I’m a Celebrity star Carol Vorderman says she’s a ‘menopausal mama’ who is finally living the life she always wanted
IF ever there was a statement that screamed mid-life crisis, it must be: “I’m quitting my job to fly solo around the world.”
Together with dating a toyboy, suspiciously youthful looks and outfits more suited to women half her age, Carol Vorderman seemed to be having the classic fifty-something meltdown.
Now the 55-year-old is heading into I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here!, where she certainly will not shy away from competing against the younger girls in camp.
She describes herself as a “menopausal mama” with a desire for adventure.
But perhaps this new thirst for life stems from a grim warning her mum Jean has issued over the years.
Carol said earlier this year: “My mother always told me that from 50 it was downhill. I absolutely don’t agree.
“I’m finally living the life I’ve always wanted and loving every second. I’m living the dream.”
Two years ago, Carol announced she was quitting her regular slot on ITV daytime show Loose Women to fly solo around the world.
Taking in 29,000 miles over three months, it was a plan that might have sounded bonkers for most people — but the former Countdown queen is not most people.
Despite her epic trip, which was scheduled for the summer, being postponed to next year to allow her plane to be modified, Carol has spent her life battling against the norm to reach her goals.
Her best friend of 12 years, author Amanda Prowse, said: “When she got into university, most girls didn’t go to university."
Dancing on tables in the early hours
“She’s always worked in a male-dominated environment of engineering and maths, and had to push herself. She is hard as nails.”
As a nine-year-old growing up in Prestatyn, Carol watched Concorde’s debut flight on the news and decided she would become a pilot.
At Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where she graduated with a third-class honours degree in engineering, she hoped to join the Junior Air Squadron, only to be turned down for being a woman.
Carol recalled: “I knocked on the door but they wouldn’t let me in because I was a girl. It was 1978 and it wasn’t until the Nineties that it changed.”
Her dream was only realised when she trained to be a pilot aged 50, having finally got the time and money to do it.
Amanda, 48, met fellow mum Carol on the school run and said of her friend: “Flying has given her so much confidence. The fact she has conquered it has made her think, ‘I can do anything’.
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“Going into the jungle is in the same vein, it’s adventurous and it’s challenging herself to do something that gets your heart racing.
“She has always loved the show and the time is right. Her diary has always been chock-full before and now it’s a case of ‘why not?’”
Despite the rumoured six-figure fee she will be banking from her stint on the ITV reality show, Carol certainly does not need to do it for the money, or self-promotion.
She describes herself as “semi-retired,” and once said: “I’ve earned a lot of money, so I don’t have to work.”
Amanda, who has occasionally lived in Carol’s Bristol home when her Army husband has been on tour, explained: “For the first time in her life, her children are older and her time’s more her own and that’s given her the freedom to follow her heart.
“I’ve never known anyone work as hard as Carol has. She’s such a professional and goes crazy working on the detail of whatever she’s involved in.
“She’s flying the flag for women over 50. If she’s not dancing on tables in the early hours then she’s out hiking around the world.
“I’ve got so much admiration for her. She’s certainly not going to put her slippers on and start knitting.”
From a young age, Carol understood the value of money. Her Dutch father, Tony, deserted her when she was 20 days old, leaving Jean to raise Carol and her big brother and sister alone.
Even when Jean remarried, Carol could see what financial independence meant. She said: “My mother was very dependent financially on her husband. I knew that I didn’t want that. That’s been a driving force.
“She kept leaving my stepfather and we’d be back sharing a grotty room in a B&B. My motivation was that I would work hard, so no one could take the roof from over my head.”
It was Jean who sent off Carol’s application for a job on a new Channel 4 game show in 1982 called Countdown, something which would turn her into an instant celebrity and the thinking man’s crumpet for an incredible 26 years.
She quit in 2008 when she was asked to take a 90 per cent pay cut on a salary thought to be in the region of £900,000.
Since then, she has launched an online maths school, as well as several detox books, which sell around one million copies in total a year.
The latest estimate puts her overall worth at £18million.
Married twice — although she insists the first, to Christopher Mather in 1985, “doesn’t count” as it only lasted a year — Carol has two children, Katie, 24, and Cameron, 19, from her ten-year marriage to Patrick King.
Her kids “think it’s hilarious I’m going into the jungle,” she said earlier this week.
While Katie is studying for a PhD at Cambridge, and made it into the University Air Squadron having learned to fly at the same time as her mum, Cameron is at home with Carol.
So too is Jean, 88, who has fought cancer three times and has spent most of her life living with her daughter.
Most recently, the presenter dated Red Arrows pilot Graham Duff, 14 years her junior.
It’s like having a new lover
They split in 2015 after four years together, and she has since admitted the age gap was “a bit silly”.
In fact, she claims flying is the only relationship she needs, saying: “It’s like having a new lover.
It’s so exciting. It has brought this whole new world to me, of people, of things to do, of adventures.”
It remains to be seen whether Carol will take on the younger camp-mates, such as Lisa Snowdon and Ola Jordan, in the traditional bikini shower scene in Australia. There is no doubting she looks fantastic for her years, yet some might say a little too fantastic — although Carol has never admitted or denied having surgery.
She once suggested being open to “fixing the things that need fixing”, but when spotted in 2012 after a four-hour appointment at a well-known cosmetic clinic in London, her spokesman said the star was merely enjoying a facial.
She puts her youthful, slender figure down to regular detox dieting, vitamin supplements and spending more time on her beauty regime.
Carol was one of the first to pioneer regular detoxing — omitting dairy, wheat, meat, caffeine and alcohol from the diet and instead eating lots of fruit and vegetables — yet when her first book, Detox For Life, came out in 2001, she was dismissed as a crank.
She hails X Factor judge Nicole Scherzinger and actresses Christie Brinkley and Sophia Loren as her style icons, as well as Victoria Beckham, whose designs she has worn several times.
In the past, she has been accused of dressing too young but even then Carol joked: “If you type ‘muttton dressed as lamb’ into Google, I’m the first ten pages.”
She’s been through the full catalogue of hairstyles since she first found fame and she is the only celebrity to be named Rear of the Year twice — both in her fifties.
Amanda insisted her pal would not miss her make-up and designer clothes in the jungle.
Carol reckons she will be the camp’s “mother” figure, although her 30-year-old camp-mate, Skins actor Joel Dommett, said he was hoping to impress her with his maths skills.
Amanda added: “Carol is so stunningly beautiful and very sexy. I think everyone finds her attractive but mainly because she’s a nice person. She’s the full package, she’s warm, funny, kind and her best quality is she finds joy in other people’s good fortune.
“She’s going to do brilliantly because she’s also very tough.”
How the years worked out
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