The life of Paula Yates, the television presenter who died at the age of 41, is to be the subject of a two-part documentary for Channel 4.
The programmes will centre on four “extraordinarily compelling” interviews with Yates, recorded in 1998 and 1999 shortly before her death and have never been heard before.
Yates was married to Bob Geldof, the frontman of the Boomtown Rats and the creator of Live Aid. She was later in a relationship with Michael Hutchence, the lead singer of Australian rock band INXS.
Yates was a popular celebrity who made regular appearances in the tabloid press, which first promoted her and then criticised her over her chaotic lifestyle.
In the interviews that appear in the documentary, Yates “frankly and eloquently discusses the positives and pitfalls of her life”, according to the broadcaster.
The documentary will also include testimonies from Yates’s close friends and former colleagues, as well as footage from a number of other interviews she gave and the programmes she presented.
Shaminder Nahal, the head of specialist factual at Channel 4, said: “Paula Yates exploded onto our screens in the very first week that Channel 4 came on air in 1982, a whirlwind of wit, verve and charisma – a totally unique style.
“Looking at what she achieved now, it feels like no one has ever quite matched her as a TV presenter.”
The documentary was “riveting and sensitive” and would “introduce Paula to a new generation”, Nahal said.
Charlene Chika Osuagwu, a producer at Curious Films, which is making the documentary for Channel 4, said: “Paula is the real story of a singular woman who was both ahead of her time and totally of it, which explores how she shaped, and was shaped by, the seismic changes in British culture and celebrity and what it meant to be a successful woman in that era.
“Paula’s battle to ‘have it all’, torn between the duties of family life and her own personal career and happiness in the magnifying glare of a world determined to judge her, provide a powerful lesson for today’s world and women fighting the same issues 40 years later.”
Yates, whose death in 2000 was ruled as an accidental heroin overdose, made her TV debut on Channel 4 on 5 November 1982 on the influential music programme The Tube. She went on to become a presenter on Channel 4’s The Big Breakfast in 1992, where she became well known for her On the Bed interviews.
She married Geldof in Las Vegas in 1986, and the couple had three daughters – Fifi, Peaches and Pixie. Peaches died in 2014, also from a heroin overdose.
After Geldof and Yates divorced in 1996, Yates went on to have a child, Tiger Lily, with Hutchence. The INXS singer was found dead in a hotel room in Sydney in 1997. After Yates’s death three years later, Geldof adopted Tiger Lily.
