On the hottest day of the year Gail Porter is wearing her wig. As she speaks she pulls on the pigtails that peek out from beneath the hat she’s also sporting.
Actually, it’s one of several wigs she owns, the TV presenter and soon-to-be-returning Fringe performer tells me. “I’ve got a white one. I’ve got a grey one. I’ve got a silver one. If I take my wig off and go and have a shower and come back, my cat’s on it. She loves it. ‘No, that was about £1000.’ They are expensive.”
Today she’s got her blonde one on. For years after she lost her hair because of her alopecia she would walk around bald, being “very stoic and very Scottish and going, ‘I’ve got this,’” she says. But then she met someone who also had the condition who invited her to try a wig on.
“And I went in and got it fitted. I think it was just a natural progression.”
That doesn’t mean she won’t take the wig off. Coming back from Newquay on the train the weekend before we talk, she says, “there was a guy sitting opposite me. I took the hat off. I took the hair off. And he’s like that …”
She mimes a horrified face. “I said, ‘It’s alright, nothing to see.’ Whereas kids love it.”
And not just kids. “I went up to the chemist the other day and the lady at the chemist was like, ‘Where’s your hair today?’ And I said it’s in the sink. I was washing it. She said, ‘I like it when you had the long brown one. Are you going to be bald tomorrow?’ And I went, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ And she went, ‘Oh, it’s quite fun isn’t it?’ And I went, ‘Yes, it is now.’”
If anyone deserves some fun it’s Gail Porter. The former children’s TV and Top of the Pops presenter has had more than just alopecia to deal with over the last 30 years. In her time she’s been sectioned and made homeless, even ending up sleeping rough on a bench on Hampstead Heath at one point. She’s got divorced, had to declare herself bankrupt and she’s lost her parents as well as her hair.
All of her misfortunes were played out on the front pages of the newspapers. Infamously, lad’s magazine FHM even beamed a naked photograph of her onto the front of Westminster without her permission and much to her horror.
Ironically, after we speak today she’s off to Westminster to talk about the time her phone was hacked by the tabloids.
“I was hacked for three years when my mum was dying. That was horrible.
“You go through this and you don’t trust your friends. I’d never heard of hacking and you’re suddenly thinking why would anybody that I know and love be doing this?”
Those darker times are never far away with Porter. She references them constantly in conversation. But she is also all positivity, whether she’s talking about her daughter Holly or meeting Prince William.
“I just think kindness is the thing that keeps me going,” she suggests.
This summer Porter returns to the Fringe with a new show, Portergeist, which draws on her days as a TV ghost hunter.
“There’s going to be lots about dead stuff,” she explains, “because I did a show called Dead Famous, which is a show that nobody watched. But there were so many fun stories.”
She begins to tell me one. It involves Alcatraz, her supposed lack of sex appeal and the long-departed front man of The Doors, Jim Morrison.
“I was spending the night in Alcatraz – as you do – with ghost hunters. There was a psychic called Carla Baron in the cell next to mine. “She went, ‘Oh my God …’ And I was crying. She went, ‘Gail, there is a man in my cell,’ meaning a ghostie. ‘Gail he wants to f- me …’ You know, the F word. And I went ‘Eew, OK.’
“And she went, ‘Not you. He does not even like you, Gail.’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God I can’t even get laid by the dead. This is really bad.’”
There’s a coda to this story. “And then we went to Jim Morrison’s house and we were doing a seance and she was like, ‘Jim is here.’
“She went, ‘Oh, Jim, he does not even like you Gail, he does not like you at all.’”
It’s worth noting that this is a heavily edited version of her anecdote. As may be already clear, Porter can’t only ever tell one story at a time. They all involve her going off on at least half a dozen other tangents, including, in this case, her mother’s take on why Porter really lost her hair.
“I remember my mum saying, ‘Do you know what Gail? The reason you’ve lost your hair is not alopecia. It’s the ghosts. They took it because you messed with the dark side.’”
At 55 Porter is still a wee skelf of a thing, and despite everything she’s been through you can still recognise in her the young woman who used to turn up on our screens to tell us, “It’s still number on, it’s Top of the Pops,” back at the turn of the century.
She is not watching the Top of the Pops repeats on BBC Four on a Friday night, she tells me, even though they have reached her presenting era.
“My daughter watches them. She’s like, ‘Mum, you look as tall as the teenagers.’ I went, ‘That’s because they gave me a box to stand on because I was too short.’ It said ‘Gail’s Box’ on it.”
In truth, Porter is not watching much TV at all these days. “I was trying to explain to this girl the other day … She’s quite young and she wants to get into television and I said, ‘I couldn’t possibly tell you what I watch on television now.’ I don’t understand it.”
She rather disapproves of Reality TV and shows such as Love Island. That said, wasn’t she offered a chance to appear in a Celebrity version of Naked Attraction?
She was. “I said, ‘Do I wear clothes and look at people naked?’ I had never seen it. Why would you watch something like that? And they went, ‘No, no, no, you have to be naked. We’d give you £10,000.’
“And I was like, do you know what? I’d rather be on that bench in Hampstead again than be naked. Nobody wants to see me naked. They saw it once before in 1999 and that was bad enough. So, no.
“It’s a terrible idea and I don’t think it happened. Nobody in their right mind who’s a celebrity would do that.”
She pauses and then qualifies her answer. “I think there was one. I’m not going to name that person, but there was one who said yes and I was like, ‘Didn’t surprise me.’ But I was like absolutely no blinking way. I’ve put my daughter through enough and she wasn’t even born when I did that stuff.
“I used to say to her, ‘Honey, that skirt’s a little bit small.’ And she was like, ‘And what were you wearing in the nineties?’ Touche. Touche, clever girl.”
It’s easy now to look back at the 1990s and decry them for their beery, blokey laddishness, for the way they objectified every woman in the public eye, including Porter. But maybe in an age of social media and Reality TV things are actually worse now.
She thinks so too.
“I can look back and think, ‘I was stupid, yeah.’ But I didn’t have my daughter. I learned my lessons. I was lucky enough to have my grandpa who was like, ‘I’ve bought FHM,’ whereas mum was telling me off, dad ignored me. Tough love was going on.
“I think it’s quite toxic at the moment. People are just making a quick buck out of Reality TV and getting their cheeks filled and their lips filled.
“Somebody said to me the other day, ‘Oh, you’re looking a bit old.’ And I went, ‘Yeah, well, I’m 55 I’ve never had Botox. This is my face. This has got a lot more story than you have, mate. This is a wig. I’ll take that off. I’m not taking the teeth out because they are my own.’”
She’s a trouper, isn’t she? But it’s not hard to see the fragility behind the can-do attitude. Still, Porter says, she’s in a better place now than she has been for a long time.
“I’ve always been very aware of everything bad that’s happened. I’ve been homeless, I’ve watched my mum die, watched my nan die, I’ve worked in orphanages, I’ve been in Liberia. I’ve seen stuff you never want to see in your entire life.”
But when she gets up in the morning, she adds, “I don’t feel sad. I used to get quite depressed. Now I get up and go, ‘Do you know what? There is nothing anyone can do that can hurt me.
“I get weepy obviously. My daughter was like, ‘I think you’re perimenopausal.’ And I said, ‘I thought she was in Little Mix’. ‘No that’s Perrie Edwards mum.’”
This is very Porter; this switchback pivot between pain and humour. And then back again. All her emotions are constantly on the surface.
“I do feel very fortunate,” she begins at one point, before adding, “I do miss picking up the phone and calling my mum.”
These days she’s an advocate for the homeless. She talks at length about working with Prince William on the issue. “He did say I can’t help what I was born into, but I can make the most of it and I thought , ‘Yeah.’”
He’s making a difference, she thinks, but more needs to be done.
Of course she has a story about the first time she met him.
“I phoned up my Auntie Laura and said, ‘You’ll never guess where I’m going?’ She said, ‘Is it G-A-Y in Soho?’ ‘No, it’s Prince WIlliam’s house in Windsor.’
“I hadn’t actually read the letter properly.I read it as I got up to security. ‘Do you have your passport, driving licence?’ I had none of that. I got up and I go, ‘Do you know what? I’ve just read the letter and I don’t have anything.’
“And they were like, ‘It’s alright pal, we’re from Glasgow. In you go.’ And I went, ‘No way, can I try your gun?’ ‘Don’t push it, Gail.’”
So many stories. Here’s the best one. In 2026 Gail Porter is wearing her wig, ready to perform at the Fringe and in a good place. Her daughter is doing well, Porter’s there for her friends, and she has a roof over her head. “It just feels nice,” she says.
“Don’t get me wrong. If anyone wants to take me to Thailand or Bali … “
Gail Porter: Portergeist, 18.25, Assembly Rooms (Drawing Room) August 6 – 30 (except August 11, 18 & 25),
https://assemblyfestival.com/whats-on/gail-porter-portergeist
