Selina Scott: ‘Many British women look terrible. London hairdressers should do a stint in the provinces’

Selina Scott’s most pressing stress point right now is the valley she’s planning to flood on her 200 acres of North Yorkshire farmland, where she lives in a 16th century farmhouse with Doogie, her wire-haired dachshund, plus sundry otters and hedgehogs.

The isolated location has helped create a myth around the pulchritudinous Scott. What happened to her career? Is she a hermit? Wikipedia states she was married in the 2010s. “Really?” Scott asks me, arching an eyebrow. “Who to?”

It’s no small victory to have reached a philosophical point where this kind of noise no longer bothers her. Back in the day, photos sometimes made her look aloofly beautiful and this invited all manner of speculation. But today she’s far more exercised about the wetland she wants to create which will be a sanctuary for wildlife – hence the flooding.

A few years ago she rescued a flock of distressed Scottish angora goats and harvested so much fleece from them, she had to track down a manufacturer in Leicestershire to turn them into socks. ‘‘Then I thought, what am I going to do with all these socks? So I gave them to my friends who all loved them. I thought, well, I’ve found my thing.’’ She ventured deep into the Gobi Desert to source yarn from cashmere goats, yaks and camels, and started a website, Simply Selina, to sell them.

In the end, she stopped because her mohair socks were made from the fleeces of angora goats from South Africa. “Although each farm was rigorously monitored for welfare, it couldn’t be guaranteed these sensitive animals met a humane end.” This wetland, one senses, is a form of restorative justice for wildlife. “In six months we’ll have lapwings, curlew and migratory birds.”

Ah, happy days and far from her late 20s and 30s, when as the only female newsreader on News at 10 and then, in 1983, one of the founding anchors of Breakfast Time, the BBC’s first foray into morning television. She was so famous that Michael Shea, then press secretary to the late Queen Elizabeth, asked if she’d mentor the young Princess Diana. “He said I was the only woman in the country of a similar age to Diana who was as hounded as she was.’’

It’s true, she was horribly famous and very young. A rookie Scarborough reporter, granddaughter of a local newspaper editor, she got her first break in print working for DC Thomson in Dundee, then moved to Grampian television in Aberdeen. She was catapulted to fame when Alastair Burnet, the grand fromage of ITN news, plucked her to be a co-presenter. She kept her private life private, but that did nothing to cauterise the geyser of unsubstantiated stories about her.

Doubtless there are times when the challenges of her farm weigh heavy on her, although she looks marvellous on them. At 73, she’s as unassumingly elegant as ever, even if today she’s wearing a grey Uniqlo cardi and Benetton drainpipes rather than the designer togs for which she became famous. She’s still partial to a bit of Ralph Lauren Polo (“it fits my long arms”). But as for dressy designs – where would she wear them?

That arched eyebrow was a bit of a trademark. So was her hair, which these days is wash’n’go in the way that wash’n’go hair is in the movies but almost never in real life – a Farrah Fawcett-ish mane with sweeps of grey among the blonde. All natural, she says. The cheekbones, her 5ft 9 height and blue eyes are as striking as ever. She’s a compelling argument for not doing anything to your face if you were genetically lucky to begin with. It’s not even as if she goes in for products. “I tried some retin-thingy but it stung like mad. My mother’s nearly 100 and doesn’t have a line on her”.

Those rarefied genes, combined with journalist flair, rocket-fuelled her career. The 1980s and 1990s paparazzi were relentless. So were the columnists. She was stalked night and day. Jean Rook, a Fleet Street Medea figure who makes today’s commentators look like sensitive carers, once wrote to her to semi-apologise for yet another take down. “She said her editor made her do it”. Scott didn’t buy it and though she seems philosophical, it clearly took its toll. “They ripped me apart for everything. My interviewing technique, my intelligence and oh my goodness, my clothes.”

Clothes are one of the pretexts for us meeting in a large, sun-drenched North London studio. She recently discovered black bin liners of her old designer outfits from her TV career, all miraculously unscathed by moths or mildew. They still fit her – she can’t have put on an ounce since 1983. When she tried on the fashionably prim Margaret Howell outfit she wore for the launch of BBC Breakfast, the memories zoomed into pin sharp focus. She popped the picture on Instagram where she has only just ventured, initially to track the progress of her wetland, and got in touch to see if The Telegraph would be interested in seeing more of her old outfits.

Margaret Howell jacket and skirt, worn with leather boots, £780, Dear Frances dearfrances.com

”I interviewed Alan Titchmarsh in it,” she recalls of the Margaret Howell. “I thought I looked like a sexy nurse. But the producers decided I looked like a nanny.” In a bad way. There were no stylists back then. But clothes mattered. Not long after the launch of BBC Breakfast, Channel Four debuted its breakfast show. In marked contrast to Scott’s Nanny Look, “Anna Ford wore this beautiful sexy, low cut pink thing – a knit I think.”

Versace jacket, worn with high rise wide leg jeans, £310, Citizens of Humanity, leather shoes, £725, Jimmy Choo

Even before her stint on the BBC’s Clothes Show (from 1986 to 1988), Scott had an innate appreciation of good clothes, shopping at Catherine Walker, Bruce Oldfield, Versace and Jean Paul Gaultier. When Gaultier saw her in one of his designs he wrote a song about her, but also made her see how much clothes could help you articulate who you were.

She had an understanding of what worked on television. She went to the lavishly coiffed Nicky Clarke, the ginger Warren Beatty of London hairdressers (and there were a lot of contenders back then) who gave her a boyish crop. Not long after, she attended what she calls “a Diana-do. It was probably the Royal Albert Hall.” She wore a long Ralph Lauren dress. “After the performance, the Princess came backstage, looked at my hair and said, ‘Nicky Clarke?’ The next thing is, bang, she had all hers lopped off.”

Ralph Lauren dress, worn with satin shoes, £610, Andrea Wazen; recycled silver cuff, £235, Anuka; sterling silver ring, £289, Tom Wood

Scott never did become Diana’s official mentor. “We had lunch a few times. I invited her to the ITN studios. I thought if she and the reporters could meet each other they might have more understanding of how the other worked. We were in the lift to the newsfloor and she asked me who I was going out with, which I thought was funny.” Maybe the Princess would have made a feisty journalist. “Then she started to tell me something scandalous Anwar Sadat of Egypt had said to her when the lift doors opened and she had to stop.” Those two could have been a good TV show.

Ultimately Scott felt she couldn’t teach the Princess anything. “There was no answer for the situation she – and to an extent I – found ourselves in,” she says, her soft Scarborough lilt masking, for a few moments, the bleakness of that conclusion. The BBC offered her no protection, she says, and she doesn’t believe that much has changed, even now,” which is remarkable given what happened to Jill Dando [another Diana lookalike BBC reporter who was murdered in 1999). “There were very few women working in TV at that time – zero sense of sisterhood.”

She found the supposedly macho environment of ITN’s News at Ten far more nurturing than the fluffy world of breakfast. Alastair Burnet took her under his wing. When she went to the US, the empresses of American broadcasting – Diane Sawyer, Jane Paulin, Barbara Walters, Connie Chung – “were all so supportive. After I interviewed Prince Charles, Diane Sawyer no less, congratulated me. But I suppose there were more of them and they were well established.”

At the BBC, by contrast, “there was one very senior male presenter. Everyone called him, Look Out Golden Balls. It was just accepted as part of the culture”. Even her co-founder at Breakfast, the avuncular Frank Bough, 20 years her senior (of course he was) who later had his own drug scandals to contend with, turned out to be less avuncular when he wasn’t absolutely in control and the centre of attention. “He needed to know that the young women around him weren’t going to confront him.”

Her looks made her a target for men in her orbit, but she didn’t seem to have a problem swerving the casting couch. Speaking of which, “that red leatherette sofa they had on BBC Breakfast – urgh,” she chuckles. The cosy-bloke woolly jumpers that male presenters on the sofa were expected to wear at the time, she jokes, were also visually alarming.

Scott is an enigmatic mix of earnest sincerity and gossipy charm (a bit like Diana?) and while her relegation from TV could play as a victim story, she doesn’t view it like that. “I don’t miss it at all. I did it for 25 years. It was relentless. I wanted to step back and enjoy life.”

At least the early days in the snake pit gave her the confidence to deal with the egos she went on to interview when she covered for Wogan, or later when she was at CBS in New York: everyone from Prince Andrew (he walked on the set with a bit of fuselage from an aircraft called the Brazen Hussy, which he asked her to sign) and George Harrison to the late Duke of Edinburgh, King Constantine of Greece, King Juan Carlos of Spain. Her views are bracingly unfiltered. Enoch Powell, she recalls,”was charming”.

There’s always one though, and in Scott’s instance, it was Donald Trump. They knew of each other by reputation (of course he would have been aware of the classy, Diana-adjacent blonde British journalist). “I quite liked him, to be honest. I thought he was funny, and it was obvious what he was about”. He was fighting for his reputation and agreed to be interviewed by the English Rose. They filmed in his office in New York, at the top of the Empire State Building, which he claimed to own and culminated with a sit down at his home in Mar-a-Lago. “He swaggers in. I was in my Catherine Walker suit with the shoulder pads. I thought at least I’ve got this, sartorially.”

Catherine Walker suit, worn with leather shoes, £725, Jimmy Choo

It was only when she was luxuriating in her bath at her hotel later that she learned the British crew had had a technical melt-down and she’d have to ask him to film the whole thing again. Every broadcast reporter’s nightmare. Eventually, against his lawyers’ advice, he agreed. “Trump being Trump, he thought he could improve on the first go. The problem was, he kept contradicting himself. Was it 100 per cent of the Empire State Building he owned or 20 per cent?” She had to choose which version to go with and as a journalist, decided to intersplice the two, the effect of which was to present Trump as a self-contradictory shyster.

It did not go down well. Lawyers’ letters. Threats. Trump stopped it from airing in the United States. “He went on a UK breakfast show and trashed me and they gave me no right of reply.”

Behind the soft voice and flutey laugh, she’s a rebel. You can see that in the grey suit she chose for the launch of BBC Breakfast through to the case she took out against Channel 5 when she accused them of ageism. They settled out of court in 2008 (the station was thought to have paid her £250,000). Her TV appearances since have been sporadic – in 2020 she presented Winter Walks, a series tailor-made for her.

Gucci gown, worn with yellow and white gold ring, £10,700, Hannah Martin; rose gold ring, £2,829, Eva Fehren; Catherine Walker suit, worn with suede shoes, £595, Manolo Blahnik

I had wondered whether this shoot might be a bid to relaunch herself as a potential TV anchor. When the news is as gripping and turbulent as it is now doesn’t she, a journalist at heart, get the odd pang? “Well, maybe the occasional one. But I had the best of it. I did everything I set out to do. Which doesn’t mean I don’t have views on what’s on offer today…”

Such as feeling the system is still dismissive of women especially as they get older. “They’re all either trivialised or trad wives. And why isn’t there any fashion on TV? There’s no help for women [or men] who want to dress better.’’

She kept her flat in London and still visits, sometimes to shop. Outside the capital, which she says “is like a city-state, the shops are mostly awful and many British women look terrible. I wish all those great London hairdressers could do a stint in the provinces.”

And there you have Scott; one part advocate for the countryside and animals, one part lobbyist for better hair.