Esther Rantzen dies at 86, after That's Life!, Childline and the Silver Line

Dame Esther Rantzen died on Wednesday at the age of 86. She presented That's Life! for 21 years, founded Childline in 1986, and founded the Silver Line in 2013 for older people living alone. Prime Minister Andy Burnham said she had changed countless lives. Her family called her a wonderful mother and a cherished grandmother, and said her compassion would continue through the charities.

That's Life! ran on the BBC from 1973 to 1994. Rantzen hosted and produced it. The show mixed consumer investigations with lighter items and regularly drew audiences of about 20 million. The consumer strand was the part that outlived the jokes. Viewers sent in faulty goods, unanswered complaints and small frauds, and the programme put the company on air. That format trained a generation of British television in the idea that a broadcaster could act as a complaints desk.

Childline was the institutional result. Launched in 1986, it gave children a phone line that did not run through a parent or a school. The charity still operates, now inside the NSPCC structure, and the original bet has not changed: a child will say to a stranger on a phone what they will not say in a room. The Silver Line, started in 2013, applied the same idea at the other end of life. Isolation among older people was the problem Rantzen named, and a phone line was the tool she already knew how to build.

She was made a dame in 2015 for services to children. The cancer diagnosis came in January 2023. She said at the time that the news had prompted thanks to the people who had made her life joyful. In December 2023 she said she had joined Dignitas, the Swiss assisted-dying clinic. This month she told the Press Association that she had spent the money and made the plans, and that she was now too physically fragile to make the journey. The campaign for a change in British law on assisted dying was the last public cause. She did not live to see a statute.

The gap between the plan and the journey is the detail her own statement left on the record. Dignitas requires the person to travel. A patient who can no longer fly cannot use the clinic, which is the practical objection campaigners have made to a system that pushes the decision offshore. Rantzen's case became the example in parliamentary debates for that reason. Her death at home, after a plan she could not carry out, is the fact those debates will cite.

The work that does not depend on the statute is already built. Childline is four decades old. The Silver Line is thirteen. That's Life! left the schedule in 1994, and the consumer-investigation habit it normalised is still how British daytime and current-affairs programmes handle a faulty product. Burnham's line was the official one. The operational one is the phone number that still answers.