Esther Rantzen: The Consumer Queen Who Changed People's Lives

Esther Rantzen, Childline, The Silver Line, That’s Life!, consumer campaigning, British television history and the extraordinary legacy of one of the most recognisable broadcasters of the last half-century. In this episode of Mark and Pete, we look back at the life of Dame Esther Rantzen, not simply as a television personality, though she was certainly that, but as someone who used fame, rather unusually, to make life better for people who were being ignored.Rantzen became a household name through the BBC’s That’s Life!, which mixed consumer complaints, investigative journalism, odd little human-interest stories and, every so often, a dog that appeared able to say “sausages”. It was a very British mixture. Slightly chaotic, occasionally ridiculous, but often surprisingly serious underneath. And that was really the point. The programme made consumer rights feel like something ordinary people could actually understand and act on, rather than a matter for committees, clipboards and somebody in a beige office saying they would look into it.But Esther Rantzen’s greatest legacy goes far beyond television.In 1986 she founded Childline, after a That’s Life! investigation exposed the scale of child abuse and the desperate lack of somewhere safe for children to turn. What began as a response to one programme became one of Britain’s best-known charities, giving children a confidential place to seek help, advice and, sometimes, simply somebody willing to listen.Then, decades later, came The Silver Line, created to tackle loneliness among older people. Again, the idea was disarmingly simple: answer the phone. Listen. Be there. Which, when you think about it, is often what people need most, and yet seems increasingly difficult for modern society to manage.We look at the statistics, the millions of calls and counselling sessions, the scale of both charities, and the remarkable fact that one broadcaster managed to leave behind institutions that carried on helping people long after the television lights were switched off.We also ask what has happened to that sort of public-service broadcasting. Could a programme like That’s Life! exist now? Would broadcasters today give so much airtime to ordinary people with genuine problems, rather than celebrities with highly polished opinions about them?There are questions too about Rantzen’s later campaigning, including assisted dying, where Christians may strongly disagree with her conclusions while still recognising the immense good she did elsewhere. Human beings are inconveniently complicated like that.This is, above all, a retrospective on a woman who made consumer campaigning entertaining, gave vulnerable children a voice and refused to accept that loneliness was simply part of getting old.Esther Rantzen may have been Britain’s consumer queen. Her real achievement, though, was persuading millions of us to notice people we might otherwise have walked past.