Vanessa Feltz has opened up about navigating the “bloody annoying” 10-year age gap with her musician partner Ben Ofoedu in a new interview.
The TalkTV host, 60, has been engaged to Ofoedu, 50, since 2006 – one year after they met.
“Don’t let anyone tell you the age gap doesn’t matter,” Feltz said in a profile for The Sunday Times, published on Sunday (1 January).
She continued: “It’s bloody annoying and it gets worse, especially as our relationship coincided with acres of the menopause, which started on my very first day presenting the Radio 2 breakfast show [in 2011] with a massive hot flush at 4am and is still going on.”
Feltz announced she was leaving BBC Radio 2 in July last year. In a subsequent interview with The Guardian, Feltz said she needed to step down from the role to “catch up” on a “decade’s deficit of beauty sleep”.
She began dating the Phats and Small singer after her marriage to surgeon Michael Kurer ended in 2000.
Feltz told The Sunday Times that her relationship with Ofoedu, who she described as “absurdly handsome” and “amazingly charasmatic”, meant she had to be “far more frolicsome than any menopausal woman should have to be”.
“It’s been nonstop hurly-burly at the door, in the car, on the chaise longue, when all I really wanted was to melt or sob or scream,” she added.
Elsewhere, she said Ofoedu is a “fabulous grandpa” to her four grandchildren and that he has “brought a lightness” into her family life.
She also revealed that she calls the singer “Young Beezy” and that “he calls me young Veezy and occasionally ‘a feral youth’, which I love”.
In December last year, Feltz spoke out against the media’s obsession with her size, adding that she has been “vilified” and “violently criticised”.
She also suggested she became self-conscious about her age while working at the BBC.
Feltz joined Rupert Murdoch-owned TalkTV in September last year, replacing Jeremy Kyle on the network’s three-hour drive time slot.
