Loose Women presenter Kaye Adams, 59, on backstage rows, talking frankly about sex and her new podcast about turning 60.
What made you start a podcast?
I wanted to do something that genuinely meant something to me. I was pottering around the garden and various ideas were going through my head and my age popped up.
It’s something I’ve got my knickers in a twist about all my life, so it was a eureka moment. My partner Ian was about to turn 60 and was very relaxed about it.
It made me wonder how he could be so cool about it while I thought it was awful. So How To Be 60 was born.
Why do you have such a dread of getting older?
I think it’s my mum’s fault. She would never confess her age. When I was a child she once got stopped by the police for speeding.
Me and my brother were in the car and we ended up being taken to the police station because she refused to give the officer her date of birth.
She’d only say she was over 21. That was always part of my life and clearly it seeped into me.
Surely, as a Loose Women presenter, it’s not been so easy to hide your age?
Nothing is a secret on that show and they all take the p*** out of me for being so ridiculous about it.
I think most of them know but I must have been quite good at obfuscating because Frankie Bridge asked me recently and, when I told her, she went, ‘Really?’
One side of me thought, ‘Oh, that’s good,’ and then the other side thought, ‘Oh my gosh, she thinks it’s shocking!’
What’s the truth behind the rumours of backstage bust-ups on Loose Women?
Have there been times of tension between individuals? Yes, there have. I’m not going to deny that there are occasions when people maybe have a bit of a beef with somebody else but it’s nothing that hasn’t been fixable.
There’s nobody who will walk out of the door when somebody else walks in. Nobody refuses to work with anybody else.
Your podcast features several frank discussions about sex…
We never sought to talk about it, it just comes up, but I personally think that we all massively lie our pants off about sex. We have sex experts telling us how to improve our sex lives and how to communicate better, blah, blah, blah.
My deep-down suspicion is that it’s all a pile of s***. I think it wanes in a long-term relationship. People even lie to their best friends about sex because there is such a weight of unspoken failure in relationships that aren’t swinging from the chandeliers.
I think people pretend they’re doing it more than they are. But I might be wrong, that might just be me!
Do your family listen to your podcast?
My daughters are 19 and 16 and don’t listen but they’ve been used to me on Loose Women, of course. Ian doesn’t listen either.
He would if I asked him but, to be honest, I’m not desperate to alert him to it!
If you’re trying to embrace your 60s, could you contemplate grey hair?
I have no immediate plans. But I have moved from ‘no way will my hair ever go grey’ to ‘actually, I can consider that’.
I was in denial about turning 60, I didn’t want to think about it, but the podcast is changing me week by week.
We’ve had various guests, like Jonathan Ross, Anthea Turner and Jane Moore, and hearing other people’s experiences makes you reflect.
Will you ever retire?
I don’t know. I think it would be fun not to be continually chasing my tail but I get an awful lot of pleasure from my work.
I meet interesting people, I laugh and have fun. And if I took that out of my life, what do you fill that with?
Don’t you have any hobbies?
In my 20s I thought I’d better start collecting things but any collection I’ve ever started has only ever had two things in it because then I got bored and forgot what the point was.
My first collection was little pottery milk jugs, then old sheet music. They weren’t collections, all I had was a pile of s***! Now I don’t have time for a hobby.
Would you fancy taking part in any of the tougher reality shows?
I did Total Wipeout. I do get offered them, like Hunted or the SAS thing, but need I remind you I’m nearly 60 and the last thing I want is a broken bloody hip?
How about Strictly Come Dancing?
I’m really not good at the sexy stuff. I would not be able to transport myself to some Argentinian bordello to do the tango.
I’m a bit uptight and Scottish. Think Judy Murray with three million bells on!
What’s left on your bucket list?
I used to think that bucket lists were a sign you were getting old but I’ve changed my mind. Top of my bucket list is to make a bucket list!
Kaye Adams: How To Be 60 is available on podcast players including Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can join Kaye live at the on August 23 and 24.
