Former This Morning host Fern Britton has told woman&home how she swerves news stories about child suffering because they cause her too much distress.
Asked when she feels the most vulnerable, the 67-year-old mum of four said, "Whenever I see children suffering in these wars and awful cases [of] parental cruelty. I can't deal with it, so I can't watch any of that," she explains.
"When people say, ‘Read this book. You'll have a really good cry’. No, no, thank you.
"Remember a year or two ago, and people were coming over on the boats and a little two-year-old was on the beach, drowned? You think, ‘what is going on in this world?’"
Fern, who is mum to Winnie, 23 - her daughter with her ex husband, TV chef Phil Vickery - daughter Grace, 27, and twin sons Harry and Jack, 31, added that she eschewed Netflix’s four-parter Adolescence, starring actor Stephen Graham, which follows the family of a 13-year-old schoolboy who is imprisoned for stabbing to death a female classmate.
Since its premiere on 13 March, the programme has amassed more than 124m views and was dubbed “a wake-up call” to parents after exposing the toxic side of teenagers' lives online, the ready availability of sexually explicit and dark material, as well as its power to influence youngsters, especially boys.
"I’ve been reading about Netflix's Adolescence and I don’t think I can bear to watch it,” explains Fern.
"I am told that it is written and performed very well and that it has a very important message, but I will have to steel myself to sit down and see it. The fact that people are saying, parents have got to watch this, I think, ‘What is happening?’."
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Referencing Andrew Tate - the controversial online influencer who is mentioned by name in the drama and is facing a 2027 civil trial accused by four women of rape, sexual assault, coercive control, plus threats of violence - Fern voiced her despair over the presence of extreme misogyny in wider society.
“This whole sexual revolution, the Andrew Tate stuff, and that women are now being throttled while they're having sex, as a matter of course… I was listening to something the other day, and men were talking about what it’s like to be a man nowadays and how feminism has done such a lot for women, and I was thinking, ‘But hang on a minute. We are still being raped and murdered. Nothing has changed,” she says, adding that the current state of the world is a worry.
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"This is the worst tension in my lifetime that I've felt. You look back to the 1970s, 80s, and 90s and it all seems so simple, so innocent and naive because we didn't have phones, computers, Wi Fi, social media.
"Suddenly, within a few months, the world has been taken over by some very spurious people who've put the world in chaos, and it’s terrifying.”
Read Fern’s full exclusive interview with woman&home in the July issue of the magazine, on shelves from 29th May.
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