That's Esther's life

HERE'S a tip: for an instant facelift lie down on your back, wave your legs in the air, then cross them seductively. Oh, and you should not be wearing a lot, apart from fishnet stockings and spiky stilettos. "Gravity will do the rest," declares Esther Rantzen, who is bare-legged but wearing a pair of frivolous, sparkly crimson mules with her scarlet polka-dot sun dress.

"Your wrinkles will disappear. Who needs Botox?" she says, sounding like Carrie Bradshaw at her most rhetorical. And your legs will look like they go on for ever, promises Rantzen, who is not actually practising what she preaches at this moment.

We are, in fact, in the flower-filled drawing room of her enviably beautiful London home, which looks out over great green swathes of Hampstead Heath and which sits amid the most lovely and lovingly-tended gardens. Rantzen is a splendid splash of colour on one of the creamy sofas, with their bosomy cushions and little silken, peachy-coloured pillows.

Displaying a fine pair of tanned pins, the broadcaster-turned-writer no longer sports fishnet stockings as was once her wont. She belongs to a generation – she was 68 on June 22 – that was fatally attracted to criss-cross hosiery, "because in my youth they used to be regarded as exotic, slightly wicked, and irresistibly sexy. But now I've finally thrown away the fishnets," she sighs.

Nonetheless, she recalls that when she first met her late husband, the acclaimed pioneering documentary film-maker, Desmond Wilcox, in the BBC Club, he always said he was drawn to Rantzen's fishnet stockings with a sluttish tear in them just above the knee. "I wasn't doing a Marilyn Monroe in the film Bus Stop; I'd probably just got dressed in a hurry that morning," she suggests.

But there comes a time in every woman's life when she has to abandon the fishnets, realising she can no longer trawl in the hope of landing Mr Big Fish. Rantzen says she realised the error of her ways only when she was well into her sixties, after she posed provocatively for a Closer magazine photoshoot in fishnets and stilettos, wearing little more than a wisp of chiffon. This might be my last chance to be a floozy, she thought.

"So, not only did I put on the fishnets and chiffon, I even threw caution to the wind and my legs in the air. My daughters (Emily (30) and Rebecca (28)] screamed and laughed when they saw the picture; my son has still not forgiven me." In fact, Joshua (26) later told the Daily Mail: "My reaction on seeing the picture of my mother in fishnets was unqualified horror, bemusement and slight revulsion." But he went on to say he loved her dearly, despite the saucy stockings.

Not that Rantzen is ready for snoozing by the fireside in her carpet slippers and shawl just yet. "As Brigitte Bardot once remarked, age is what we all do," she concedes. However, as one of Britain's 17m baby boomers, Rantzen is currently having the time of her life, although with certain sad caveats, which we shall come to later.

"It's difficult to face the fact that you are no longer alluring, that even your ovaries retired long ago," remarks the still glamorous consumer champion, tireless anti-child abuse campaigner, chat show host, novelist, newspaper columnist and celebrity ballroom dancer, who has now turned her beady gaze onto the third age and is full of words of wisdom for wrinklies.

"Because I'm a child of the Sixties I'm a rule-breaker, always have been and always will be. I plan to go on doing one mad thing after another," she says, explaining why she's written her latest book.

If Not Now, When? – the title is a 2000-year-old quote from Rabbi Hillel – is a witty self-help volume in which she advises her generation to grow old as disgracefully as they please. She has, however, larded the book with lots of sound advice culled from interviews with a range of people, about money worries, loneliness and the empty-nest syndrome, coping with bereavement and moving on after the death of a partner, the desire for sex, lust and love, being a grandparent and battling those senior moments. (She has problems with proper nouns, she confides.)

Now's the time, she declares, as Shirley Bassey put it, to pop our corks .

So the over-sixties – "especially those of us on the far side of 65," – are out there, parachuting, hang-gliding, seeing the Northern Lights and, inevitably, swimming with the ubiquitous dolphins.They are going to the opera, growing beards and having lots of sex if that's what turns them on.

"All this relentless activity is because being over 60 concentrates the mind wonderfully," says Rantzen, who has resolutely decided to thumb her nose at the passing of time. "So what if people call us mutton dressed as curly, girly lambs?" In her mind, she is for ever 28, which happened to be her favourite age.

Meanwhile, some of her best middle-aged friends have decided to stick at 17. "Apparently, they refer to themselves as recycled teenagers . God help us!" Still, in a dozen years' time half the population will be over 50 and she believes passionately that their skills and experience should not go to waste.

Rantzen's rage against the dying of the light is admirable and her book is exhaustively researched and cogently written – and it's funny. "Now is the time for vulgarity. SKIN! (Spend the Kids Inheritance Now!) If you've always wanted to go to Machu Pichu, pack your bags and go," she advises, adding that she cruises – the seven seas, that is.

Her next cruise will be with her medical student son, Joshua – "My son, the doctor!" she exclaims in Jewish momma mode. They plan to visit Norway. It will, says Rantzen, be a poignant time for her. She's thrilled to spend time with her son, who is so very much like his father, but then a shadow falls across her face. "How Desmond would have adored it," she says softly. It's going to be tough.

Her beloved husband died from heart disease in September 2000; he was 69. They had been together for more than 30 years, had three children and were so deliriously happy that they married twice (for the second time only two years before he died) since she was heavily pregnant with their daughter, Emily, the first time around.

"Desi was a man who packed five lives into one life and made us all laugh so much," she recalls.

When she was widowed, her step-daughter – Wilcox had three children with his first wife, Patsy – made it clear that she thought that Rantzen should adopt sackcloth and ashes.

"She minded that I went to the hairdresser, put on the make-up, the heels, the chic suit. Desi was the most incredibly non-judgmental man, really empathetic. So whether I'd heaped ashes on my head or dyed my hair red, which I did when I was on Strictly Come Dancing, he would have said, 'Do what feels right'."

Rantzen may come across as a merry widow, but she's clearly never got over losing the love of her life. "As the Queen Mother once said. 'Not to me!' You never get over the loss but you learn to behave better.

"There still those moments when I hear a piece of music, say, and I'm in bits. It's the happy times I find hardest. We shared our troubles but we shared our happiness – and there was so much of it."

Has she ruled out another love affair? "No, I haven't," she replies. After all, she made a TV programme, Would Like to Meet, in 2004, in which she went in search of a new relationship. "The great advantage of being this great age is you no longer care what other people think. Why not have fun? If ladies of a certain age trek off to Africa and fall in love with Masai warriors, good luck to them. Behaving badly and looking ridiculous is not a criminal offence."

Not all middle-aged love affairs end in shipwrecks, she notes. However, Rantzen knew and worked with Heather Mills around the time she swept Paul McCartney off his feet. Post the messy divorce, Rantzen would love to tell him: 'There were times with Heather when you were able to forget your grief, and you felt fresh and young again, so if you were seduced into living for the moment, and you blocked your ears to common sense, who can possibly blame you?'

"After all," she concludes, "Tis better to have loved and been laughed at, than never to have loved, or laughed, at all."

&149 If Not Now, When? (Headline Springboard, £16.99). Esther Rantzen will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 20 (1.30pm); then she debates Life in the Third Age at 7pm, with publishing doyen and author Diana Athill and life coach Keren Smedley.

MEMORABLE MOMENTS AND TV TRIUMPHS FROM THAT'S LIFE! (1973-1994)

• Among the talented pets showcased, the most famous was Prince, a dog who said 'sausages'.

• The appetite for oddly shaped vegetables among the show's 18 million viewers was seemingly insatiable.

• The show introduced the term 'Jobsworth' to our lexicon, naming and shaming individuals who enforced rules that defied all reason or compassion, such as the clamping of a car belonging to a woman who went in to labour in a hospital car park.

• The wearing of car seatbelts by children became compulsory by law after a That's Life! campaign. The replacement of hard tarmac playground surfaces with softer materials was another triumph.

• Rantzen successfully publicised the need for child organ transplants when she followed the moving story of Ben Hardwick, a toddler with liver disease, who tragically died in 1985.