Menopause was the best wake-up call I ever had

Broadcaster Anthea Turner discusses going through menopause during the breakdown of her marriage. By LARA OWEN

- LARA OWEN

ANTHEA TURNER first went to the GP when she started having symptoms she couldn't describe back in 2012.

"The most difficult thing for me at the time was actually explaining myself," she says.

"When I started out on my journey, there just wasn't the conversation. You could, if you really looked, find something - but nobody really wanted to talk about menopause, because it was this horrible admission as a woman that you're getting old - and God forbid we want to admit that!"

Sitting in her local surgery "snivelling" through her symptoms, the broadcaster, now 65, left with a prescription for tranquilisers.

"He said, 'I'm going to prescribe you tranquilisers.' Before I even took one, I thought: no, no, this has got to be wrong - and obviously I went on my own journey."

That journey was anything but simple. Anthea describes her peri-menopause as colliding with one of the most turbulent periods of her life.

She had started to have problems within her marriage to her then-husband Grant Bovey, CEO of Imagine Homes, who had just declared bankruptcy in 2010.

"My ex-husband's business was going down. I rolled up my sleeves and did what all women do, 'I'll work my way out of this.' I was literally commuting back and forth to Canada and filming and coming home then somewhere in all this melee I was going through the menopause as well.

"They were difficult times," she says, "[menopause] doesn't come at a good time in your life."

She even wrote her husband a letter to explain what she was going through.

"I tried to put into words what was happening to me, but then of course I later found out he was having an affair and wasn't interested in his sweaty wife," she laughs.