Dame Esther Rantzen, who has died at the age of 86, was best known for presenting the BBC TV programme That's Life! Over two decades, what started as a consumer programme with quirky asides became renowned for its high-profile campaigns, notably against child abuse. It resulted in Dame Esther setting up Childline, a national telephone helpline for children suffering abuse or neglect.
She later became a renowned campaigner for older people and, in the last years of her life, for the legalisation of medically-assisted death. Esther Louise Rantzen was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire on 22 June 1940. Her paternal ancestors were Polish Jews.
Her father, Henry, who worked as a broadcast engineer for the BBC, had moved the family out of London to escape German bombing. The family returned to London when the war ended. She later recalled she hated the grey streets of the capital after the semi-rural idyll in which she had spent her early childhood.
After a spell at a private school, run by what she recalled was a sadistic headmistress, she went to the North London Collegiate School in Edgware, and then to Somerville College, Oxford, where she read English. She became an enthusiastic member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society and of the Experimental Theatre Group. Rantzen then secured a job as a trainee studio manager with BBC Radio, before moving to television as a researcher on the satirical show BBC3, which had been created by Ned Sherrin.
She met documentary maker Desmond Wilcox when she approached him in a BBC bar and asked him to give a talk to a local youth club. He asked her to dinner and offered her a job on Man Alive, the BBC's current affairs programme. The pair later began a relationship.
The relationship caused huge tensions in her department, not least because Wilcox's wife Patsy, one of Rantzen's best friends, also worked at the BBC. By 1968, she was working on Braden's Week, a consumer programme fronted by Canadian presenter Bernard Braden. A decision to allow the researchers a short spot on air gave Rantzen her first on-screen TV experience, where she made a favourable impression on the producers.
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