‘At least once a week, I ask myself, how could I make money without being in the public eye? But I’ve never done it, so I don’t know what to do.’
Fearne Cotton has been on television since she was 15 years old. Her equivalent of a paper round was being the face of GMTV’s The Disney Club, which eventually became Diggit.
It wasn’t long before she became one of the most recognisable faces on British television, inescapable for the next 20 years, before she’d had enough of being told she was ‘annoying’ over and over again by a British public getting a strange kick from beating a successful woman down.
Since stepping back from the merciless world of television at 44 years old, after life has come at her hard, she’s channelling her energy into expanding her wellness brand, Happy Place. We’re speaking before the second wave of announcements for her bi-annual Happy Place festival is due to be released.
In Old Deer Park, London, on July 11 and 12, and then in Cheshire on September 5 and 6, Cotton invites an eclectic mix of famous faces who have become established voices in the mental health and wellbeing space to give talks and host live podcasts, while guests pick and mix from a menu of activities that, as the title suggests, make them happy. Ruby Wax, Tom Reed Wilson and Jordan Stephens are among the names on the bill for 2026.
‘The premise is that you get to come and do whatever wellness means to you, we don’t want to be prescriptive – if you hate yoga, if you’ve never meditated, you don’t have to do it there.
‘There’s something for everybody, whether it’s shopping, a great talk, a podcast, a workout, eating great food, lying on a bean bag in the sun, whatever you want it to be, but it’s a chance to ditch your real life for a day and just have you time,’ Fearne tells me.
‘I’ve done the crazy s**t, I’ve got that out my system. My nervous system needs something different these days,’ she says. And she’s not alone. This will be her sixth year of hosting Happy Place festivals. By the end of the year she will have hosted 12 of them.
‘We’ve learned who our Happy Place audience are and it was the festival that my audience were really wanting. Some of the audience will love going out to a big music festival, but for some of them, that’s their worst nightmare.
‘I’ve done the crazy s**t’
‘They don’t want to be in big crowds, they don’t want to be drinking loads of booze, and this is the opportunity to kind of go to a festival and leave feeling better than when you arrived.’
The festival was inspired by Fearne’s hugely successful podcast, the aptly titled Happy Place. Guests candidly discuss their own relationships with mental health, the parameters they’ve put in place to bring joy into their life and keep out the dark.
After two decades of being bullied by viewers and hounded by tabloids, Fearne has taken control of her narrative.
Career aside, in the last two years alone, she’s separated from her husband Jesse Wood, father of their two children, and had two tumours removed.
On the pod, she’s refreshingly frank and honest about her own life, somewhat of an oracle when it comes to building resilience.
‘Without sounding too dramatic, the podcast changed my life,’ she says.
‘Before I was beholden to what anybody wanted to write about me or have a pop at me online or in the papers, and you couldn’t really retaliate or defend yourself unless you wanted to make it bigger.’
Her latest best-selling book, Likeable: How I Broke Free From The Need To Please, was released earlier this year. In it, she reflects on how her addiction to other people’s approval had a seismic impact on her mental and physical health.
‘The podcast saved my life’
‘I’m not saying that every single mental and physical issue I’ve had is down to people pleasing, but it’s definitely contributed to everything from very low self-esteem and poor mental health.
‘I had bulimia, and I had OCD at one point, I’m not saying that that’s entirely down to people pleasing, but I do think part of it was just trying to keep everybody happy, totally neglecting myself, as many of us do.’
Inevitably, she had to make a radical change, starting with the relationship with her job. ‘I don’t want to push myself for the sake of it now. I don’t have those desires like I did in my 20s, like I must be the biggest and the best TV presenter ever.’
I ask if the competitive nature of the TV industry was among the hardest challenges. ‘You’re pitted against your mates, and it’s really wild. You’d be put up for jobs against some of your greatest friends, and you lose out to them or sometimes you get it, and they don’t.
‘It is a competitive industry, but I’m not really in it anymore; I don’t play that game. I’m not thick-skinned at all, so I can’t put myself up for those kinds of jobs anymore.’
She is, however, making a tentative return to screens, co-hosting Landscape Artist of The Year alongside Stephen Mangan. ‘There are parts of my old career that just broke me so I wondered, “Do I want to go back to all of that and feel like that again?”
‘It’s is scary stepping back into it, and I’m sure there’ll be fans of the pre-existing show that will go, “I would prefer it to be Stephen on his own”, I’m sure that will happen, but I’m going to give it my best shot.’
‘I wish I knew I was good enough as I was’
During our chat, the emotional scars of her time on television are still so clear. She wasn’t always scrutinised to a degree that is far beyond what is natural, even possible, for a single human to endure.
Presenting children’s television, she was arguably in her comfort zone. She could be naturally a bit goofy, but her vivacious enthusiasm found the perfect home on kids’ TV.
But by the time she was reaching 20, Top of The Pops came calling, and suddenly she was a big fish in a tiny pool of TV presenters such as the more ‘hip’ MTV crowd, her close friend Holly Willoughby, Emma Willis and Ant and Dec.
‘I wish I knew I was good enough as I was,’ she says. ‘I didn’t question that until I got to about 19 or 20 when I started doing more adult stuff, like Top of the Pops and other more mainstream TV.
‘Before that, I was just me, a bit geeky, I was just giving it my all, and then I think I got to start doing the “cool TV”, and I was like, “Oh God, I am not cool, I have no edge, and I just come from a random suburb.” I just felt very uninteresting and that started to slightly eat away at me from that point onwards.’
‘I dyed my hair black, red, ginger, yellow, pink. I was just doing all the cliche things, and I think that’s fun; it doesn’t have to be a totally serious thing, but then, equally, later down the line, my mental health was impacted badly, and that’s a bit more serious. I was on antidepressants, I was having a pretty tough time. I certainly lost a sense of who I was at that point.’
I wonder if, at the time, there was anyone looking out for her, a mentor who could take her under their wing. ‘I am still firmly under Davina McCall’s wing.
I could literally cry talking about Davina,’ she smiles, looking away as she is clearly running through countless memories of moments when the Big Brother presenter, with a similarly high energy, has been there for her.
But they had to be there for each other in 2024 when, under a hideous coincidence, they both had tumours removed. Davina had brain surgery to remove a cyst. Weeks later Fearne had two tumors removed from her jawline and parotid gland.
‘I had seen her a few months before her operation, and she told me about it. I was like, “crikey, what the f**k.” Then I literally rang her four weeks later and went, “You will not believe it, but I’ve got to have a bloody tumour removed as well.”
‘Davina is a bl**dy angel’
‘It was another opportunity to bond, and even through other personal stuff going on that we both experienced, we’ve just chatted relentlessly on the phone about all sorts of things, and she is just so generous with her time, but also she’s so calm and grounded, and she’s just the most amazing person. She’s like a bl**dy angel, it has brought us a lot closer.’
It’s coming up to 30 years since Fearne first appeared on television and barely left it until it became too much. Now, with her podcast, festival and a best-selling book, she’s exactly where she was meant to be. A long and difficult road, but one that’s led her to the right place.
At this stage of her life and career, what does she care about more than ever before? ‘Genuine connection with the people I love, eyeballing them, chatting to them, and painting. And to care less what people think. It’s a lifelong quest, and I’m not there yet.’
Happy Place festival runs July 11-12 in London’s Old Deer Park and returns September 5 and 6 at Tatton Park, Cheshire. Tickets are available now.
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