Vanessa Collingridge

Who is Vanessa Collingridge?

Vanessa Collingridge is an author and broadcaster. She is the youngest of five children born and raised in Woking in Surrey, England. Her father Gordon was half-Irish and her mother Irene half-Scottish.

She studied Geography at Hertford College, Oxford, where she earned a first class MA in 1990, despite contracting viral encephalitis in her second year which caused an almost fatal swelling of her brain. It was also at Oxford that she met her husband Alan Watt.

After graduating, Collingridge moved immediately to a career in television, first as a question checker on game shows Wheel of Fortune and Win, Lose or Draw, and then for 14 months as a weathergirl on BBC Scotland. In the early to mid 1990s she appeared from time to time on BBC television's Gardeners' World. She has since worked as a producer and presenter on all five British national terrestrial television channels, as well as BBC national radio.

In 2000 she quit her television presenter's job on Tonight with Trevor McDonald to author two biographies, one of eighteenth century explorer James Cook and one of Celtic warrior queen Boudica. During her research for the former, she discovered she shared ancestry with controversial Australian writer and illustrator George Collingridge, who asserted in 1895 that Australia was discovered by the Portuguese. She has described her very early interest in feminism in the introduction to her book on Boudica in 2005: "what started as a strong-willed desire for independence became a fully-fledged, bra-burning mentality... Certainly, I cannot remember a time when I wasn't acutely aware of the inherently political nature of woman's position in society and — much to my father's disgust and my now extreme embarrassment — by the grand old age of twelve, I would proudly read Cosmopolitan magazine and proclaim myself a feminist!"