OK, I added the ”Hideous” – but this is the story reported on Digital Spy over the past few days.
Vanessa Feltz has been accused of bullying a student who was doing work experience on her BBC London show.
Beverley Nesbit, 19, claims that she was reduced to tears after a series of incidents involving the presenter in July. She secured the post after winning a £120 bid arranged by Feltz’s daughter Saskia Kurer at a university charity event.
“I basically paid to be abused by Vanessa Feltz for a week,” she told the Daily Mail. “Vanessa was really brash, not like the bubbly person you see on television, but in a rude and arrogant way. She barely acknowledged me, and when she did she said everything I had done was rubbish.”
Recalling one incident, Nesbit said: “Vanessa turned to me and said, ‘Beverley, which is your favourite poem by Yeats?’ I’m not a stupid person, but I was honest and told her I’d never heard of Yeats and didn’t have a favourite. She was really rude and said something like, ‘That’s ridiculous, write me a 2,000 word essay on Yeats by tomorrow’. I thought she was joking.”
Feltz apparently requested the essay the following day. “I had to admit I hadn’t done it,” Nesbit added. “I couldn’t believe it. In the end I went to the toilet and just cried. I just wanted to go home. I couldn’t believe how rude and horrible she had been. In the end a producer came and asked me if I was okay.”
Feltz didn’t respond to the paper’s requests for a comment. A BBC spokesman said: “This was a private visit arranged by Vanessa and not part of the BBC work experience scheme.”
Feltz has long had a reputation for being an absolute cow. Several times during her marriage to Michael Kurer (1983 – 2000) she was interviewed for newspapers and magazine articles, and was quite prepared to discuss and belittle his surgeon’s salary versus her considerable income from media. Feltz clearly has no idea of marital diplomacy. Some time later, Feltz and Kurer divorced, some media citing Kurer’s affair with a colleague. Around that time, Feltz was embroiled in a scandal involving her TV chat show, where her “guests” with their problems turned out to be paid actors. Feltz was considered to be somehow culpable for the audacious deceit and the show was cancelled. Her reputation has suffered ever since. More recently, her new Channel 5 show launched on 11 January 2011 has just been ditched after a few weeks – one show supposedly picking up around 60,000 viewers.
I’m fairly confident around the time of the Feltz/Kurer divorce, an ex-colleague of Feltz profiled her in Hello magazine. Given Hello has a reputation for saccharine niceness, the article was shocking for its unashamed carve up of Feltz, and made clear sympathies lay with Kurer for all he’d endured during their marriage, including being regularly berated in front of others. It was clear the ex-colleague thought Feltz was a complete cow to work with.
Where some presenters stay loyal to a particular broadcaster or channel, this doesn’t apply to Feltz, who has worked for BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5, Anglia, various radio stations, etc. Some broadcasters fall over themselves to retain what they consider to be “star” talent, decade-in-decade-out. Feltz seems to have worked for a fair few broadcasters in her career. It’d be interesting to hear what other ex-colleagues have to say about the joys of working with Vanessa. Feltz has an “interesting” Wikipedia page with good links.