‘Normal?! Don’t call me normal!’ Gail Porter on stardom, sexism, anorexia – and survival

Gail Porter says she doesn’t do jokes in her standup comedy. It’s all about the story. And the former children’s TV and Top of the Pops presenter’s story is very dark indeed. She tells me how she introduces herself. “At the start, I say: ‘Hi, hands up who’s been sectioned.’” How do people react? “Usually nobody puts their hand up. Apart from this one woman who went: ‘Me. Seven times!’ And I was like: ‘Oh right, you win!’”

There is not much Porter hasn’t experienced in the way of horror stories: anorexia, alopecia that did for her career, serious mental health problems, homelessness and bankruptcy. If she played Bad Luck Bingo, she would be unbeatable.

We are walking through her favourite old haunts in Soho in central London. In her heyday, as a dazzlingly pretty, pocket-sized dynamo, she used to live here. She points out the bars, clubs and restaurants she used to frequent. Porter still seems to know most of the locals.

It feels like a throwback. Oasis have just announced they are reforming, and now I’m with Porter, who appeared to exemplify the hedonistic 90s of lads and ladettes, Britpop and boozing, when everyday sexism was all the rage and stone-age values reigned supreme. The Gallagher boys may not have changed much, but Porter certainly has.

When we get to her restaurant of choice, she hugs the owners and tells them she is desperate to eat. They look at her disbelievingly. “In all these years, I’ve never seen you eat,” the boss says. “Does that mean you’re going to have a chip?”

“No, I want a cheese toastie.”

Now he gives her another look. This time approving, fatherly. Porter, 53, says they have been friends for decades; he has seen her through the good times and the bad.

When she was growing up by the seaside in the Portobello suburb of Edinburgh, she says she was a happy little thing. She loved school, the beach and ice-cream. She was smart, cute and content. Life was an idyll.

Then she thinks about it, and says, well, maybe things weren’t so good. She was bullied at school, for starters. “My nickname was Snobby Porter.” And was she a snob? “No, it’s just that I was so eager to please that I’d put my hand up before Mrs Nesbit had finished the question. I just assumed I’d know the answer.”

In her teens, Porter contended with a darkness that she couldn’t make sense of. Eventually, she realised this was depression. And then there was the body dysmorphia. Her father, who ran a small construction business handed down from his father, didn’t help. “Dad used to say I was chubby. If I got sad I’d sit upstairs and listen to the Smiths and eat a tub of ice-cream on my own.” And then she would worry about it and stop eating.

Porter studied for a diploma in film and photography and was determined to break into TV. She worked in bars and babysat and sent off begging letters to programme-makers she admired. After working as a runner on The Comic Strip, she got presenting jobs on kids’ TV shows such as Fully Booked, which led to Top of the Pops. Suddenly, in her late 20s, Porter was a star.

She was a natural on TV – cute, likable, ebullient. “I was having an absolute ball.” While friends were doing regular nine-to-five jobs, she just turned up, had a laugh and got paid. But, again, she admits that isn’t the whole truth. By now she was obsessed with her weight. “I wasn’t eating. I was stressed quite a lot, and people were saying: ‘You’re losing weight, you’re looking great.’ The thinner I got, the more I thought I might get more work and I might feel happier. But it doesn’t work like that. It just got out of control.”

Did nobody tell her she was too thin? “People were starting to notice but nobody was saying anything because people didn’t know how to deal with it. I had quite big boobs at the time [she later had a reduction], and if I went out I wore baggy trousers so people wouldn’t see me properly.”

She stops to correct herself. One person did say something – her personal trainer. “I got barred from my gym because I collapsed there. I was at the gym for 6am, then I’d not eat. She said: ‘I’m not training you.’ Then she’d come round to my house and bring food.”

Today, Porter is wearing black dungarees, a black top and bright yellow-and-pink trainers. Her green nails match her green specs, and her hands and arms are laden with chunky silver jewellery. As she talks, I look at her arms – the left is covered in tattoos that cover fading scars from years of self-harm. On her biceps is a pool ball with a number eight on it. “I got an 8-ball after my mum passed away because my lucky number was seven, but everything went wrong and my hair fell out.” Did it change her luck? “No,” she says, picking at the cheese toastie.

Although she never formally worked as a model, whenever she was in a new TV show, men’s mags such as FHM, Loaded, GQ and Esquire were happy to interview her. But really, more than anything, they wanted a photoshoot. And most of all they wanted her to take her clothes off. In 1999, she did a nude shoot for FHM that went on to define her – bare bum, hint of boob, tastefully de-nippled. The problem wasn’t so much the photo – it was the way it was used. FHM projected it on to the Houses of Parliament in a guerrilla marketing campaign, accompanied with a message to vote for her in FHM’s sexiest woman poll. Porter says she didn’t have a clue they were going to do this. “And it was Photoshopped to death.”

Porter wouldn’t leave her house for days afterwards. And when she did, she found she was treated differently. “I got scared of going out because lots of lads stopped me in the street going, ‘Weyheyhey!’” How did she respond? “I didn’t go out often. I tried not to go out at night because of drunk people coming up to you going: ‘I’ve seen your arse.’ It was quite lechy,” she says quietly.

Did women treat her differently after the shoot? “Feminists definitely did.” She says she was made to feel a traitor to the sisterhood. “I thought, Oh God, I don’t want to get caught up in all this. I didn’t mean to do any harm.”

Although Porter became known as a ladette, she says she didn’t even know what it meant. “They just tarred us all with the same brush. Me, Zoë Ball, Sara Cox. I’d met Zoë, but I didn’t know her, and they made out we were hanging out all the time. They had that picture of Zoë with her bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which they kept putting out over and over and over again. That was at a wedding and she was having a laugh, and it was like, ‘Ladettes! They’re all off their heads all the time.’” The trouble is, she says, that when she did have a drink it went straight to her head, because she wasn’t eating and because she was so tiny.

Some people also treated her differently on TV after the FHM shoot. I start to mention a repellent moment on the pop quizshow Never Mind the Buzzcocks, when the presenter Mark Lamarr says … She finishes off the sentence for me: “‘If you’re not going to show us your arse, what’s the point of you being here?’ And that’s after he’d asked me out on the same day, and I’d said no.”

You looked broken after that comment, I say. She nods. “I was so shocked. It was a live audience, and I thought, Oh my God this is awful. Everyone was laughing, and nobody stood up for me.” Did she say anything to him afterwards? “No, I just left and cried my eyes out on the way home.”

In 2001, Porter married the Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave, and she gave birth to their daughter Honey in 2002. By 2004, she and Hipgrave had separated. A year later, she was in Las Vegas making a TV series called Dead Famous in which she searched for the ghosts of famous dead people, when her hair fell out. She had never heard of alopecia. Her main concern was that, when she got home, Honey would be spooked. And she wasn’t. “She just looked at me and went: ‘Rock’n’roll!’” Really, at the age of three? “Yes, she was very cool. She was saying all sorts.”

Porter didn’t want to wear wigs because they were uncomfortable. She asked her friends if she looked weird, they said, ‘No, you’re beautiful’, and she was happy with that. But the TV world wasn’t. The work dried up immediately. “I just got asked to do interviews about being bald. They wouldn’t pay you because you’re talking about an illness, and I thought, well, I’m still coming into the studio and everyone else is getting paid. That’s when I started thinking: ‘Oh this is going to be a bit shit.’”

It’s around now that Porter also loses track of time. When I ask for dates, she has no idea. Years of misery merge together as she suffered blow after blow. She had been making decent money, mainly through commercials, but that quickly went. She lost her house and ended up homeless. “I was sofa-surfing for six months and spent a couple of nights sleeping rough on a bench on Hampstead Heath.”

However hard she tried, she couldn’t get work. “I applied for jobs in libraries and bookshops, and they were like, ‘You can’t do that – you’re Gail Porter!’ I said, ‘I’ll do anything – please give me a job.’ So I did voluntary work in a charity shop, and then I got slagged off in the papers for doing it. They’re like: ‘Look what’s happened to her!’ and I’m trying to do something good.”

When did she reach her lowest? “Probably sitting on that bench on Hampstead Heath thinking, I can’t do this any more.” She thinks it was around this time she texted her then boyfriend saying just that. He thought she was about to take her life, said he’d meet her in a pub, but rang the police and said she was a danger to herself. “He panicked. I went to the pub, and then four police officers walked in and said: ‘Are you Gail Porter?’ and I said, ‘No!’ And they said, ‘Well, we know you are, and somebody’s really concerned for your safety, so we’re going to take you to hospital,’ and I just kicked off.”

She ended up sectioned under a 28-day order in 2011, and says it was terrifying – drugged up to her eyeballs and sharing a ward with two men who were convinced they were Jesus and some violent patients. “It really was like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

The way she tells it, the sectioning and homelessness go together. And in a way they do, as part of one sustained breakdown. But actually it was three years later, in 2014, that she found herself homeless.

In 2015, she appeared on Celebrity Big Brother. She said it was worse than being sectioned, but it provided her with enough money to put down a deposit on a small flat in London, which gave her a degree of stability. But in 2016, the taxman came after her. For a number of years when she was at her lowest, she didn’t fill in her returns. HMRC presented her with a huge bill, but she couldn’t pay it. Porter was declared bankrupt in 2017, which she says was a blessing. “It enabled me to start again. They said, ‘You can’t have credit cards,’ and I said: ‘Well, I don’t use credit cards.’ I’m not a big spender.”

Since then, she has been rebuilding her life. Progress hasn’t been linear or simple. She still struggles for work, and when I ask what she tells people she does these days, she says she hasn’t a clue. But she is doing plenty. There’s the standup comedy, for starters, which she is taking around the country . She has almost finished her second memoir, which has already been optioned for a potential drama-documentary, and she works with a number of mental health, poverty and homelessness charities. And, of course, she is a mother. Porter is close to Honey, who has just graduated from university. “She got a first in politics and criminology.” She beams with pride.

Today, she is promoting the work of Fair for You, an organisation that helps people struggling to afford basic household goods. “They might have a home, but they can’t afford a fridge or a freezer – the things that most people have. I think it’s important that I was homeless because I know what it’s like. I can say to people: ‘I know where you’re coming from.’”

In 2020, she made a documentary, Being Gail Porter, tracing her rise and fall. She was frequently in tears as she examined why things went so horribly wrong. She says she is not interested in a diagnosis for her mental health problems, but in the show she visited a psychiatrist who said he thought she had borderline personality disorder (BPD). “Actually, I had five diagnoses,” she says, mock-boastfully. “BPD, bipolar one, bipolar two, manic depression and then the worst one was when he went: ‘I think you’re normal.’ Normal! I was like, I’ve not been through all that shit for you to call me normal! Jesus!” Porter is as funny as she is fragile. “We won a Bafta for the documentary,” she says. Another beam.

Soon after the documentary was aired, Porter’s father died, leaving her three small flats that needed lots of work but are now providing her with a regular income. For the first time in decades, she says, she has a degree of financial security.

As for the depression, she has managed to keep it at bay recently. “Ninety-five per cent of the time I’m fine. I feel fine at the moment, and I’ve got my friends, and I’m not scared to tell people now that I’m having a bad day whereas before I would never have told anybody. I’d just put that smile on, and go: ‘It’s great !’”

Porter says she is done with fake smiles. She is done with all fakery. One thing that she loves about her life now is that people just want to talk about real things to her. And when they ask her how she is, they really care. “I just got a cuddle from a stranger. He said he saw me on the telly and wanted to know if I was OK.”

It couldn’t be more different from the bad old days when drunk lads approached her just to say they had seen her bottom. “People come up and talk to me about things they may not discuss with other people, whether it’s hair or mental health or struggles with money. I get so many stories from people, and it’s really nice. I mean, I can’t help everybody, but I like the fact that they feel they can open up.”

Does it ever become a burden? “ Never !” she says, with a smile that verges on the ecstatic.

Gail Porter has teamed up with charity-owned Fair for You , which helps people spread the cost of household items.

• In the UK, the mental health charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org. In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978