One of the most important new faces in British television in 1973 was Esther Rantzen’s. Her giant gnashers became the teeth of television and, as the consumer watchdog for millions, she needed their bite and used it more and more on tricksters and charlatans.
Originally planned for just a six-week run, That’s Life! was conceived as a follow-up to the Saturday night offering, Braden’s Week, in which Bernard Braden and a team of reporters made people laugh and fought consumers’ battles. The show eventually ran for 21 years!
Esther presided over a succession of lap-dog men who sat behind desks on stage and reported back to Big Sister on their investigations.
Her co-presenters over the years included Glyn Worsnip, Kieran Prendiville, Chris Serle, Bill Buckley, Gavin Campbell, Paul Heiney and Adrian Mills.
The shows were recorded so close to transmission time that there was no time to edit out any but the most serious mistakes, which added a near-live edge of excitement.
That’s Life! loved animals – and not only dogs who could say “sausages”. Esther once tried to investigate ‘Scent-Off’ pellets, which the manufacturer claimed would dispatch any hound that sniffed them.
A viewer had reported that her dog, far from being repelled, had liked the pellets so much he’d eaten them all. Esther arranged for a dozen assorted dogs with their owners to come into the studio to test them. There was chaos.
A large Airedale took a passionate interest in a Yorkshire terrier and pursued it around the studio. Two others fought, while another decided to cock its leg up by the pot plant next to Esther’s chair. The scent on the plant encouraged others to follow suit. Esther needed help to remove the dogs so she could carry on with the show.
That’s Life! pioneered television reporting on consumer problems involving dodgy builders, fraudulent businessmen, and criminal cheats, and it raised important issues such as the sugar content in drinks, human organ donations, and rear seatbelts in cars.
It also mixed in more jokey items – suggestively shaped vegetables sent in by viewers, singing dogs, street vox-pops with engaging pensioners such as the perennially jolly East End woman Annie Mizen, silly headlines, and comic songs.
The show also gave a new lease of life to the veteran rhyming comedian Cyril Fletcher with his “Odd Odes”, and provided an early showcase for new talents such as Victoria Wood, Richard Stilgoe and Lynsey de Paul.
As Esther produced three children and became a famous working mother, she championed more children’s causes. Ben Hardwicke, a toddler with incurable liver disease, became the focus of Esther’s campaign for child organ donors.
In 1986 she began publicising Childline – a help-line for children suffering sexual and other abuse.
On the line’s first night, it received 50,000 calls, swamping the system. By the time the charity was absorbed into the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, in 2006, Childline claimed to have helped 4 million callers.
Strangely, viewers responded to such life-and-death, heart-breaking subjects, wedged as they often were between tax inspectors gargling to music and racing bunny rabbits.
That’s Life! was always in the BBC’s Top Ten and, at its peak, attracted 20 million viewers on Sunday nights. By the late 80s, its peculiar mix of pranks and preaching had made Esther Rantzen (the surname translates as ‘old bag’) the most authoritative woman in British broadcasting and one of the few TV personalities recognisable by her first name alone.
In January 2023, Rantzen announced that she had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer. In December of that year, she joined the Dignitas assisted dying clinic in Switzerland but quickly became too physically fragile to make the journey and go through the Dignitas process.
Esther Rantzen died on 30 September 2026, aged 86.
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The show also gave a new lease of life to the veteran rhyming comedian Cyril Fletcher with his “Odd Odes”, and provided an early showcase for new talents such as Victoria Wood, Richard Stilgoe and Lynsey de Paul.
