Dame Esther Louise Rantzen (22 June 1940 – 30 September 2026) was an English journalist and television presenter who presented the BBC television series That's Life! for 21 years, from 1973 until 1994. She worked with various charitable causes and founded the charities Childline, a helpline for children, which she set up in 1986, and The Silver Line, designed to combat loneliness in older people's lives, which she set up in November 2012.
Rantzen was recognised for her contribution to television and society. She was appointed an OBE for services to broadcasting in 1991 and a CBE for services to children in 2006, and in the 2015 New Year Honours was made a Dame for services to children and older people through Childline and The Silver Line. She was also a patron of a number of charities, including Operation Encompass and Silver Stories.
She remained as President of Childline until her death in 2026, and her daughter Rebecca Wilcox is Deputy President of Childline and has trained to be a volunteer counsellor there. Rantzen worked closely with the campaigning organisation Dignity in Dying.
Early life Esther Louise Rantzen was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, England on 22 June 1940, to Katherine Flora Rantzen (née Leverson, 1911–2005) and Henry Barnato Rantzen (1902–1992), an electrical engineer. Her family is Jewish. She had one younger sister, Priscilla N. Taylor. She attended Buckley Country Day School in New York, leaving in 1952. She was educated at North London Collegiate School, an all-girls independent school in Edgware, North London. She studied English at Somerville College, Oxford, where the Principal was Dame Janet Vaughan and one of her tutors was Mary Lascelles. At Oxford she performed with the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS), became Secretary of the Experimental Theatre Club (ETC) and joined the Oxford Theatre Group, performing in Oxford and Edinburgh.Rantzen 2001, pp 58–60
Rantzen was the subject of an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? on 3 September 2008 (series 5 episode 4). Her paternal line was traced back, as far as the 1760s, to an established Jewish neighbourhood in Warsaw. Tracing Rantzen's forebears was greatly helped by the rarity of the surname "Rantzen" (even in Warsaw) and the survival of records in Warsaw. In the late 1850s, her great-great-grandfather emigrated to Britain and settled, as a cap-maker, in Spitalfields, a slum district of London's East End. Rantzen's great-grandfather moved to a more comfortable neighbourhood with the help of his brother-in-law, Barney Barnato (born Barnett Isaacs), who had become extremely wealthy as the owner of the Kimberley Diamond Mine in South Africa. Her father's middle name was Barnato. On her wealthy maternal side, Rantzen's great-grandfather, Montague Leverson, was one of the founders of the West London Synagogue. Montague Leverson was the maternal grandfather of British composer Gerald Finzi. Rantzen was also related to Ada Leverson, a British writer and friend of Oscar Wilde, who was portrayed by Zoë Wanamaker in the 1997 film Wilde. She was first cousin once removed of the novelist and translator Michael Meyer.
Career BBC After training in secretarial skills, Rantzen was recruited by BBC Radio as a trainee sound effects assistant. She began her television career as a clerk in the programme planning department, then obtained her first production job working as a researcher on the BBC1 late-night satire programme BBC-3 (1965–1966). Having worked as a researcher on a number of current affairs programmes, she moved to the award-winning BBC2 documentary series Man Alive in the mid-1960s.
In 1968, Rantzen, at the time a researcher for Braden's Week (hosted by Bernard Braden), became a presenter because the producer of the programme decided to put the researchers onscreen. Braden decided to return to his native Canada in 1972, to present a similar TV show there; the following year, the BBC replaced Braden's Week with That's Life! with Rantzen as the main presenter.
That's Life! ran on BBC1 for 21 years from 1973 to 1994 and became one of the most popular shows on British television, reaching audiences of more than 18 million. During that time, it expanded the traditional role of the consumer programme from simply exposing faulty washing machines and dodgy salesmen, to investigating life-and-death issues, such as a campaign for more organ donors, which featured Ben Hardwick, a two-year-old dying of liver disease whose only hope was a transplant. Also included was the investigation of Crookham Court boarding school near Newbury, described as "dirty and depressing" with unsatisfactory teaching standards, the owner of which was a paedophile who employed several paedophile teachers. The school was closed and the owner and two members of staff were convicted of sexual offences against pupils as a result of That's Life! publicising the issues. In 1993, Rantzen sued The People for libel after they printed false information about her investigation of the school. Rantzen was awarded £110,000 in damages.
In 1976, Rantzen devised the documentary series The Big Time, which launched Sheena Easton's singing career.
Childline
That's Life! was influential in many different ways, not least in the introduction of the videolink for child witnesses in court procedures, and it was responsible for the launch of Childline in 1986, the first national helpline for children in danger or distress. Rantzen had suggested the Childwatch programme to BBC1 Controller Michael Grade after the death of a toddler who had starved to death, locked in a bedroom. The aim of the programme was to find better ways of detecting children at risk of abuse; to that end, viewers of That's Life! who had themselves experienced cruelty as children were asked to take part in a survey detailing the circumstances of their abuse.
Rantzen suggested that after that edition of That's Life!, the BBC should open a helpline for children, in case any young viewers suffering current abuse wished to ring in to ask for help. The helpline was open for 48 hours, during which it was swamped with calls, mainly from children suffering sexual abuse they had never been able to disclose to anyone else. This gave Rantzen the idea for a specific helpline for children in distress or danger, to be open 24/7 throughout the year, the first of its kind in the world. The Childwatch team consulted child care professionals, who agreed that children would use such a helpline, but said it would be impossible to create. Nevertheless, the team obtained funding from the Department of Health and the Variety Club of Great Britain, both of which donated £25,000. Ian Skipper OBE, a noted philanthropist who had already helped Rantzen set up a special fund in memory of Ben Hardwick, agreed to underwrite the helpline's running costs for the first year. Rantzen and the team went to BT to ask for premises for the charity and for a simple freephone number, both of which were provided.
The Childwatch programme screened on 30 October 1986 and based on the results of the survey, launched Childline with a specially written jingle (by B. A. Robertson) which featured the free phone number 0800 1111. On that first night in October 1986, fifty thousand attempted calls were made to the helpline. Childline now has twelve bases around the UK, including two in Northern Ireland, two in Scotland and two in Wales, plus a virtual on-line base. Childline merged with the NSPCC in 2006, enabling it to expand in an effort to meet demand. The helpline has now been copied in 150 countries.
The Silver Line
In 2013, Rantzen set up The Silver Line, a charity to benefit elderly people, by combating isolation and loneliness, to provide information and advice and to offer a free confidential helpline. In addition, The Silver Line offers a telephone befriending service, in which trained volunteers make regular weekly calls to older people. It merged with Age UK in October 2019.
Later career
In 1988, Rantzen created a BBC One television series called Hearts of Gold, celebrating people who had performed unsung acts of outstanding kindness or courage.
After That's Life! finished its 21-year run in 1994, Rantzen presented her own talk show, Esther, on BBC Two from 1994 to 2002. In 2004, Rantzen was a contestant on the second series of the BBC celebrity dance competition Strictly Come Dancing. She was paired with Anton Du Beke, and they were the third couple to be eliminated.
In 2006, Rantzen took part in the BBC Two programmes Would Like to Meet and Excuse My French, and was selected to present a new consumer affairs show with former Watchdog presenter Lynn Faulds Wood, under the title Old Dogs New Tricks. She made a documentary for ITV, called Winton's Children about Sir Nicholas Winton, who (as was first revealed on That's Life!) had rescued a generation of Czech children from The Holocaust and was later nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Following the death of Rantzen's husband, film-maker Desmond Wilcox, she made a landmark programme on palliative care, How to Have a Good Death, for BBC Two. She campaigned on behalf of hospice care and better care for the elderly and terminally ill, and also campaigned to raise awareness of ME/CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), as her elder daughter has suffered from the condition. She created the 'Children of Courage' segment for the BBC's Children in Need programme, and the series The Big Time which discovered singer Sheena Easton.
In 2016, Rantzen was made an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, University of Oxford.
In addition to her television career, as a patron or vice-president of 55 charities, Rantzen mainly concentrated on working for children, vulnerable older people and disabled people. Much of her voluntary effort was for Childline as a volunteer counsellor on the helpline, and as a fund-raiser and spokesperson for children, and latterly working to set up The Silver Line, the new helpline for isolated and vulnerable older people. Childline currently has 12 centres around the UK, plus one virtual on-line base,1,500 volunteer counsellors and answers around a million calls and on-line contacts from children each year. Rantzen chaired Childline's board of trustees for twenty years, and since Childline merged with the NSPCC in 2006, she served as a Trustee of the NSPCC, as well as being President of Childline. In 2013, she also became the vice-president of Revitalise, a charity providing those with disabilities, and their careers, with short breaks and holidays.
Rantzen appeared in the 2008 series of ITV show I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!, and was the fifth celebrity to leave the camp.
In 2016, Rantzen was in the first episode of Celebrity First Dates.
In 2018, Rantzen presented a new Channel 5 consumer advice show called Esther Rantzen's House Trap, a 4-part series similar to BBC's long-running Watchdog programme, with hidden cameras trying to trap rogue traders in the homes of a number of undercover actors. Unlike Watchdog, these actors were all people of an advanced age with each episode focusing on a different trade, such as locksmiths, where older people were likely to being preyed upon.
Political career