Picture: Jenni Falconer/ Smooth
The Glasgow born presenter, who celebrated her fiftieth with her brother jetting in from South Africa and parents arriving from Glasgow for a get together in London this weekend, says she’s more excited than ever that life and her career are far from slowing down.
Jenni explained: “Because you spend all your years dreading 30 and 40, and now turning 50. I'm not fearful of that kind of new chapter In fact, it's almost like I feel more empowered now.”
“Previously, you'd go and work out, and you'd really look after yourself, and everyone would see it as vanity, I feel like it's all longevity now, and everything's changed.”
She added: “I'm enjoying the age I am. I'm more confident than ever, and along the way, you can have zones and times of life where you feel confident, and then when you lack it massively, and now I think I'm very relaxed, I feel confident, I'm pleased with what I've achieved, and I just kind of want to keep going, and so yeah, it's a good age to be.”
Jenni, who got her big break on Blind Date and hosted shows like The Big Country on BBC Scotland before carving out a career in radio, says the biggest lesson she’s learned in 50 years is to stop comparing herself to others.
She said: “Years ago, when you start out, you are looking at everyone else, and that phrase ‘comparison is the thief of joy’, which is absolutely true.
“There is space for everyone everywhere. You've just got to find what suits you.”
It’s a message she’s trying to pass on to her own daughter Ella, who’s just chosen her GCSE subjects and, has no idea what she wants to do.
Jenni, who is normally notoriously private about her family life with actor husband James Midgley revealed: “We're just discussing, my daughter has just chosen her GCSE subjects, and she doesn't know what she wants to do in life, and I'm like, ‘Well, lots of people don't know what they want to do in life’.”
“I didn't even discover that I loved radio until I was in my 30’s, and now that's pretty much the main thing that I do for work on a day to day basis, and I absolutely love it, but until my 30’s, I'd never ever done anything in radio.
“So yeah, you can learn and you can find out more about yourself all the time, and turning 50, I feel that there's still probably a lot of things that I've yet to try and yet to learn, and I'm quite excited about it.”
Jenni admits presenting was never her first career choice.
She said: “I had no intentions of being in television. I actually always wanted to be an architect.
And there was a bit of a recession going on, and everyone had said, you won't get much work if you're an architect. So all the subjects I'd chosen, which would have geared me towards being an architect, I kind of had to reassess.
“And I thought, okay, I'll study languages and see where it takes me. And I was all set to go to university. Just done my A-levels.”
A chance phone call changed everything.
She explained: “I'd gone through all the auditions, and I got the call to say, ‘We're going to film Blind Date’. So I'd literally just finished my A-levels, been on a two week p*** up to Tenerife with my friends, and off I went to film Blind Date. And I just suddenly went, ‘Wow, this is amazing’.”
Jenni admits she got a very glamorous first impression of the industry.
She laughed: “I got a really kind of warped sense of what television is like, because I am there on a show with Cilla Black. I was a picker, so I was guaranteed to go on the whole experience. We went on a trip to France. We filmed sports and activities, which is absolutely what I love doing. We were filming with an amazing crew who actually, in the last thirty odd years since I filmed Blind Date, I have run into many of them several times. They still work in the industry and I just loved it.
“They sold me a really good idea of television.”
Back then, the scale of Saturday night TV was enormous.
She recalls: “There were like 20 million viewers on Saturday night. It was an incredible experience. So I turned around and I said, ‘I'd really like to do this for a living’. And how they laughed.”
But she was determined and that Blind Date appearance led directly to a break in broadcasting.
She told Gaby Roslin’s podcast: “I got offered an opportunity to go into work experience at BBC Leeds, where I was at uni. And so I said, ‘Okay, I'll do it if you can give me kind of a little interview on air and let me try things out on air.’ And they went, ‘Okay, you can do this.’ And then I did an interview on air and a producer from Scotland heard me. And then I got an audition.”
The rest as they say is history, but Jenni admits that the industry is almost unrecognisable now.
She said: “It was quite exciting, wasn't it? Even going on set was huge. Sets were in huge studios. Now everything feels like they have to kind of cut costs and really do everything on a tight budget.”
“I remember when we were filming, we'd have someone doing lighting, and a lighting assistant, we'd have sound recordist and a sound recordist’s assistant. I mean, it was just nuts.
“Nowadays, you have literally the bare minimum that you need to do a shoot, but it was all fantastic. I think everything evolves, and you have to learn new skills along the way and you have to move with it.”
“I mean, I'm still trying to learn to be better at social media. This is where I'm falling short now, because if you want to do well now, you have to be a whiz on Instagram and TikTok. This is why everything changes. And if you don't keep evolving and keep learning, then you're going to be left behind.
Anyone now who is going out to kind of get a career, it's like, ‘Well, make sure you understand AI because you're going to need to exploit that because that's the key to success probably moving forward. If you want to work kind of especially in computers and online and in media’.”
Technology aside, Jenni remains optimistic about the opportunities for people with a bit of life experience under their belt.
She said: “I do love the fact that there is so much more opportunity now for people who are, I mean, it's not even that they're older, that it's just maybe more experienced, maybe got a few creases, but apart from that, we know we've been through a lot and I feel like, ‘Look, there is opportunities for everyone and there are lots of new talent coming through in all these new fields, but there's still space for us as well.’
“We've been doing this for a while and I feel that there's still lots for us to do.”
