let’s just say, this is a woman who knows how to put on a show. Remember the bonkers-but-beautiful format of That’s Life!, the programme that made her one of the most powerful broadcasters in Britain?

One minute it had us weeping at the harshness of human existence and demanding something must be done about something; the next, we were laughing at a dog that could say ‘sausages’, or potatoes that resembled human anatomy. Expect similar lurches in tone.

She tells me that the first thing she did when she got her lung cancer diagnosis, ‘and when I thought I’d drop off my perch in a matter of weeks’, was to call ‘wonderful friends’ and ask them to do readings at her send-off.

She picked a John Donne poem, sombre and soaring. Then she wondered if Pam Ayres might be available ‘to read her famous poem about looking after her teeth’. The one that starts, ‘Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth’, and has people roaring with laughter? ‘The very one,’ she says, tickled at the thought of her much-lampooned teeth getting their own epitaph.

Dame Esther Rantzen has been planning her funeral and, let's just say, this is a woman who knows how to put on a show

Dame Esther Rantzen has been planning her funeral and, let’s just say, this is a woman who knows how to put on a show

Remember the bonkers-but-beautiful format of That's Life!, the programme that made her one of the most powerful broadcasters in Britain? Pictured: Esther and Camilla in July 2022

Remember the bonkers-but-beautiful format of That’s Life!, the programme that made her one of the most powerful broadcasters in Britain? Pictured: Esther and Camilla in July 2022

She’s having more trouble picking the music. ‘If I’m cremated, I am torn between two pieces of music as the coffin disappears —either Vera Lynn’s Wish Me Luck As You Wave Me Goodbye or Come On Baby, Light My Fire by The Doors.’ 

Then she has a bright idea. Again, it’s a very Esther Rantzen thing, an instinctive reaching out to an audience, asking for engagement, involvement, proof that if we all join forces we will work it out.

‘Actually, I’d love your readers to send me suggestions for readings or music, if they have any favourites that might be suitable.’

I don’t want to control my death but I’d like choice 

It’s now almost a year since Dame Esther — broadcaster, trailblazer, ferocious campaigner — discovered she had lung cancer, and that it had progressed to stage four.

A ‘miracle pill’ has stalled the inevitable, but she makes no bones about the fact she is now on borrowed time. Even she doesn’t know how long we are talking about (‘Ah! That is the question I ask my oncologist’) but today she is frail and tires so easily we have to supplement our conversation with emailed questions and answers.

Last time I interviewed her, for a bouncy piece about her 80th birthday she regaled me with memories of running around the garden stark naked, save for a hat. There has been little of that, recently.

‘Sadly, the weather has not been conducive to nude dancing, so I’ve had to invent new indoor games. One is writing letters to newspapers, another is inventing questions for TV quiz shows. One has been accepted by The Chase, and I couldn’t be more proud.’

What is immediately obvious, in person and on the page, is that her sense of humour has not deserted her.

She tells me that the NSPCC, which runs her most famous charity, Childline, has been in touch ‘to see if I’d like them to create some kind of memorial after I’ve gone, and I said I would love them to create something involving children. If they do, I’ll try to come back for it. I’d hate to miss it’.

She also manages to deliver a stern message to those who might want to have fun with the That’s Life subversions when she does die. ‘If anyone says ‘That’s Death’, I’ll come back and haunt them.’

Nor has her zeal to ‘do something’ diminished. Since the Sixties, Esther has campaigned on everything from organ donation to car seat-belts. She has waded in on child abuse, loneliness, alienated grandchildren. Rescue instinct, she calls it. She once said: ‘I’m the sort of person who helps an old lady across the road even if she doesn’t want to go.’

Her final campaign, the one she might just see out, is the most poignant of all. ‘Yes, it is personal,’ she agrees.

Before Christmas she appeared on a BBC podcast and breezily revealed that she had signed up to Dignitas and was planning to ‘buzz off to Zurich’ should the prospect of a peaceful death at home be denied her.

She insists she didn’t plan to galvanise the public into a mass roar about the need to reform the law around assisted dying.

Making memories: Esther surrounded by her children, standing from left, Rebecca, Joshua and Miriam, plus five grandchildren and Joshua’s wife, Kelly, seated

Making memories: Esther surrounded by her children, standing from left, Rebecca, Joshua and Miriam, plus five grandchildren and Joshua’s wife, Kelly, seated

‘I have been amazed by the public response, and really moved by the stories people have shared with me,’ she says.

Her dying wish now is that enough people will sign a petition to force Parliament to allow a free vote on the issue.

The time is now, she says. ‘I don’t know if I will live for long enough to witness a parliamentary debate, but surely it is time for the law- makers to catch up with the public.’

She has laid out her thinking in an email: ‘I don’t want ‘control’ over my death, that would be too much,’ she writes. ‘But I would like choice. I know palliative care can be wonderful, and I am in touch with my local hospice which is fantastic, but if things go badly, as a Plan B I have joined Dignitas.

‘But it’s not an easy option. If I have to go to Switzerland, I would like my children to come with me, so we can say goodbye together but, with the law such a mess at the moment, if they do they could be charged with my murder. Which is terribly wrong.’ When we speak, though, it becomes clear that the journey to Dignitas would be arduous for her, and she dreads the idea of having to go alone.

When the time comes to decide, will she be physically strong enough? To make sure she’s actually well enough to make the trip, will she, like many people who choose to go to Switzerland, have to sacrifice precious last weeks together with her family?

‘And that is the problem,’ she says, firmly. ‘People are having to make these impossible decisions.’

 Putting together anecdotes for my grandchildren

She doesn’t yet know whether she will die at home, or in a hospice nearby. The idea of the latter doesn’t fill her with horror.

‘I have made programmes about end of life and there were never the complaints about hospices that you would hear about hospitals.’

Nor does she rail about death itself. ‘I’m 83. I know I’ll have to drop off my perch some time. Probably some time soon.’

Trickier is the process of dying. Is she scared? ‘Well . . .’ she says, and there is a long pause. ‘I’m not frightened of death, but I’m not confident about dying.’

Is she in pain yet? It’s the only question of the entire interview she doesn’t answer. ‘I don’t talk about that,’ she says.

Esther pictured after she was made a Dame by the Princess Royal in 2015

Esther pictured after she was made a Dame by the Princess Royal in 2015

She shares all this from her home in the New Forest. Her beloved late husband Desmond Wilcox — Desi to Esther — bought the house, nestled ‘among the trees, which are lovely and crisp at the moment’, as their retirement nest because it was his favourite place in the world, neither of them realising he would not have their planned long retirement.

He died aged 69, in 2000. Desi had sorted his own funeral too, but she tells me that she, being a bossy boots, ‘slightly tinkered’.

Terry Wogan and Michael Parkinson gave lovely readings, and she wore purple, ‘which I think is a lovely colour for a funeral, although funerals are for the living so, when my time comes, people should wear what they like’.

She talks about the Christmas just gone — the one she didn’t expect to see. It was ‘quieter’ than Christmases of old ‘where we used to hold rumbustious parties. Fancy dress. People loved them, or I hope they loved them. I have a picture of myself dressed as a French maid. Who did I think I was?!’

This time, she watched her five grandchildren — three boys and two girls aged between ten and five — play, and sang (badly) in the family karaoke and kept remembering all the stories she must tell them.

‘I’m putting together a little thing called Stories I May Not Have Time To Tell You. It’s a series of anecdotes from my very lucky life. Whether they will ever read it, I don’t know.’

It must be odd for her family, for this very private tragedy to be played out so publicly. Her daughter Rebecca, a journalist, wept on the TV panel show Loose Women this week as she revealed Esther hadn’t told even her own children about her Dignitas plans.

She said the three siblings regarded their mother as a ‘volcano’; you could never know what she was going to do or say next, so the only strategy was to hunker down, ‘and wait for the lava’.

Rebecca has taken over at the helm of Childline, which Esther is proud of. But she’s even more proud that Rebecca has forged her own way, ‘as a mother, daughter, journalist’. In that order? ‘Yes. She did things differently to the way I did, and good for her.’

Esther is pictured with her late husband, Desmond Wilcox at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1999

Esther is pictured with her late husband, Desmond Wilcox at the Chelsea Flower Show in 1999 

People are often urged to think of their deathbeds in the context of work/life balance. Will they look back and wish they had spent less time at the office? There is a slight element of that with Esther.

She talks wistfully about her children’s early years and how she actually loved being called Mrs Wilcox ‘by their teachers, and the doctor’. But there is also an acceptance that she could never have been a stay-at-home mother.

Desi used to say that she was hopelessly undomesticated, to the extent she didn’t even know where the vacuum cleaner was, which makes her laugh, still.

‘I know where it is now, but don’t ask me to put it together!’ she says. ‘They’re so complicated these days. Whatever happened to those lovely ones, like the one my mother used and Freddie Mercury pushed around [in the video for I Want To Break Free]?

‘I don’t regret doing so little Hoovering or ironing. I’m hopeless at it. I believe housework is an art. And I never acquired it.

‘Nor can I knit, although I was taught how to darn a sock. And how to make a white stew out of scrag end. Not recommended.

‘But I don’t think there is ever a right balance if you want to be a working parent, you feel guilty at work because you’re not at home, and guilty at home because you’re not at work.

‘My son [who is a doctor] went part-time so that he could see his lovely three children. Rebecca has turned down TV work to make sure she has enough time to be with her gorgeous boys. So they’ve made different decisions from Desi and me — although Desi did try to time his documentary film work to avoid the six months I was working every hour God sent on That’s Life! And I gave up making documentaries so I could be at home when he was away on location. So we tried.’

Esther says she's having more trouble picking the music for her send off

Esther says she’s having more trouble picking the music for her send off 

Does she think she was as good a mother as she was a broadcaster? ‘Oh, I cannot judge that. The viewers can, and my children can.’

When Esther leaves us, it will represent the loss of an entire broadcasting era.

Her pride in being part of the BBC, in its all-powerful heyday, oozes from every pore. ‘It was an extraordinary time to be making programmes. Audiences were so huge, you could be really influential. At its peak, That’s Life! had 22.5 million viewers. All watching at the same time, of course, and talking about us the next day.’

Yes, it was a sexist time, where ‘women were often just used as set decoration, especially in entertainment shows’.

‘I remember a lovely producer friend, Colin, saying to me that I was the only woman on television who didn’t annoy his wife.

‘I pointed out that if a man walked into the BBC Club, where we were sitting, wearing only a pair of leopard-print swimming trunks, said nothing, flexed his muscles, twirled around and then left, that might annoy him. But that is how women were often used in TV.’

I remember all the people who bravely spoke up

And she did something about that, too. She steered the show for 21 years, showing that women could be more than mere decoration. ‘Many of the people who worked with me, including women, went on to top TV jobs, and are still there.’

I ask what she would say to today’s BBC bosses, should they ask for her parting advice? ‘I would say ‘good luck’. These are tough times. But you must find a way to flourish. The world needs you.

Before Christmas she appeared on a BBC podcast and breezily revealed that she had signed up to Dignitas

Before Christmas she appeared on a BBC podcast and breezily revealed that she had signed up to Dignitas

‘At your best, you provide us with careful, objective journalism. You commission amazing programmes, like for instance all the stuff that comes from the BBC’s Natural History Unit.

‘You transform lives for the better, for example, with Children In Need. And sometimes you make mistakes. Learn from them.

‘And don’t, for heaven’s sake, make the mistake the Post Office made and be dominated by your lawyers trying to cover it up to ‘protect the brand’. As the Post Office shows, the reputational risk of a cover-up destroys the brand, even if you are the ‘most trusted brand in Britain’.’

She has been fascinated by the ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office about the Horizon IT scandal, offering it as evidence that the quickest way to force necessary change is by getting an audience engaged (and enraged).

‘Every campaign I have ever been involved with has come from listening to what your audience is saying.

‘I still remember the people who were brave enough to speak up. There were parents of stillborn babies who contacted us for help, and the parents of toddlers who had seriously hurt themselves in dangerous playgrounds, and people who found that tranquillisers were wrecking the mental health they were supposed to help with.

‘It was only because we had thousands of letters from people talking about their lives that we were able to take their stories to a very big audience.

‘And when we broadcast them, our viewers would respond and change things, the numbers of transplants doubled, dangerous playgrounds were re-surfaced, MPs had to take the issues seriously. So we relied upon the courage and compassion of our viewers.

‘As the recent drama about the Post Office has shown, once the British public cares about an issue, law makers and huge corporations have to act.’

It’s so terribly poignant that even as Esther is dying, her most famous TV moment is more alive than ever. That famous That’s Life! clip from 1988 of her introducing a bewildered Sir Nicholas Winton to the children he saved from the Holocaust is still doing the rounds on YouTube. Boosted by the recent Anthony Hopkins movie, One Life, the clip has had an astonishing 42 million views.

Had the power of that story made her cry at the time? ‘Yes, I’m told I borrowed his handkerchief when I had to stop the studio recording to wipe my tears.’ And it continues to now. ‘I still have tears in my eyes when I see it.’

She knows exactly why: ‘The Nicky Winton revelation has so many important messages about the difference one man can make.’

One woman, too.

  • Do you have suggestions for readings or music for Esther? Please email femailreaders@ dailymail.co.uk 
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This post first appeared on Daily mail