Fern Britton quits This Morning over pay

Yet again a female celebrity in the public eye finds she is worth less to the moneymakers than a male. Latest victim of this scourge, Fern Britton has fallen out with her ITV co-presenter on “This Morning” as well as the show’s bosses. After ten years as a presenter on the show, Ms Britton’s relationship with ITV suffered after she discovered that Schofield was getting a fee three times as high as hers for the ‘Celebrity Mr & Mrs’ show. The figures seem high to the rest of us, but where she was paid £15000 per show, he was getting £45000! Nobody would justify such a huge differential in the real world for the same job, and it is no less wrong in showbiz.

The relationship between the two ‘This Morning’ presenters also suffered over the Gastric Band affair last year. Fern at first denied using the procedure, and insisted she had lost weight through diet and exercise alone. The trouble was, Phillip Schofield was not in on the secret, and he felt embarrassed at being tricked into her deception. The weight loss seems to have boosted Britton’s confidence enough to quit the show rather than accepting second-class treatment, though she will carry on with ‘Celebrity Mr & Mrs’ for the time being.

So she will no longer spend every weekday morning on the sofa, which should help keep her weight down. She needs to stay trim in my view, as her celebrity chef husband Phil Vickery (pictured together, below) is pretty tasty. You would not want his eye to wander, Fern – it happens to celebrity chefs all too often.

Tana Ramsay is an elegant shapely celebrity in her own right, but that did not stop husband Gordon behaving badly. Then look at the case of John Burton Race, who dumped his second wife, Kim Dendle, for a younger model after he fathered a love child with secretary Susan Ward. Both Burton Race and his second wife had experience with infidelity – they left their spouses after meeting at a friend’s birthday party in the Caribbean. Kim’s first husband is happily remarried to a very nice woman called Julia and now lives down here in Sussex.

Fern Britton and Phil Vickery have both been married before. Fern’s former husband, millionaire Clive Jones is the former ITV chief executive of news and regions, and they have three children from their 12-year marriage  – twins Jack and Harry, now 15, and daughter Grace, 12.  She met Phil while she was presenting ‘Ready Steady Cook’ in 1994, and they married six years later.  They have a daughter, Winnie, now aged eight. Phil has no children from his first marriage.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 1:01 pm and is filed under celebrity gossip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.