Full Cycle with Gail Porter

Gail Porter Inspires

by Beth Pearson

Gail Porter favours the school cycle over the school run. Every weekday morning, she and her daughter Honey get on their tandem. Gail’s mountain bike is in front, with Honey’s bike attached to the back. It was Honey’s idea that they get one, but while Gail is concentrating on the road ahead, she’ll occasionally notice that she’s having to pedal a bit harder.
“Honey has been cycling since she learned to walk, but sometimes I’ll look round and she’ll have her feet up,” says Gail. “I’ll say, ‘thanks, dude’.
“My mum always cycled about with us when we were kids, either mucking around in the street or going somewhere. When I moved to London, I got myself a bike and I just find it a really easy way to get around.”
Gail and Honey, 5, took part in this year’s Big Bike Ride weekend, from June 27-29, to raise money for the NSPCC and Childline. Gail, who was born and brought up in Edinburgh, has fond memories of cycling.
“We’d usually go up Arthur’s Seat,” she says. “We’d also cycle to Musselburgh from Joppa and nine times out of ten our mum would manage to get us lost. It would always be a really fun trip, we’d be laughing so much we wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.”
Now she is carrying on the family tradition, with a little help from her partner, cameraman James Lloyd. “He cycles everywhere and if I get knackered, he’ll take the tandem and I’ll take his bike.”
Hearing about her everyday life, it’s easy to forget that this is the woman whose naked image was projected onto the Houses of Parliament for an FHM magazine campaign. It was estimated that 40 million people saw the infamous photograph of the stunt. That was almost a decade ago: she had a high-profile television career presenting children’s programmes including Fully Booked, Top of the Pops and Live and Kicking, and regularly appeared in “100 sexiest women” polls. She also had hair.
Now, she’d be the first to admit that life didn’t turn out how she might have expected. In 2002, she married Dan Hipgrave of the now-defunct band Toploader and soon became pregnant. After giving birth to Honey in 2002, she suffered post-natal depression that was undiagnosed for more than a year.
“The doctor would say I was tired and I was tired, of course, but I was hysterical all the time,” she says, now 37. “I was crying at everything, thinking I was doing everything wrong, terrified that everyone would come near Honey so I didn’t want to go anywhere. I was travelling to America a lot and I think that didn’t help.
“I just got very depressed. I’d been depressed in the past so I don’t think it was a shock to anyone that I got even more depressed. I thought I was the worst mum in the world, but once you get help you realise other women have experienced it too and think ‘it’s not just me’.
“More people talk about it now. Fern Britton and Melinda Messenger are very vocal about it and they’re not embarrassed. I think they think ‘this might help another woman’. Women like to help each other.”
She and Hipgrave separated in 2004, after which Gail’s depression worsened. In the following year, she began losing her body hair; it is thought that stress triggered alopecia areata. Her body is now entirely bald  - “I never have to shave” - and the kids at Honey’s school don’t let her forget it.
“They love my bald head,” she laughs. “When I go to pick up Honey, they all rub it because they think it’s really funny. Every day. I let them touch away. Then about once a week they’ll say ‘do you know you’ve got no hair?’ and I’ll say ‘yes I do, thank you’. Then they’ll ask if I left it on the bus, because I told them that’s what happened, and they’ll ask why I haven’t gone back to the bus to get it.”
If there’s an overarching lesson Gail has learned in life, it’s never to plan. In her early days of fame, she would be asked where she saw herself in five years’ time and she would never answer because “I wouldn’t know what I was doing the next day”. Now, she doesn’t answer because she knows that life rarely conforms to five-year plans.
“I never thought I’d have Honey or own a house in London, I never thought I’d be bald or have a dog,” she says. “I think I’ve been really quite fortunate.”
Last year, her autobiography, Laid Bare: My Story of Love, Fame and Survival, was published, in which she wrote openly about her struggle with depression and alopecia. Her aim in writing it was to help other women, but she must also have felt that it drew a line under her past and helped her focus on the future.
She now organises her work in six-month blocks – don’t ask her what her long-term plans are, because she remains firmly anti-five-year-plan (though she recently suggested she might one day move back to Scotland) . Forthcoming projects include some documentaries, voiceover work and writing some travel articles, one of which will involve spending two weeks at an American wildlife park with Honey. She’s also a keen reader and is currently working her way through some books to review on BBC Radio Four.
Gail and Honey sound like peas in a pod, and she admits they do everything together, from ladies’ lunches to dog-walking, charity runs and cycles.
“People say we’re bonded at the hip,” says Gail. “I think she’s like me. She’s laidback and likes a good laugh. She’s up for anything. I’ll say ‘want to go for lunch?’ and she’ll go ‘Yeah! Let’s go for lunch!’ She’s very happy, very content. ”
But if they do end up back in Scotland, Honey will fit right in.