I love wearing sexy knickers for my man & we’ve had more sex than ever in lockdown, says Vanessa Feltz
IT’S a typical evening for loved-up Vanessa Feltz, sitting back in her lingerie while naked Ben Ofoedu prepares the dinner.
The outspoken TV and radio presenter’s libido is thriving, and the 59-year-old says she still loves to hit the sheets with Ben, 48, former vocalist with nineties dance music duo Phats & Small.
In fact the pair, who have been together for nearly 15 years, have taken full advantage of lockdown.
Vanessa says: “Age is not an issue for me. You have to keep the climate going, and we both feel an obligation to make an effort.
“I am no stranger to slinky lingerie. My father Norman was in the business himself — he made and sold them.
“It is my duty to have saucy knickers and all that, so I’ll wear them and do something special.
“And Ben will do a bit of cooking wearing nothing but a chef’s apron, or something like that. We just try to make it more fun.
“We want our relationship to be good, we don’t want it to subside and fall apart and become stagnant, boring and dreary.
“We send each other saucy messages so that it doesn’t all just subside into ‘Have you taken the bins out?’ or ‘Do you want a baked potato?’.”
Vanessa is one of the BBC’s highest-earning presenters. She hosts Radio 2’s early breakfast show at 4am followed by Radio London at 7am every weekday.
While almost half of couples isolating together are having less sex in lockdown, according to a survey by onbuy.com, being cooped up alone in the house together has had the opposite effect on Ben and Vanessa.
She says: “It is not like we’re doing anything else at the moment, so what the hell are we going to do if we’re not doing that?
"Also, we haven’t got kids at home any more, so we really can do it whenever we want to.
“We don’t have to ask for anyone’s permission if we want to do whatever we want, in any room that we feel like doing it in, in any position we want to do it in, at any time of the day. And that is quite a nice feeling.”
As for turn-ons, Vanessa, who is an agony aunt on ITV’s This Morning, says: “If you can’t think of anything except for dealing with that damp patch on the ceiling, then watch Bridgerton and you’ll think, ‘Hang on a minute’.
“I don’t like 50 Shades, it is not my thing, I don’t like anything that hurts. But something sexy that does turn you on, then that is worth watching.
“Anything that gets you smooching and hand-holding, or nibbling on each other’s earlobe, rather than just staring at your phone is important to try with each other, even if you are not 100 per cent in the mood.”
Vanessa was married to surgeon Michael Kurer for more than 14 years and they had daughters Allegra, now 35, and Saskia, 32.
He left her for another woman and they divorced in 1999.
In 2001, Vanessa went on Celebrity Big Brother, where she met Boyzone’s Keith Duffy, who later introduced her to Ben, 11 years her junior.
She says: “We became pals and went on a few dates. Every time I met him, he’d say to me almost straight away, ‘Tomorrow night, babe? At seven?’
“And I’d think, ‘Oh thank God’. I loved that there was no game-playing.
"That’s the reason I fell in love with him. We finally got together at the very end of 2006.
“I’d had this horrible divorce and I was really broken-hearted. That’s why I think me and Ben just try hard with each other.”
Accepting some people were sceptical about the relationship, she says: “Whatever I do, Ben remains ten years younger than me, which I think is disgraceful. It is just so bloody annoying.
“But the thing is, he looks so f***ing young. When we first met we had nothing in common, we were the most unlikely couple.
“Nobody thought we’d last, even us. People said, ‘How can this possibly work?
";She is with that young guy — she must be with him for sex’, or whatever they thought it was.”
And Vanessa says there was an incident when a fellow presenter made a comment about how she attracts “big black boyfriends”, which she called out at the time.
She says: “I certainly have never chosen a lover or a partner because of their race.
“And he didn’t choose me because I am small and Jewish.
“We are both from ethnic minorities, we both know what it’s like to experience racism.”
Vanessa is saddened that Meghan and Prince Harry said this week they did not always feel welcome in this country.
She says: “I don’t think it is for me to say whether Meghan did or didn’t feel racism.
"I don’t think you can tell somebody black or bi-racial whether they should or shouldn’t feel as if anyone is being racist towards them.
"I wouldn’t dream of insulting her like that.
“But I’m sad she felt that she wasn’t supported here. I think this is a country where you can be happy, and very welcome.
“And I say this as a Jewish woman in a relationship with a black man of Nigerian origin.
“We don’t feel as if we run the gamut of racism every day, we really don’t, we feel welcome and accepted as part of the country, in every possible way.
"Both of us were born here, this is our home, this is our land, for God’s sake.”
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Vanessa and Ben have been engaged since 2006 but she is not in a rush to rock the boat by tying the knot.
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She says: “All I know is that we have been together for nearly 15 years, and we have been to so many weddings in that time, and so many of them are already divorced.
“And I just think, ‘Do we really need it, do we really want it?’. But I would never say never.”
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