‘I’ve got nothing to apologise for’: After 40 years as TV’s brainbox, CAROL VORDERMAN, 62, has life figured out: own one aeroplane, have five dates on the go and gain a podcast audience of 16 million. Oh, and don’t care a jot what anyone thinks of you, she tells Nick Curtis.
Behold the second coming of Carol Vorderman. At 62, the TV brainbox who co-presented Countdown for 26 years is relaunching the career that she put into semi-retirement in her mid-50s.
She’s on I’m a Celebrity All Stars this summer, having munched through her share of animal parts in the 2016 series. She’s finalising negotiations to host a raft of quiz shows and documentaries on TV and radio later this year. Since it launched in January, her own multi-platform, bite-size quiz podcast, Perfect 10 – ten questions in ten minutes, with a new episode every weekday – has racked up an astonishing 16.5 million views and listens.
More surprisingly, Vorderman, the only two-time winner of the now mercifully defunct Rear of the Year award, has been embraced by a new generation as a feminist and a firebrand campaigner, for calling out alleged government corruption (and the involvement of her former friend Michelle Mone in PPE procurement during the pandemic) on social media and news shows.
Last month, Vorderman made headlines again when she called out No 10 in front of the Women and Equalities Select Committee. Vorderman was ‘absolutely disgusted’ by Equality Minister Kemi Badenoch‘s comments that compared ‘women going through terrible, terrible menopausal symptoms with those with ginger hair’, adding that she found it ‘insulting to all women’. Her take-me-as-you-find-me, don’t-give-a-damn attitude extends to her looks, and a love life that involves no permanent partner but relationships with five ‘special friends’, of which more later.
‘It comes from being slagged off for 40 years,’ she says of her sexagenarian swagger. ‘When you’ve had false headlines written about you, helicopters over your house, your kids followed by paparazzi, and every part of your life – my body, my face, my hair, my sweaty armpits, my cellulite – has had abuse flung at it over a very long period of time, one of two things happens. You either go under, which I will never do. Or it gives you a superpower.
