Edinburgh Festival: Gail Porter set for no holds barred show

If they don’t mind. I always ask. After that, I hug everyone.”

It’s not just the excitement of being home, though. This is a large part of what Gail Porter does these days when not presenting shows about the paranormal or appearing on Celebrity Big Brother. Giving people a hug. On the street or on the Tube where she lives in London. The girl from Portobello is there for whoever might need her.

“If I have to work I always leave an hour before I should do because I can guarantee you, even in London where people don’t really talk much, they will stop me and go, ‘It’s Gail isn’t it? You look like Gail Porter.’ ‘I don’t know how many other bald women you know, but yeah’.” 

And it will lead to a conversation where people ask her for advice, about mental health or homelessness. “I can’t give that, but I can listen, give them a hug and say, ‘If I was you I would contact the Samaritans or this homeless charity I work with.’ It’s lovely, though,” Porter adds. “It’s nice that people look at you and go, ‘We can talk’.”

Gail Porter at the height of her fame (Image: free)
There are obviously a couple of reasons for that. One is that Porter is simply very approachable. The TV presenter is chatty and interested in everyone and wants to help.

The other is that people often know Porter’s story. They know about her alopecia. They know that she has had her own problems in the past, that she’s had issues with her mental health, that she’s been homeless, that her life has been tough at times. They know, in short, that she has walked in their shoes. And walked maybe further than they have.

It’s Monday afternoon and Porter is late. About six days late actually. We were meant to speak the previous Tuesday. She apologises profusely but she has a good excuse. She’s just undergone dental surgery – extraction of a tooth that has been giving her a lot of trouble. The pain has been unbearable, she says. 

The surgery was on Friday. Porter was meant to be doing a stand-up spot that night but she couldn’t even speak. “I’d had four injections.” 
Today, she is making up for that enforced silence. Porter is such an open book, talking to me about the past, the present and the fact that she is doing a show at the Edinburgh Fringe this August. 

The obvious question about the latter, Gail, is why? “I’m not entirely sure,” she says, laughing. “It might have been wine.”

Actually Porter adds, doing a show at the Fringe has long been on the bucket list. “It has always been in my head because I always loved going to the festival. My mum took me every single year. I remember we saw Matt Lucas and David Walliams at midnight one night in a tiny venue when I was just a teenager. And then she took me to see Graham Norton in a tiny venue.” 

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She wishes her parents were still alive to see it. “It’s kind of bittersweet because I just wanted to phone them both and say, ‘You’ll never guess what I am doing?’”

Porter also sees the show as an opportunity. “I can make it as funny as possible, but also you’re going to get 10 minutes of talking about mental health and looking out for each other. I want to make a difference in every single, tiny way I can.”

The show is very much Porter’s own story. As the Fringe programme blurb puts it: “She’s been famous, she’s been homeless, she’s been sectioned with two guys who both claimed to be Jesus. Now she’s won a Bafta  for ‘being mental’. Now it’s time to laugh.”

Can she, though? Is it possible for Porter to look back and find humour in the darkest of days?

“Loads of it is funny to me. I sit with my friends and say, ‘Have you been sectioned?’ ‘No Gail, that’s just you.’ 

“I can laugh about it now because this is part of the whole mental health thing I’m going to be talking about. Because back in the day if someone didn’t know how to deal with you and you’re having a little mini breakdown and you couldn’t get to see a doctor they’d go, ‘Just lock her up for a bit.’ But when you’re actually in that situation it’s not funny.

“This has given me a voice to speak out for people who are in that situation now.”

The Big Breakfast (Image: Channel 4)

The short version of the Gail Porter story is that she grew up in Porty, was obsessed with telly, got a job as a runner then a presenter in the 1990s, first on Scottish children’s TV and then on programmes like Top of the Pops and The Big Breakfast. She also became a pin-up girl for the lads’ magazines of that time. Infamously her naked image was projected onto the Houses of Parliament to promote FHM magazine (without her knowledge or approval). 

But at the same time she was battling anorexia and had been self-harming for years. She got married – to Dan Hipgrove, guitarist with the band Toploader – in 2001 and her daughter Honey was born in 2002.

But Porter suffered post-natal depression. She was also diagnosed as bipolar. Life became hard. In 2005 her hair fell out overnight. Alopecia Totalis.

There was an overdose – “a cry for help” she once called it – and a difficult divorce. In 2009 her mother, who had been dealing with breast cancer, passed away. In 2014 Porter found herself homeless. At every turn a new terrible challenge.

All of this was played out in the full glare of the media. The tabloids (and the rest) had a field day with the story. She’s certain her phone was hacked, which didn’t help. For a long time the person who most needed a hug in this story was Porter.

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One of the things I wonder about the Fringe show is whether it’s a chance to take back control of her own story in the same way her memoir and her aforementioned “Bafta-winning” documentary, Being Gail Porter, were. A chance not to have it filtered through people like, well, me.

But she doesn’t have that level of suspicion. “Certain people in the olden days – the News of the World – they didn’t make your life pleasant. And knowing that your phone was hacked for years was not a pleasant thing. That was a little bit awful and it makes you very trepidatious. Are you going to be mean to me? Are you going to be nice?”

But, she adds, she’s not worried about what anyone writes about her now, “because I think I’ve had the worst of the worst.

“You can say what you want. As long as you stay away from my daughter because then you’ve got a problem.”

If I’m honest I’m a bit trepidatious today about bringing up some of Porter’s backstory because so much of it must be painful for her. But she says I can ask her anything. It helps to be open, she believes. 

“For me it’s a good thing. I thought I’m just going to talk about everything because what have I got to lose? Nothing. If it helps somebody, I’ve done something good. If people are bored of it they don’t have to listen.”

What’s the part of her life that is still the biggest mystery to her? “Someone projecting your naked image on the Houses of Parliament, that was pretty mysterious and also traumatising,” she suggests.

Actually, she says, the real mystery is how she got a job on television in the first place.
The obvious answer is perhaps that when she got her chance, Porter was very good at it. But she arrived in the public eye at the height of the New Lad moment. It was probably inevitable that she would be approached by men’s magazines for photo shoots. 

Did she feel pressured to do them? “To be honest with you I was in my 20s, I had just moved to London, I was having a great time, I was being asked to do these things and I thought why not?

“I spoke to my grandma and she said, ‘Do you know what? You’re only young once. You look lovely and you can look back on the pictures, Gail.’ 

And so Porter saw it all as a bit of fun. She wasn’t paid for any of them. And she didn’t imagine anyone was going to see them. “What’s the worst that could happen? ‘Oh yeah, we’ll pop you on the Houses of Parliament.’

“Obviously, I’m 52 now and I look back on some of them and think, ‘Well yeah, probably not the best idea I’ve ever had.’ 

The infamous projection onto Westminster (Image: free)

“But it’s done and I don’t regret anything because there is no point. To me,” she adds, “it feels like a lifetime ago. But yesterday when I was out, this guy came and sat next to me on the Tube and he went, ‘Still got a picture of you on my wall.’ I had to get off. It wasn’t even my stop.”

Her daughter has told her that all her friends know about the pictures. “She’s fine with it. She knows I’m not the most normal mum in the world.”

It’s worth remembering, though, that the young woman who graced those magazine covers had a history of self-harming stretching back to her school days.

“I was either overeating or undereating or hurting myself. I was not very good at communicating what I was actually feeling. Not the proudest things I’ve ever done, but

I’ll talk about it because if it can help other people not do it …”

It seems Porter’s success on TV didn’t make any difference to her sense of self at the time. “No difference whatsoever. It subsided due to my dealing with things in different ways.”

In short, success wasn’t a validation. “That’s not how it works. It was something to do with my own head and no matter what job I was in I’d have to sort it out myself.

“When I was doing Big Breakfast and Top of the Pops, they were the most fun times in my life. But when you are not kind to yourself it doesn’t matter what job you do. You just have to find solace in yourself and make sure you deal with your own problems. It had nothing to do with work.”

After the New Lad 1990s, the 21st century has been even tougher on her. “When my hair fell out, I think that was quite a defining moment. It was so visual. When the hair fell out people could see there was something wrong.”

But, rather than hide from reality, she embraced it. She decided not to cover up her baldness. “I got a little bit of abuse from a few people saying, ‘Why does she not wear a wig? Does she want attention?’”

That wasn’t the case, she says. But it prompted her to speak up about her other problems as well. “I  thought I’m just going to talk about everything because what have I got to lose? Nothing.” There was the odd advantage too, she notes. Now she doesn’t have any hair, she says, “it takes me two minutes in the shower.”
This is very Porter. Making a joke of the worst things. It should stand her in good stead at the Fringe. But she isn’t in denial about what she went through. When I suggest that despite everything, she somehow kept herself afloat through her darkest days, she corrects me.

“I kind of didn’t. I lost my home. I was homeless, sleeping on a bench. That kind of went a bit tits up. 
“But,” she adds,  “I knew something would happen and I would get back.”
Even so, it was a shock to her. “Suddenly when you realise you don’t have a roof over your head you think, ‘Oh gosh, I’m in my late 30s, early 40s, that was my house, that was my everything. But people went through much worse things.”
All Porter’s stuff went into storage. She’s never bothered to reclaim it. “I couldn’t afford to get it out. I watch that programme Storage Wars on the telly box just in case someone opens one of the containers and I go, ‘Oh, there’s my stuff.’ 
“But when I put everything into storage and I had nothing left I just put a different perspective into my mind. I thought, ‘I can feel sorry for myself or I’m just going to have to figure it out. I don’t know how I’m going to figure it out but I need to get myself back on my feet and things are just not that important. People are important, your friends are important.’ I miss some of the photographs but memories are more important than photographs.”
These days she helps homeless charities as much as she can. How much of a problem is it generally?
“It’s not great. It’s really not great. I can’t give you the statistics, but it’s really, really bad. Everyone is trying their hardest. I don’t know if you’ve read about the Prince William homeless thing. He’s trying to eradicate homelessness in five years. I hope it happens. He’s lovely and great and so many people are trying to help, but I just don’t understand how it’s working.
“I know lots and lots of people are trying their hardest and anyone who tries, I’m in. No kid should be on the street. There’s loads of children on the street. Speak to the Government … I don’t even know. How much money are you spending on …? Oh, don’t get me started. I’ll just cry.”
Porter pauses, remembers she’s here to talk about the Fringe. “I’m trying to sell a really funny show here.”
But she can speak about these things with some authority because of her lived experience. When we talk about mental health Porter agrees we have become much better at talking about it. But is the help available where it’s needed or are things getting worse?
“I don’t think it’s going backwards, but I don’t think it’s improving. I did a talk the other week in Parliament. There were not many MPs there. I think there was one MP who turned up. I was there at eight in the morning to say, ‘This is what happened when I was there and it’s not improving.’ The care doesn’t seem to be improving which is something I’m desperate, desperate, to try and make change. 
“I’m just a wee tiny bald person from Portobello. But I’m trying my best.”
Most days you will find Gail Porter doing some charity work. “I work with a lot of animal charities. I’m an ambassador with the SSPCA and my friend Kirsteen Campbell, she is the CEO, and she works tirelessly, so I do as much as I possibly can with them and with Centrepoint.”
And there is other work too. She could do with more, but there’s another paranormal TV show on the cards and maybe, if Edinburgh goes well, Porter might take this show on tour. 
“I’m busy and it’s good,” she says. And isn’t that good to hear? Even so, she won’t ever say no to a hug. “No-one has to ask me, it’s not a problem.”
People of Edinburgh, prepare yourselves to be cuddled.

Gail Porter: Hung, Drawn and Portered, Assembly George Square Studios (Studio Two), Edinburgh, 7pm, August 2-28 (except August 14 & 21)