Esther Rantzen
Dame Esther Louise Rantzen is an English journalist and television presenter. She presented the BBC television series That’s Life! for 21 years, from 1973 until 1994. She works with various charitable causes, and founded the charities ChildLine, promoting child protection, and The Silver Line, designed to combat loneliness in older people’s lives.
About Esther Rantzen in brief
Dame Esther Louise Rantzen DBE is an English journalist and television presenter. She presented the BBC television series That’s Life! for 21 years, from 1973 until 1994. She works with various charitable causes, and founded the charities ChildLine, promoting child protection, and The Silver Line, designed to combat loneliness in older people’s lives. She was awarded an OBE for services to broadcasting in 1991, a CBE for services in 2006, and in the 2015 New Year Honours, was made a Dame. She is Patron for Operation Encompass and a Trustee for the charity Silver Stories. She has one younger sister, Priscilla N. Taylor. She attended Buckley Country Day School in New York, leaving in 1950. She studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where one of her tutors was Mary Lascelles. She began her television career as a clerk in the programme planning department, then obtained her first production job working as a researcher on the BBC One late-night satire programme BBC3. She moved to the award-winning BBC Two documentary series Man Alive in the mid-1960s. In 1976, she devised the documentary series The Big Time, which launched Sheena Easton’s singing career. In 1968, she became a presenter because the producer of the programme decided to put the researchers onscreen. The following year, the BBC replaced Braden’s Week with That’s Life! with Rantze as the main presenter. That’s life! ran on BBC1 for 21. years from 1973 to 1994, becoming one of the most popular shows on British television, reaching audiences of more than 18 million.
During that time, it expanded the traditional role of the consumer programme from simply exposing faulty washing machines and dodgy salesmen, to investigating life-and-death issues, such as a campaign for more organ donors. It was responsible for the launch of ChildLine in 1986, the first national helpline for children in danger or distress. She suggested the Childwatch programme to BBC One Controller Michael Grade after the death of a toddler who had starved to death, locked in a bedroom. The aim of Childwatch was to find better ways of detecting children at risk of abuse. To lighten some of these very serious themes and issues, That’sLife! also had some humorous spots, including readings of amusing misprints sent in by viewers; it also featured comic songs that often matched the theme of each show, specially written and performed by artists such as Lynsey De Paul, Victoria Wood, Richard Stilgoe and Jake Thackray. Rantz suggested that after that edition of that’s Life!, that the BBC should open a helplines for young viewers suffering current abuse. This led to the creation of Childline, which was open for 48 hours, during which it was swamped with calls, mainly from children suffering sexual abuse. The Childwatch team obtained funding from the Department of Health and Variety of Great Britain.
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