Childline leaders pay tribute to Esther Rantzen after her death at 86

Dame Esther Rantzen, the British broadcaster and Childline founder who died on Wednesday, 30 September, aged 86, has been remembered by charity leaders and fellow broadcasters for turning her television work into help for children. Speaking to BBC Breakfast on Thursday, Childline director Shaun Friel called her ‘an inspirational individual’ and ‘quite a force’ as a campaigner.

The tributes add colleagues’ and charities’ accounts of her work to NewsJaws’ earlier report on Rantzen’s death. They focus particularly on how the long-running BBC programme That’s Life! helped bring Childline into being and on the service the charity says it continues to provide.

What Childline’s director said about Esther Rantzen

Friel told the BBC that Rantzen ‘inspired people’, ‘energised people’ and ‘persuaded people’. He also praised her journalistic ability. His description of her as a determined campaigner reflects a recurring theme in the tributes: people who worked with her connected her public profile to her ability to press for changes beyond television.

‘The legacy that Dame Esther created when she created Childline is something quite incredible,’ Friel said. He told BBC Breakfast that she had changed how society looked at children and said that, once she had a vision for something that needed to change, she was ‘quite a force’. Those are Friel’s assessments of her influence, rather than measured findings about Childline’s effects.

How That’s Life! led to Childline

The NSPCC traces the helpline’s beginnings to an episode of That’s Life! broadcast on 16 March 1986 that addressed childhood sexual abuse. According to the charity, a helpline set up after the programme received about 100 calls within 48 hours, while thousands of letters arrived. The response indicated that children wanted a way to describe experiences they had struggled to disclose.

Childline launched as a nationwide, round-the-clock helpline on 30 October that year, the NSPCC says. The sequence helps explain why tributes have treated Rantzen’s broadcasting and charity work as connected parts of her public life. She used a television programme to bring an issue to a wide audience, then helped establish a service intended to give children a place to seek support.

The NSPCC says Childline has provided more than six million counselling sessions to children in the UK and Channel Islands over almost 40 years. It says the service operates from 12 bases across the UK and that its helpline model has been replicated in 150 countries. These are the organisation’s service figures and descriptions; they are not an independent assessment of outcomes for the children who contacted it.

Tributes from broadcasting and public life

BBC director general Matt Brittin called Rantzen a ‘legend of British broadcasting’ whose contribution to public life was ‘immeasurable’. He said her campaigning continued after her time on screen. Rantzen presented That’s Life! for 21 years, according to the BBC, making her television career a familiar reference point for those paying tribute.

Fellow broadcaster Martin Lewis called her an ‘inspiration’ and a ‘pioneer’. Dame Elaine Paige praised her work as a broadcaster, journalist and campaigner, and pointed to both Childline and The Silver Line, the service for older people experiencing loneliness. The BBC reports that Rantzen founded The Silver Line; accounts differ on its founding year, so a precise date is not used here.

Prime Minister Andy Burnham said Rantzen had ‘changed countless lives’ and praised the courage and openness with which she discussed her illness. Rantzen had been terminally ill with lung cancer. The BBC also reported tributes from people who had worked with her on television, including That’s Life! co-presenter Bill Buckley, who recalled how persistently she pursued campaigns.

Her final years as an assisted-dying campaigner

In later life, Rantzen became a prominent campaigner for the legalisation of assisted dying. She said in 2023 that she had joined Dignitas, the Swiss assisted-dying clinic, and said last month that she was too physically fragile to make the journey there, according to the BBC. Those statements became part of the response to her death, alongside tributes to her broadcasting and charity work.