Gail Porter has spent most of the past 18 years talking about being bald.
The 1990s TV presenter lost all her hair to alopecia, a chronic condition which causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, in 2005. It came out of nowhere and happened in just four weeks, while she was away from home filming in the U.S.
Her long blonde locks fell out in clumps on her pillow while she slept, along with her eyelashes and eyebrows.
It felt, she reveals, 'as if someone was physically rubbing me out'.'I remember calling my then husband and asking him to tell our daughter, who was two, that Mummy's gone away with all her hair and she's going to come back with nothing. I cried the whole way home.'
Gail has her first proper wig - a gorgeously glossy blonde number which looks remarkably like her own hair did at the peak of her TV fame
Gail lost all her hair to alopecia, a chronic condition which causes the immune system to attack hair follicles, in 2005
Gail, now 52, became an ambassador for hair loss, a public beacon of support for men and women who had suffered the same life-changing experience.
'The irony was, I didn't know anything about being bald,' she says. 'I hadn't even had time to get used to it. But suddenly it was all anyone wanted me to talk about.'
Today, Gail is on less familiar ground: she's talking about having hair again. Not her own — despite some doctors' predictions, her alopecia has proven irreversible — but her first proper wig: a gorgeously glossy blonde number which looks remarkably like her own hair did at the peak of her TV f
'It takes me back,' she admits. 'I wore it to a restaurant in Soho the other day, and walked up to a table where my friends were having dinner, and they looked at me and went: 'Oh my God, it's Gail from 1999!' Some people don't recognise me. I've known one of the waitresses in that
restaurant for years, and she came up to me and said: 'Hi Ma'am, can I get you a table
The public has got used to Gail without hair: she is lucky, she says, to have 'an OK-shaped head', and is adept at accessorising with quirky glasses and colourful beanie h
The wig, made by her friend, wigmaker Amber Jean Rowan, comprises natural, ethically-sourced human hair and requires 'no styling whatsoever — I just fling it on and go. I can flick it around a bit and it feels nice. But I can take it on or off whenever I fancy, and there's something liberating in
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Her 21-year-old daughter, Honey, loves it — and Gail knows her mum, Sandra, who died of lung cancer in 2009, would have been a fan. 'She never wanted my head to get cold,' she says,
But Gail won't be wearing it all the time: it's reserved for special occasions or when she wants to go incognito. 'It's like a hat really. A long, swoo
'Most of the time, 'she' stays in the house [the wig, Gail insists, is a 'she' but she hasn't yet settled on a name for it]. Sometimes she comes out
'I won't make the mistake of wearing her on the Tube again, though. The other day I was wearing the wig with a beanie on top, and it was so hot that I wanted to rip both of t
'But there were children sitting opposite me and I didn't want to traumatise th
Gail is disarmingly honest and self-deprecating. Though a laugh plays almost constantly on her lips, her eyes — huge green irises with not a scrap of make-up —shine with vulnerability. There's no doubt she's had a tough life, one she refers to in two halves: Before Hair Loss
er.
Before, she was at the pinnacle of her presenting career — a media student from Edinburgh, she'd worked her way through the ranks, from runner to children's television, narrowly missing out on a slot on Blue Peter — to becoming a presenter on the most-watched shows of the era: Fully Booked, The Big Breakfast and T
e Pops.
It was, she says, 'a proper nice time': late nights at the pub, canteen lunches with top bands and misbehaving — 'but not in
bad way'.
'I ended up working with my friends and everyone was lovely to each other,' she recalls. 'We were non-stop laughing. It didn't
ke work.'
But the bubbly, carefree persona Gail portrayed on screen masked a young woman grappling with the pressures of fame. Since her teenage years, she'd suffered from anorexia, sparked by cruel comments at school which first caused her to overeat, and then to stop e
together.
'When I started losing weight, people would say: 'Wow, you look great.' So that encouraged me. I went d
½-6 st.'
Her hectic lifestyle — waking up at 2am for The Big Breakfast, getting home at midnight after Top Of The Pops — made it easy to skip meals, and for a time she survived on wine, sushi and hand
Jelly Babies.
'On days off, I'd go to the gym at 6am,' she says. 'I'd go on the running machine or cross-trainer for an hour and then sweat
in the sauna.
'One day I passed out and my personal trainer took me to hospital. They banned me from the gym after that. It wasn't until I stopped that I realised I was knackere
'
An image of a naked Gail was projected on the Houses of Parliament in 1999 as
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Since her teenage years, Gail suffered from anorexia, sparked by cruel comments at school which first caused her to overeat, and then to s
ng altogether
In 1999, Gail was catapulted into the public eye when, having posed nude for lads' magazine FHM, an image of her naked body was projected on to the Houses of Parliament
licity stunt.
She says the now-infamous incident — which she knew nothing about until the next day — was 'horrible'. The magazine sold a million copies, while she was le
ck up the pieces.
'I knew I'd done the shoot, but they never asked my permission to do that [pro
image].
'My mum was ringing asking: 'What have you done?' There were people outside my house day and night. It was really scary. The whole thing knocked my confidence. I didn't get out
for a long time.'
Looking back, Gail adds: 'I was naive and just going with the flow. I'd spoken to my Nan about it and she'd told me to go for it. I don't think she realised I was g
get my a**e out.'
On the whole, Gail's family —especially her mother, who was on the FHM set with her during the shoot — were very supportive, not just the
roughout her career.
Her Dad, Craig, who died in 2020, had separated from her mum when Gail was in her
had moved to Spain.
'He took it all with a pinch of salt,' she says. 'At his wake, all his friends kept coming up to me saying: 'He was so proud. He talked about you all the time.' Not to me, he didn't. He was v
tish, very stoical.'
TV in those days was a pretty sexist place, Gail admits: presenters were hired for their looks, lewd innuendos were rife and posing nude was par for the course. Jimmy Savile was still prowling prime-time shows and 온라인슬롯 Gail recalls appearing al
him on Top Of The Pops.
'We didn't know what he was like back then; we just thought he was a cree
an,' she says.
'I remember they were introducing something, and there was a bunch of us huddled together on camera. He was really touchy-feely; his hands were everywhere. But it was just before we went li
one of us could react.'
As the shiny world of youth TV began to tarnish, Gail moved on to more grown-up presenting roles, such as the travel series Wish You Were Her
er favourite job to date.
Off screen, too, she started settling down.