Janet Street-Porter on the Fringe and her love of fishing in Scotland

She was once nominated for the Mae West award for the most outspoken woman on screen. But TV’s Loose Woman Janet Street-Porter – famed for her fiery, take-no-crap-and-no-prisoners approach – has a pensive and peaceful passion few could fathom.

The tough former newspaper editor and creator of ground-breaking TV is hooked – on trout fishing in Scotland.

And she is reeling-in a chance to return after actor and presenter Christopher Biggins – who she beat in the 2020 Celebrity Masterchef Christmas Special – suggested she join him at Prestonfield for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this week.

But Janet, 77, who this year marked her 1000th appearance on ITV1’s award-winning Loose Women is – unsurprisingly – not coming quietly. She admits she’ll probably “shout at Biggins”.

Janet, whose one-woman show All The Rage went down a storm at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival in the run up to the launch of her 2004 memoir Baggage, admits she’d been thinking of doing another when “Biggins” mentioned his Edinburgh festival gigs.

“He talked about it last year and then I got the hump because he didn’t ask me. I don’t know what we’re going to do so I just asked him to introduce me, and I can basically shout at him for an hour,” she guffaws. Like the book, the chat will be titled Baggage. “I thought I’d use it again because baggage is something you carry with you through your life,” she explains.

And Janet has her fair share, having lived through a strained relationship with her now late parents and only sibling, four divorces, and having been brutally pilloried for her “estuary” accent after breaking into broadcasting where clipped, received pronunciation was once de rigueur. She also survived an attack on the island of La Gomera, close to Tenerife where she laid her father to rest after his sudden death on holiday.

Little wonder that keen hiker Janet relishes the peace and freedom of remote wild Scotland.

“We’ve been up to Glen Etive a lot. My partner goes salmon fishing and I go walking or loch fishing. I like going out in a boat. I’ve been to Stornoway trout fishing, and I rented cottages up near Tongue. Me and my dog Badger took the sleeper train from London to Fort William, and I managed to get the compartment with the double bed which Badger occupied half of – with me on the edge. It’s about time for another trip.”

Janet, who was appointed CBE in 2016 for services to journalism and broadcasting, and who divides her time between London and Norfolk where she lives in a thatched cottage beside a river with Peter Stanton, her partner of about 20 years, adds: “Peter is a counsellor. He has his work cut out with me. I don’t spend all the time with him because it would drive me mad.”

West London-born Janet, who studied for two years at the Architectural Association School in the capital, left home aged 18 to live with a boyfriend after falling out with her parents. She went on in 1967 to marry Tim Street-Porter who she met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where he had an exhibition of his photographs and who she was with for seven years. “My parents were furious until they met the Street-Porter family, and realised that I had ‘married up’,” she grins.

They were also furious when she dropped out of architecture school eventually going to work for the Daily Mail, and later the Evening Standard, before working on Radio 4’s Today programme and joining LBC radio in 1973. Two years later, London Weekend Television programmes chief John Birt gave Janet her first TV break in the youth-oriented current affairs series The London Weekend Show, with Janet later going on to present the late-night chat show Saturday Night People with the late Clive James and Russell Harty.

Janet Street-Porter (PA Photo/Scot Morrison)

She remembers her mother – who she says was plagued by “negativity” – visiting the studios. “My mum told Russell Harty that she didn’t know why he was working with me and that she was a better cook than me,” she laughs. “I get my resilience from my parents – from trying not to be like them,” she quips. And she needed it in broadcasting. “When I started there was such a fuss. I began doing bits on the Today programme with old school broadcasters like Jack de Manio, and it is true, my accent really did stand out. There was no one like me. I attracted the most horrible press with all these male critics saying I was stupid. It was very hurtful. It was very personal; it was about my hair, my glasses, my teeth and my accent.”

In her memoir Fall Out she reveals how one abusive listener wrote to her: “Please go off our air. Your voice is excruciatingly awful. Take a job at LBC as a tea lady or something.” She also recalls “the racists” who she says: “usually wrote in block capitals, and frequently drew me with a giant black willy aimed at me, or an axe sticking out of my back.

“The criticism continued in one form or another right up until I was made editor of The Independent on Sunday in 1999,” when she claims she drew fire from journalists Andrew Neil and Sarah Sands who questioned her credentials. “You just become very resilient.”

Her experiences and her dad’s fatal heart attack while on holiday with her mum in Tenerife’s Los Cristianos led her to write an article in support of the mother of Jay Slater, who was targeted by trolls after her 19-year-old son went missing in the resort before he was found dead in a remote part of the island.

She says: “I was thinking, ‘Why has this resonated with me so much? Then I realised my mum and dad had the flat in Los Cristianos which is where my dad died.” Like Jay’s mum she says she had “the dilemma of whether to bring his body home or bury him there. People have to cut Jay Slater’s mother a bit of slack.”

Janet is familiar with the landscape in which Jay went missing, having survived her own horror years ago in similar terrain on a neighbouring island.

“I was in La Gomera walking with a girlfriend. We were in the middle of nowhere on a mountain road when a car appeared and tried to force us off and down a steep slope. It terrified us. We managed to get to a place where he couldn’t get to us and then he drove off.”

Looking back over life, is there anything she would do differently?

“I made some terrible decisions, but I don’t care. I could have not got divorced,” she says of two of her marriages. “I could have said, ‘I’m sorry, let’s stay married’. “But I moved on, and they moved on and we all stayed pretty good friends. People do change. You are not the same person at 70 that you are at 20 but certain aspects of my personality are exactly the same, I don’t like queuing, or rules, or fitting in. I must be annoying to loads of people, but I just think, ‘get over it’.

From fashion to fishing

Journalist, author and broadcaster Janet Street-Porter is full of surprises, turning her no-nonsense hands to everything from fashion to fishing, architecture to hiking, cooking to comedy and politics to jungle survival.

She was the last woman standing in the 2004 TV reality show I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, is a frequent panelist on TV’s Question Time and Have I Got News For You and has appeared in gameshows including the Weakest Link and Tipping Point.

An honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, she was the pioneer of the broadcast genre ‘Youth Television’, her revolutionary Network 7 on Channel 4, aimed at 16 to 25-year-olds, saw her land a BAFTA for originality in 1988 – the same year she became Head of Youth and Entertainment Features at the BBC. She left in 1994.

In the same year Janet, a former vice-president of the Rambler’s Association, joined Ffyona Campbell on the last leg of her round-the-world walk for the BBC series The Longest Walk. In 1998 she walked from Dungeness in Kent to Conway in Wales for the BBC’s Coast to Coast.

Her awards include Columnist of the Year, the Prix Italia for Arts Programming and a nomination in 2000 for the Mae West Award for the most outspoken woman in the industry.

Janet Street-Porter will be talking Baggage with Christopher Biggins at The Edinburgh Fringe at Prestonfield on Sunday, August 25. Visit edfringe.com