A tale of two Janets (From Living Northeast)

A tale of two Janets

1:00pm Thursday 18th February 2010 in

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She may be part of the glitzy media set in London, but up north Janet Street-Porter prefers to party in her local village hall, playing games of musical chairs and pass the parcel with her famous friends. She tells Ruth Campbell what it is she loves about the Dales.

JANET Street-Porter doesn’t seem her usual feisty, brash opinionated self. She is three hours late because she has been asleep, suffering from jet lag, having flown to America, then Australia and back with little chance to catch her breath.

“I’m really sorry,” she drawls, launching into a drowsy, uncharacteristically softly-spoken apology, explaining that she also had to get up every morning at 4.30am to work on the I’m a Celebrity TV series in Sydney. “I’m completely knackered.”

But it doesn’t take her long to get into her stride.

Touch on a subject that rattles her, which isn’t difficult, and she’s off. There’s noise, for a start. “I go completely mad if there’s any noise – off-roaders, trail bikes, I can’t stand them. And I hate bloody low-flying aircraft, that does my head in.”

Janet with jetlag can be pretty ferocious. I can’t begin to imagine what she would be like after a good night’s sleep. But she’s really funny, witty, compassionate and kind too.

As she warms to her themes, the distinctive, stroppy voice, once described as sounding as if she was “consuming a plate of spaghetti with a fork and spoon”, re-emerges. Expletives, like parmesan, are liberally sprinkled over the lot.

The celebrated broadcaster, journalist and author also seems to have it in for Harrogate. “Everyone is so overdressed and tarted up.” And she warns me not to start her on the spa town’s restaurants, because she has already got into big trouble for slagging them off.

We are talking about the North, and particularly Nidderdale, north-west of Harrogate, because it is here that she wrote her latest book, Don’t Let The B*****ds Get You Down, full of her characteristically bolshy, yet practical and highly amusing, advice on how to take control of our lives.

She locked herself away in her 1700 stone farmhouse in the remote Dales valley, where she lives half the year, to write it. The book echoes her views in her various newspaper columns where she vents her spleen about everything from shopping to eating out, the fashion mafia, cosmetics industry and the Green lobby.

“People get issued with all sorts of stuff, people telling us what to do. My book is about debunking all the crap, highlighting the sheer madness of it all. Sod what the experts say,” she says.

Even gardening, which is clearly a passion, comes in for some stick. The famous media personality, exnewspaper editor and once the most powerful woman executive in British television, grows all her own vegetables in her North Yorkshire garden, which she describes as a “temple of perfection”.

“Let’s lay a couple of myths to rest,” she says. “It’s no bloody cheaper to grow your own, despite what the experts tell you, and it completely does your head in.”

She rails against the weather and the pests: “There are so many bugs, I get demented. I talk to my plants, tell them to shape up and not waste my time. I think of myself as a sergeant major. It involves so many emotions, from joy to pride to despair – it’s a roller coaster ride.”

The inventor of Yoof TV who is now, unbelievably, nearly 63, even entered some of her vegetables in the local Pateley agricultural show. “The stress of it, I was so nervous, up against all these pensioners. But then someone pointed out that I am a pensioner,” she laughs.

Janet’s chillies, purple beans and Italian cabbage won a reserve prize. It meant more to her than any glittering media award. “I am very proud of that,” she says.

Janet first came to live in the valley in 1978 and is now accepted as part of the community. The turning point came after ten years. “I was allowed to read the lesson at the Christmas carol service, and I was prouder than the day I picked up my Bafta. It meant I was no longer an incomer,” she says.

“I might be a loudmouth bossy bitch in London, but up north I am a completely different person. I try to be diplomatic, which doesn’t come naturally.”

When the village hall needed a new roof, she put on a one-woman show in Pateley Bridge and raised more than £3,000. She also sold off lots of her old clothes in a celebrity jumble sale: “The vicar introduced me. It was a good laugh that night,”

she says.

Janet fell in love with this valley from the moment she stumbled across it in the Seventies when her then husband, film director Frank Cvitanovich, was working in North Yorkshire and she came to join him, driving on B-roads to meet him in Middleham.

“I drove through Nidderdale and stopped at the top of the hill, looking down to Pateley. I thought, this is fab, we ought to get a house round here.” At first they lived in Darley. “But that was too near Harrogate for my taste,” she says. “If I get out of London, why would I want to hang out in Harrogate?”

Eventually, after her divorce from Cvitanovich, she moved to a more remote spot, and then moved again. “My ambition was to move further up the valley and now I’m even further up.”

But her exact location remains a secret. Four-times married Janet regrets ever opening up her London house to the media. In Nidderdale, people turn up at the village shop asking where she lives. “I can’t stand the nutters that I get coming round. But the locals are very friendly, they accept you for what you are.”

Janet, who, as well as working on TV’s the F Word, is currently making a film for C4 about contemporary art and writes two weekly newspaper columns. She associates London with work and loves to escape up here, she says.

“I can’t stay in London for more than four days. It does my head in. It’s noisy and I go out all the time, I love going to the opera and doing things. I have two sofas in my London house and I’ve never sat on them.”

When I come up here I live like a big blob on the sofa, reading books. And I like working on my vegetables.” Her boyfriend of ten years, former restaurateur Peter Spanton, who is now studying for a degree in psychology, loves it.

“He wants to live here all the time and eventually work up here.”

There are downsides, though. Janet, who is vice- president of the Ramblers’ Association and has farmed Dexter cattle and rare breed pigs on her smallholding, does balk at the number of tourists in summer, who recognise her.

“The locals are all right but the holidaymakers – aarrrgghhhhh,”

she says.

But she does approve of the changes she has witnessed over the past ten years. “It used to be a very insular society.

There are more incomers now, particularly young families with children. And tourism has really taken off. It’s a good thing as it has altered the local economy.

“We shouldn’t be preserving the countryside in aspic.

I’m against keeping it like a theme park,” she says.

Janet and Peter were spending Christmas there. “The silence appeals to me,” she says. “I like Pateley in winter, it is divine. I love it at dusk, about 4pm in the afternoon, with all the Christmas lights along the high street, which hasn’t changed since the 1920s.”

Although she doesn’t do a lot of socialising, she has lots of good friends up here, including the McCoys, who run the Cleveland Tontine restaurant, and Neil Tennant, of the Pet Shop Boys, who lives in Weardale. “Neil loves Weardale,” she says.

It was Tennant who bought her a T-shirt with the tabloid headline “Jungle Janet Was A Beast In Bed” on it, from a story one of her ex-husbands sold to the tabloids about her when she was on the I’m A Celebrity TV show.

She wore it to one of the legendary birthday parties she throws in her village hall in Niddlerdale. “I had a good laugh about that one,” she says.

Every year she has a big, birthday dinner for her friends in the hall, which looks, she says, like something from about 1953, decorated with bunting and fairy lights. Ray, a chef who lives down the road, will do the starters. Janet makes a stew and a couple of friends will make trifles. TV chat show host Paul O’Grady always makes the best one, she says.

There is a disco, and games of ping-pong, pass the parcel and musical chairs, which have been known to descend into violence, she says. Everyone has to bring a gift costing less than £10 for the tombola, so every guest gets a present to take home. She never had a party like this as a child and that is why she loves it so much now. “I can have a glitzy bash any time,” she says.

Two of her close friends who can’t, sadly, make it, are Elton John and David Furnish, who go to their house in Venice during her birthday. The couple, she confesses, called one of their new Alsatian puppies after her. “Elton told me it was because she’s very aggressive and bossy. I wasn’t offended. It’s true,” she laughs.

“But the latest news is, he told me the other day that Janet bit Lulu.” I assume Lulu is one of the other puppies, although it occurs to me later that he might have been referring to the singer. Either way, it sounds like another good tabloid headline. It would certainly make a good Tshirt for her next village hall party...

■ Don’t Let The B*****d’s Get You Down (Quadrille, £12.99).

JSP's North Yorkshire favouritres

FAVOURITE VIEW

Above Scarhouse Reservoir, looking down over one of the quarries, I love the way the landscape curves and you can’t see any other houses.

WALK

I like walking off footpaths, in a straight line. From Nidderdale to Coverdale or Wharfedale from Conistone and back to Stean are great country walks. Just follow the rivers. Anything in a straight line from one dale to another.

RESTAURANT

The Sportsman’s Arms in Nidderdale. The chef is a friend and I like local food. I only eat local food, game or fish.

Sportsman’s Arms, Wath-in-Nidderdale, Pateley Bridge, near Harrogate, North Yorkshire HG3 5PP (01423-711306).

BUTCHERS

I have a big freezer with a lot of game in it, and we regularly pick things off the road. I use different butchers for different things. WS Rogers & Son in Masham does very good beef. They’re at 14 Church Street, Masham, North Yorkshire. I also go to Ken Balsdon’s (01423-890-358); The Butchers Shop, Summerbridge (01423-890-358); Kendalls on the High Street, Pateley Bridge (01423-711342); and Weatherheads, also on the High Street (01423-711207)

FISH

I go to Carricks, just outside Masham, North Yorkshire.

(01677-470261); e-mail: carrickfish@carrickfishltd.co.uk

MARKET

“Can I give you a top tip? I have had more success with cabbages, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts bought for £1 a bundle in Ripon market than any raised lovingly from seed. If you see vegetable plants for sale on a stall in a local market, buy them and bung them in.” (Ripon market, Thursdays and Saturdays.)