Emma Cowing: The damage that can be done by celebrities

WHEN I was at school, I did a week-long work placement at an engineering company. I know. I was surprised, too. Not least because I had neglected to take even one science subject beyond second year and wouldn’t have known a spectroscope from a spirit level if my life had depended on it.

The only thing I had ever engineered in my life was a date with Charlie the minister’s son who went to the boys’ school down the road.

The reason I was dispatched to spend a week with these (by the end of it) long-suffering chaps was because they were sound engineers, working on a contract with STV. “You’re interested in journalism, aren’t you, Emma?” remarked the school careers adviser. “This will be perfect for you.”

I spent my days encased in tiny sound booths, watching men twiddling with knobs and dials and wondering if I should have taken the placement at a paper mill instead.

One day however, Kirsty Young popped up on the screen, reading the news on Scotland Today. The sound mixer emitted a groan. “She’s a nightmare,” he said. I perked up. This was gossip. “Don’t get me wrong, she’s brilliant at what she does. But that voice! It’s so low it’s impossible to get the levels right. There’s no-one else like her out there. I’ve given up.”

I never forgot this little anecdote; indeed, it made me intrigued about Young’s determination to succeed. As her career has progressed, I have noticed a few times that she has had a knack of doing things just a little bit differently.

So perhaps we should not be surprised that once again Young has gone against the grain. In a recent interview she admitted that when she was younger, she suffered from bulimia.

In a profile to mark the 70th anniversary of Desert Island Discs, which she has presented on Radio 4 for several years, she said that it was something that developed when she was a teenager, working as an au pair in Switzerland.

“I feel funny saying it because I’m now a different person,” she admitted. “Although it was horrible, I don’t want to overplay it as ‘TV Kirsty’s bulimic hell’ – because people suffer for decades.” She went on to say that she managed to beat it fairly quickly. “I was lucky. I talked myself out of it in six months.”

On the surface, Young would seem like one of the least likely victims of an eating disorder. She’s always come across as confident and certain of herself. To know that she teetered on the brink of an eating disorder, albeit one that she was able to pull herself away from, is jarring.

Eating disorders most commonly afflict teenage girls (although older women and men can suffer from them, too). This should not be a surprise. It is when young women are teenagers that they are at their most vulnerable, and susceptible to images of stick-thin actresses and pop stars whom, they are told, they must do their best to emulate. It is interesting that Young’s admission comes on the same day that Victoria Beckham released a photo-shoot of herself looking whip-thin just six months after giving birth to her fourth child.

For some young women, this becomes the ideal. Indeed, things are much worse than they were in Young’s day. The numbers of those treated for anorexia and bulimia rise each year, and there are believed to be thousands more undiagnosed cases out there, many of them poring overs images of tiny celebrities from Lady Gaga to Kate Moss and wishing they could look just like them, before flipping to the page that tells them how to embark on an extreme diet to do just that.

It would be easy to say that I wish more celebrities would speak out about eating disorders. A few have. Portia de Rossi, the American actress, wrote a moving memoir charting her battle with anorexia, while former deputy prime minister John Prescott was roundly ridiculed for exposing his own struggles with bulimia. Such things are not easy to talk about, and leave you open to cruel jibes. That Young has chosen to speak out in this manner is exceptionally brave, and I commend her for it.

But what I would really like to see is individuals like Beckham being stopped from promoting weight loss as if it were the only thing to aspire to. The endless interviews with celebrities talking about being thin are damaging our young women. It needs to stop.

Now that’s something I would like to engineer.