If you go back about 15 years, you will notice that the headlines accompanying interviews with Fearne Cotton took a certain tone. “TV’s dirtiest blonde,” read the cover line on Arena magazine. “Fearne Cotton’s got legs,” was a headline opted for by The Sunday Times. Today, as I read these out to the now 41-year-old broadcaster, Happy Place founder and mother of four, she winces. Does she remember feeling objectified?
“I don’t know if I felt objectified; I felt as though they were writing about someone else,” she says. “I’d read these weird headlines and think, that is not me. So I did feel a discomfort about that, because it was embarrassing. My grandparents were alive in that era – that was mortifying for them to read.”
Cotton came from a regular suburban family. “I was as unracy and undirty as they come,” she says. “I felt utterly boring, and like I needed to prove I had something interesting about me.” If anything, she felt lost. “I was trying to find my way in this terrifying career where I felt completely out of place, that I’m not good enough, I don’t belong, so I’m blagging my way through it.”
Society has moved on since then – those headlines are unlikely to stand up today – but there has also been a sea change in Cotton’s public image. Gone are the days of rolling into her presenting job on Radio 1 “after two seconds sleep”, or rolling around an ITV studio with one end of a banana in her mouth, the other end in Holly Willoughby’s mouth (really), in a task overseen by Keith Lemon in the panel show Celebrity Juice, which Cotton worked on for a decade.
Since quitting practically everything she was a part of and beginning to explore the concept of happiness – first with a book called Happy, in 2017, then by launching the Happy Place podcast the following year – the Fearne Cotton we know today is introspective, invested in wellbeing and, by her own admission, far more authentic.
Guests on her podcast have included Dawn French, Hillary Clinton and Tom Daley. Within a handful of years, it has spawned a festival, an imprint of books, an album – and now an app. The latter is the reason for our Zoom conversation today, which Cotton joins from her pink and green home studio in Richmond, declaring that she would rather be the interviewer than interviewee. Still, she is generous with her time and has a warmth that leaves an afterglow.
The Happy Place app, which acts as a hub of wellbeing tools – yoga routines, guided mediations, breathing exercises – has been a long time in the making. “I wanted to get it perfect,” she says. “I’m unbelievably happy with what we’ve ended up with.”
Are there any nerves around releasing it? “If it was a TV show I’d been hired for, and there’s all the pressure from everybody else, it would be quite a terrifying place to be,” she says. “But with Happy Place, we have an in-house manifesto along the lines of: we’re not trying to change the world, we’re aiming to help in small ways where we can.”
Ensuring it is “cool” or “zeitgeist” is the antithesis of their purpose. “It’s coming from a very real place of: these are things that I need for my own mental health,” she says. “So there is less pressure because I really believe in it.”
The wellness industry has come under fire before for being exclusive, a privilege only for those who can afford it, so I wonder how she feels about launching a paid product – the app costs £9.99 a month or £49.99 a year – in the context of the cost of living crisis.
“Everything has to be a low price point,” she agrees, pointing out that the festival is £35, relatively cheap compared with others of its kind, while the podcast and YouTube channel are free. “With the app, it’s in line with competitors. If you think it would benefit you and if you’ve got that money, amazing. But I’m not going sit here and say, ‘Everybody has to do this.’ There’s a choice in all of it.”
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Cotton has previously expressed a discomfort with being lumped in the same category as those that whack an enormous price on a candle and act as if it will fix your problems. Today, she retracts a little. “I think there’s room for all of it,” she says. “With any brand, you don’t have to buy into anything. Some people might want to spend 200 quid on a pair of leggings, and if it makes you feel good, go for it. I think it’s dangerous territory to start vilifying anyone or anything.”
So there’s never any harm? “I don’t like it when big promises are made – drink this juice and it will change your life,” she says. “Wellness can be like, ‘Oh, it’s white people in expensive leggings doing yoga.’ Well, it might be some of the time. But I’m going to focus on the people who don’t feel seen or heard. I’m listening – tell me what you need.”
Not that it’s possible to get everything right all the time. “We will make mistakes; that is part and parcel of doing anything in life,” she says. “We can’t cancel people or tell people they can’t do something because they made a mistake. We want to listen and try again.”
Cotton is keen to emphasise that she doesn’t know it all. “If I did, I’d be in a cave mediating all day. I haven’t got a clue – I’m fumbling my way through life, like everybody.”
Nevertheless, I tell her, I see her sharing yoga poses and vegan food on social media and associate her with perfect wellness. Does she ever get the urge to let loose – and if so, does she feel any responsibility to hide that?
“Zero responsibility,” she says. “If I did have the urge, I would talk about it. I’d say, ‘God, I feel like shit, I’m hungover.’ But you know what? I really don’t have the urge. I’ve been there, done that, got the T shirt. I felt shit the whole of my twenties. I went to a horrible place mentally; I don’t want to go back there.”
So, these days she barely drinks. “At a wedding two weeks ago, half a gin made my mouth go salivary. And I cannot overeat because I was bulimic for 10 years, and that is the biggest trigger for me. So I’m very disciplined, because I can’t go back to being physically ill.
“We have this warped mindset that having any sort of discipline is virtuous or boring. We celebrate getting pissed or having a massive pizza. But I don’t want to feel shit. So I eat well, I exercise and I don’t drink much. If people want to hate on me because they feel like it’s unattainable, that’s none of my business. I just refuse to go back there.”
Cotton was raised in Hillingdon, in north-west London suburbia, by her signwriter father and her mother, who worked several jobs. After joining a local drama group, she spent much of her time in and out of auditions, and by 15, she landed a presenting job on kids’ show The Disney Club.
It was, undoubtedly, a young age to be thrust into the spotlight, but at first Cotton thrived. She rose stratospherically to present Top of the Pops at the age of 23, and when she got the gig on Radio 1 a few years later, she became the first ever permanent female presenter of a BBC radio chart show.
“I can look back at some of it as being extraordinary,” she reflects. “You know, getting to stand in a small room with Eminem rapping in your face. I will bore the shit out of my kids one day with all the stories. But I don’t miss doing it. It was relentless. I couldn’t ever do it again.”
People would congratulate her on her success, but inside, Cotton was suffering. “My life [was] quite out of control – the jobs were getting bigger, the attention was getting bigger, the opinion was getting louder,” she says. As well as bulimia, she experienced panic attacks and depression, for which she was later treated with medication and therapy. “I had a huge, ugly period of shame when I was feeling very low and it was all-consuming,” she recalls. “I would plummet into self-loathing.”
Something else happened around this time, which Cotton is yet to talk about, that eventually led to her walking away from presenting. Everything she has already opened up about has been in the hope of helping people, but she is not ready to discuss this one. “I think there’s a really fine line,” she explains. “How much do you poke around in the past when is it too painful? I don’t want to put myself in a position where saying too much is detrimental. I really want to feel well. I want to be a decent parent to my kids and a nice wife to my husband.”
Cotton married Jesse Wood, son of Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood, in 2014, three years after they met on a night out in Ibiza. I notice her Zoom name is Fearne Wood. “I am Fearne Wood. It is just such a hassle to change, what with the books and everything over the years. If someone comes up to me saying, ‘Are you Fearne Cotton?’ Jesse’s like, ‘Wood!’” She laughs. “But I like having the same surname as my kids and all that jazz.”
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Instead, her concerns are focused on social media. “It’s a nightmare. I don’t know how to navigate that one.” Because of social media, she says, “we’ve lost the plot. We’re driving ourselves mad trying to imbibe all this information, make sense of it, have an opinion. It’s insanity.”
I ask how she felt watching the backlash to Holly Willoughby and Phillip Schofield over “Queuegate”, but she’d rather not comment, explaining: “I don’t want to wade in on this one because I don’t want the story to keep running.”
Does she ever worry about being torn down herself? “I’ve already been taken down by the press more times than I can count.” She thinks. “The world is a noisy place at the moment. Everyone’s pissed off. There is a lot of aggression being channelled in the wrong direction for the wrong reasons. So what I do is tune out of everything. I’m not going to stand on my social media soapbox arguing about something. I’m not interested.”
Cotton is content sitting on the fence. “It has somehow become a crime if you don’t have an opinion. I quite happily don’t have an opinion on a lot of things. I’m still questioning everything. I think I was questioning too little before.”
Perhaps like what she was doing dressed in just a bra and leather miniskirt she didn’t feel comfortable in for the cover of Arena magazine in 2006. “It’s all a learning curve,” she muses. “I’ve made loads of mistakes; I’ve done things badly and made decisions that I wouldn’t make now.
“But that’s why I’m doing everything I’m doing today, because of all that stuff. If I had a perfect ascent to becoming a TV presenter, and it had all been plain sailing, no lads’ mags, just hard graft, I would be there like, ‘La la la la!’ No, it’s been a bumpy ride, hence why I’m doing all of this stuff. So, underpinning the regrets, remorse, all those things, there has to be gratitude, because I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today without it.”
The Happy Place App is available to download from the App Store or at happyplaceofficial.co.uk
