Fearne Cotton - The Biography. Nigel Goodall
mum had great style as a young woman and I take a lot of inspiration from photos of her during the seventies. As a kid, I’d always go into my mum’s cupboard, dress up in this big purple silk robe and walk around the house pretending that I was a queen – so not much has changed!’
Fearne’s younger brother Jamie, born two years after she arrived in the world, is quite the opposite to what one might expect. He is, she explains, ‘like my dad – very shy, very chilled, doesn’t say boo to a goose and doesn’t give a crap what I do!’ Rather than follow his sister into showbiz, Jamie chose to study for a degree in marketing. He’s not at all like his sister, who from an early age loved to dress up, perform and be the centre of attention, but why should he be?
Even if Fearne had been regarded as a hippie kid on the block, there is no evidence to suggest she was an outcast or ostracised because of it. And let’s face it, if you were a hippie in the early- to mid-1990s this would be a definite no-no at school. Imagine it: had she been a hippie, she would have almost certainly been considered wild, weird and anti-social at the time, and by all accounts, she was none of those things. Certainly she was never bullied or battered, either as a youngster or in her adult life, and probably the worst thing that ever happened to her at school was being called ‘Fearne-tree’ or ‘Fearne-iture’ – the nicknames the other pupils bestowed on her.
Neither did she go through the same kind of nightmare as, say, actress Winona Ryder did, who was far more of a ‘hippie kid on the block’ than wannabe hippie Fearne ever was. It happened when a group of fellow students decided to single Winona out on her third day in the seventh grade. Seen as an effeminate boy, the incident occurred in the hallway of her new school in between classes, when some of her fellow students decided to pounce. ‘A group of guys hit me in the stomach and banged my head into a locker, so I got stitches,’ Winona recalls. ‘They were calling me faggot and I was like,“but wait – I am a girl!” But they didn’t believe me.’
Fearne never went through such an ordeal. So, isn’t it interesting to ponder that the only struggle she appears to have had to get where she is now, despite the fact that her grandfather’s cousin is Sir Billy Cotton, former controller of BBC Light Entertainment – who might have made things very easy for her, but didn’t – was to give up some of the things she felt she didn’t need? One of those, she admits, was going without long student lie-ins, which she describes as ‘a teeny-weeny sacrifice’.
Of course, even if she had wanted to do so, there was no real opportunity to hook up with the graduate crowd of the 1980s who were experiencing the throwback of writer and psychologist Timothy Leary’s ‘tune in, turn on and drop out’ era. It was, after all, a decade that kicked off the 1960s’ counterculture rebellion long before it was fashionable to be a societal renegade, a time when free thinking, free love and free drugs were the buzzwords of a generation.
Leary himself, of course, was a key figure of that period. Kicked out of West Point Military Academy and dismissed from Harvard as well, his adventures with hallucinogenic drugs earned him notoriety and jail time but he never repented. Even in his mid-seventies, several years before his death, he believed, ‘Psychoactive brain-activating drugs are the most powerful tools humanity has for operating your mind, your brain, developing new language, building upon communications, new cultures and subcultures.’
Like a messiah attracting followers of his teachings, Leary (Winona Ryder’s godfather, incidentally) was a true visionary. Bound up in those visions was the dream of change, enfranchisement and a new dawn of freedom that flavoured the 1960s even as America became more and more deeply mired in the Vietnam War.
‘The long history of psychedelic drugs,’ Leary taught, ‘has always been associated with shamanism, mysticism, art, poetry, free sexuality, acceptance of the body, an ecological sense of the oneness of all things. This runs through Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, Greek humanism … There was an enormous drug influence on the French Revolution, on Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, Thoreau … It’s a tradition.’
It was, of course, almost ironic that early into the decade that followed, marijuana became the dope of childhood; older kids made their way through school on amphetamines, Quaaludes and liquor. But this certainly wasn’t the kind of surroundings that Fearne endured as her own ambitions began to take shape.
Instead she became driven, dedicated and disciplined in all that she did and what she wanted to achieve under her own steam. Rather than worry about missing relaxations such as student lie-ins and leisure pursuits, she decided to balance her presenting jobs by studying for an A level in art at college in north-west London, where she grew up and had her first job working for her grandfather.
‘He owned a flower shop and put me in charge of cleaning flower pots, a role I hated because the pots stank of rotten eggs. I worked in the shop on Saturdays and got paid about £20, which I usually spent on CDs. Granddad was quite strict and told me off quite a lot, mostly for sweeping up plants and soil in the wrong direction, which made the shop look a mess. But I could get away with being a bit cheeky and he was a joker, always having a laugh with the customers and mucking around,’ she recalls.
Not so good was ‘the really embarrassing photo of me, my brother Jamie and my cousin Biba when we were about six, four and two. It showed us all naked in the garden and it was placed above the shop counter. We used to beg him to take it down as all our friends walked past the shop on the way to school. But he thought it was hilarious and would point it out to my mates.
‘The good things about working in the shop included hanging out with my aunt Karen and getting a lift home by car. I also got free flowers to give to my mum and learnt how to do arty stuff like arrange a lovely bunch of flowers. But I only lasted three weeks at the shop; I left after I saw an ad in the paper about a new weekend drama school – I felt it would be a better way to fill my weekends. My granddad was very understanding. I think he was glad to get a new Saturday girl who was a bit more enthusiastic!’
Compared to working in her grandfather’s flower shop, school for Fearne was a similarly uninspiring experience and she grew to dislike most things about Haydon School in Northwood Hills in Eastcote village, not far from where she lived. She just didn’t like it. Not that there was anything necessarily wrong with the school, but perhaps from her point of view it was simply an inconvenience compared to what she really wanted to do. And perhaps she was right when you consider that the school is now a language college, and probably nothing like it was when she attended.
All the same, like most of us at one time or another she still had her favourite teacher. His name was Mr Iggulden and he taught English, Fearne remembers: ‘It’s funny because English wasn’t one of my favourite subjects to start with; I was really terrible at it. I was about the level of a D when I started, but Mr Iggulden got me to an A in my GCSE. I remember one specific lesson where we all went in and he brought up something quite controversial: it was something about sexism and women. He knew there were some mouthy girls in the class – especially me – and we all started to have an argument. The discussion lasted for almost the full hour and someone said, “Sir, aren’t we going to do any work?” And he said, “That was your oral exam.” It was a really good way to go about it – it got everyone involved.
‘On top of that,’ she continues, ‘he was young, cool and funky. We argued a bit because I was a bit cocky but we were still friends. I always wanted to impress him, even if I did mess about a bit. I was amazed when I got my A. I was a terrible speller, but Mr Iggulden knew I was really into poetry and played to my strengths. Now I’m an avid reader – I usually have about three books on the go.
‘He’s an author now. He wrote a book called The Gates of Rome about Julius Caesar. I saw him again recently and he said, “Well done” to me for proving him wrong because he always told me I’d need my school work as a back-up in case my career didn’t work out. I did drama outside school from the age of about twelve, every night and every weekend. I loved it; it was an escape from routines, which I hate. I did loads of auditions. I was working during my GCSEs and I did more and more after that. I did one A level in art. I went to the university of life and TV presenting.’
Interestingly enough, Iggulden is only