Tamra May

“I fear boredom,” says ITVs This Morning Agony Aunt, Denise Robertson. She explains how every night before bed she writes a list of things she has to do the next day. She has five media jobs, is a patron for 47 charities, a grandmother to eight and a great grandmother to four so she is always busy. “I would like to wake up one day and just think, what shall I do today? Because I don’t ever,” She explains, now aged 81 and still on This Morning. 

 

She has now been on the show for 26 years although she did not plan to be one; it was through force of circumstance. As her family were struggling financially and This Morning offered her a sum of money she could not refuse. “I only ever wanted to be a writer,” she said because when she first started as a writer she wanted to be paid weekly as she only got paid every six months from the BBC.
 
After her husband died of terminal cancer, she eventually re-married and had four stepchildren, which meant all seven people were living off her income. She then began to write about things that had happened to her, her first story was about being a young widow. After that, readers began writing to her and she became an Agony Aunt.
 
“You can feel very sorry for yourself until you find out what has happened to another person and then all of a sudden you think I’m not as unlucky as I thought I was,” she said because people seem to think being an Agony aunt is depressing.
 
In 1976 she had an Agony aunt column over the air and it was successful, she said: “People who weren’t able to talk about things were able to talk to someone on the radio.” She explained how it was not always easy, “One day a woman rang who was in the process of committing suicide and I had to try and talk her out of it while we tried to find out where she was and I remember when it was over and sitting in the car not having the strength to drive home wondering if I’d done the right thing because who am I to stop someone from dying if they wanted to die?” However the woman did write in ten days later and thanked Robertson for her help. However Denise made her life change when she agreed to be an Agony Aunt on This Morning in 1988 for six months but ended up staying for 26 years.
 
She said she does not want to host her own show, she is happy on This Morning and letters have risen by 135%, she commented about her readers: “If they don’t think I’m out of touch, why should I?”