Dame Esther Rantzen obituary — SkimNews
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- Esther Rantzen died aged 86 after four decades as one of British television's most recognisable faces, pioneering consumer journalism and later campaigning on assisted dying.
- That's Life! ran on the BBC for 21 years from 1973, drawing up to 20 million Sunday-night viewers with a populist mix of consumer investigations and comic items, and launching the careers of Victoria Wood, Richard Stilgoe and Lynsey de Paul.
- Childline, founded by Rantzen in 1986 after the programme revealed children suffering abuse in silence, received 50,000 calls on its first night and had helped 4 million callers by the time it was absorbed into the NSPCC in 2006, though one in four callers failed to get through.
- The Silver Line, a telephone counselling service for older people, was set up by Rantzen in 2013 after she experienced loneliness as a widow following the 2000 death of her husband, documentary-maker Desmond Wilcox.
- Diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer in May 2023, Rantzen joined the Dignitas clinic in Zurich and threw her weight behind a private member's bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales, which was voted down in the Commons.
- Rantzen was appointed OBE in 1991, CBE in 2006 and made a dame in 2015; she was the first woman to receive the Bafta Richard Dimbleby award in 1988, describing herself that night as 'the oldest, plainest woman on television'.
Why it matters: Rantzen built two enduring national helplines — Childline, which handled millions of calls from abused children before joining the NSPCC, and the Silver Line for isolated older people — giving Britain a template for telephone-based crisis support that outlasted her broadcasting career. Her terminal cancer diagnosis converted her final years into a public campaign for assisted dying legislation that, though defeated in the Commons, kept the issue on the political agenda.
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