Jan Leeming is insisting, with her smiley pixie face, we should not attempt to make her look sexy. Not that she thinks she does look sexy, but in no way should we try.
“That’s not what this is about,” she underlines. Although she can’t help a chuckle at the hairdresser blasting a hairdryer at her in lieu of a wind machine during her photoshoot for the Mirror.
The trouble is, former BBC newsreader Jan may be 81 – rather than the 60 most people assumed when she popped in for a chat with Graham Norton on Eurovision – but she really is sexy.
She looks amazing, bravely posing in swimwear.
Last week, US TV cook Martha Stewart, also 81, posed spectacularly in a one-piece on the cover of Sports Illustrated, becoming their oldest ever cover model.
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Now Jan - who's actually eight months older than Martha - has decided to do the same, to deliver a very important message to all older women.
Jan giving news report in 1982 (BBC)She explains: “I’m not giving Martha Stewart a run for her money, but she can do it, and I’m doing it – for all older women who still have life in them and joie de vivre.”
Jan’s pictures are as real and honest as she is. There’s been no airbrushing.
She adds: “I just want to say, ‘Please don’t write us all off.
“Older people are put into a bracket, they are discriminated against. There are loads of women my age who have still got a lot to give.”
Matter-of-fact Jan admits she misses male attention these days.
Jan smiles in swimsuit for Mirror photoshoot (Tim Merry/Daily Mirror)
Jan is unafraid to bare flesh (Tim Merry/Daily Mirror)She chuckles: “I’m quite miserable I never get any wolf whistles any more. The last time it happened, I walked past some builders about 30 years ago. I went back and thanked them.”
Absolutely tiny, drowned by her large tote bag stuffed with swimsuits and sarongs, Jan is as petite as a ballerina when she arrives from her home in Kent, her birth county, in chic court shoes and a black dress.
She’s been doing yoga for the past year and it shows.
Later, she demonstrates how “I can get off the floor without using my hands”.
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She’s quick to explain that looking like this comes with a lot of effort, and isn’t all down to nature, although she’s had no “work”.
Being consoled by campmates on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! (PA)She lives a clean life, weighing herself each morning, doing the odd fast day, reducing wine to nights out with friends, and rationing cake and chocolate.
At the same time, she accepts “ageing is part of life”. She says: “I am fortunate that I can do everything I’ve ever done albeit perhaps more slowly and with a few aches and pains.
“Given the opportunity I can still dance the night away.” One of her secrets is to keep active and busy.
She swears by the benefits of doing volunteer work and stresses it’s vital to keep up with hobbies.
“I was so down during Covid without the social interaction,” she adds. In her 20s, when she was an actress in Australia, she was two stone heavier for a spell.
Chatting with Graham Norton at Eurovision (Pixel8000)But she reiterates that today’s shoot is to “get away from ageism”, not just to show off her trim figure.
The former Pebble Mill At One presenter, a household name after being on the show from 1976-79, became a BBC newsreader in the 80s.
She feels her age now blocks any chance of a regular TV slot. She feels sidelined, she says.
Jan’s witty interview on Eurovision a couple of weeks ago, in a Gina Fratini dress she bought in 1972, reminded us how slick she is. In recent years she has appeared in reality TV – I’m A Celebrity in 2006, and the 2015 BBC documentary The Real Marigold Hotel. But she believes a host slot is long gone.
“Women are judged more harshly, particularly with regard to our looks,” she says. “One regularly sees TV programmes with a craggy old man partnered by a woman half his age.
Jan in 1982“I don’t recall seeing the coupling the other way around.
”These days older women do have a slightly better representation on TV but only up to the age of about 50.”
It’s far from the sole way Jan says she and other seniors are discriminated against. She gives the examples of travel insurance firms reducing older people’s maximum stays abroad from 90 to 30 days, and car hire firms charging extra.
And age discrimination is not the only type of unfairness. On Pebble Mill she earned £6,000 a year but knows male colleagues earned at least double. As a woman she didn’t get expenses and while the men stayed in hotels, she and fellow presenter Marian Foster were forced to share a rented studio flat, taking turns to have the bed.
She says the editor told them: “Ladies if you don’t like it, there’s the door.” And harassment was the norm, Jan recalls.
Jan looks splendid in orange (Tim Merry/Daily Mirror)“If a man touched your backside, you would crunch your stiletto down on his toes, and if someone brushed your breast you would laugh and call them a dirty old man,” she recalls.
“The culture was totally wrong but these incidents did not ruin my life.
“I know I lost a couple of jobs because I wasn’t prepared to sleep with the boss.” Much has been made of the fact Jan, who has one son, was married five times, the last of which ended in 2001.
Her first was aged just 19 and lasted six months. She refers to her “bad luck with men” and nowadays, doesn’t date. In the past she certainly hasn’t been short of offers.
“I had more proposals than I took up – I can’t remember how many,” she shrugs. One missed chance was perhaps with Egyptian actor Omar Sharif, who she interviewed on Pebble Mill.
Jan early in her TV career (Daily Mirror)
Publicity picture in 1967 (DAILY MIRROR)She recalls: “He said ‘Jan, are you married?’ and when I replied no, he said, ‘Why not?’ I had the next day off, and when I got back they told me he had phoned for me. I could have had lunch with him.” Might she have hoped for more?
“I’d be a liar if I said not,” she laughs.
Despite all this, Jan admits she has been insecure but says age has brought confidence and courage.
She has discovered she is “much more brave than I realised”.
“This is brave!” she squeals, brandishing a swimsuit.
“I know I’m going to get flak.
“But I just want people to realise we still have a lot to offer.”
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