Before Jane McDonald was a Bafta-winning travelogue presenter, genre-spanning singer, bestselling author, cruise ship enthusiast and multimillionaire, she was just a little girl from Wakefield, West Yorkshire, obsessed with performing. She claims that her first word as an infant was “Downtown”, inspired by Petula Clark’s 1964 hit. By 12, hooked on the stench of “stale beer and fried food” that permeated her local club, she decided to try her luck at singing full-time.
Today, in addition to releasing music and presenting Channel 5 shows – Cruising with Jane McDonald, From Pole to Pole, Holidaying with Jane McDonald – the 63-year-old has earned a new, unlikely moniker: internet icon. Forget Alison Hammond. McDonald is the Loose Woman that Gen Z and millennials can’t get enough of.
With a quarter of a million followers on Instagram, McDonald is suddenly everywhere. At the Mighty Hoopla festival in south London last weekend, I watched – along with 30,000 other revellers drunk on 30C weather and overpriced lager – McDonald perform a medley of sequin-studded covers by artists such as Whitney Houston, Cher and the Pussycat Dolls. She was clad in a red leather biker jacket and matching cowboy boots with rainbow highlights nestled among her brunette waves. Her mode of transport? A makeshift wooden cruise ship, moved on to stage by hunky topless men wearing miniature sailor hats. McDonald tells me over email: “I know it’s cheesy to say it, but this year I really am living the dream… Mighty Hoopla was just another level of craziness. To perform on that stage in front of a capacity audience was such an incredible feeling.”
Beneath her eight Instagram posts about the festival, commenters are calling for her to represent the UK at next year’s Eurovision Song Contest and nab the Glastonbury Legends slot. Dolly Parton, Kylie Minogue, Shirley Bassey… and Jane McDonald?
So why all of this adulation? Coleen Nolan, who appeared alongside McDonald on Loose Women for more than a decade, tells me. “There aren’t enough words to describe Jane. Some of my best memories are working with her on Loose Women for so many years,” she says.
Describing them as “the Cissie and Ada of daytime TV” [in reference to Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough’s drag double act which was a staple of light entertainment television in the 1980s], Nolan, 61, says McDonald “was always funny and warm and always a lady. She deserves everything she has achieved. No matter what life has thrown at her – and trust me, it’s thrown some rocks – she’s come back fighting and stronger than ever. She’s an amazing performer, and boy, what a voice.”
McDonald was born to a coal-miner father and shop-worker mother in Wakefield in 1963, and she has described her childhood as happy. Proudly working class, her politics were shaped by her upbringing and the 1984-85 Miners Strike further cemented her identity. Following the death of Margaret Thatcher in April 2013, she said, live on air: “My thoughts are with all the miners that she… That actually died.”
For someone from McDonald’s background, the pursuit of fame and fortune was unheard of. She told The Guardian that: “In my age, everybody was either a secretary or a nurse.”
She started performing at clubs across the North West in her teenage years, but stopped in 1993 following the death of her father, Peter, who had been working as her manager. Television fame arrived quickly – and accidentally – thanks to the 1998 BBC One docu-series The Cruise, which centred on the everyday dramas, work and romances of the Galaxy ship’s staff as it embarked on its maiden voyage in the Caribbean. McDonald, employed on the ship as a singer, soon became the “main character”; one special episode even featured her onboard wedding to her colleague, Henrik Brixen (they divorced in 2003 and she remained with the Searchers’ drummer Eddie Rothe, whom she had known as a teenager, until his death from lung cancer in 2021) . The show peaked at 13 million viewers, and is now available to watch on iPlayer.
Thanks to her hilarious one-liners (on inter-colleague relationships, she gruffly admitted: “All morals go out of the window on a ship”) and no-nonsense attitude, The Cruise made McDonald a viewer favourite. However, that fame brought some derision, culminating in comedian Victoria Wood parodying McDonald in her 2000 Christmas special Victoria Wood with All the Trimmings. Watching Wood’s character “Stacey Leanne Paige” – an all-singing, all-dancing, slightly dim-witted cruise ship singer – now, you feel slightly bad for McDonald. It feels like someone is bullying a loveable child. (She didn’t seem to take offence, publicly stating she loved the character and Wood’s comedy.)
In the years between The Cruise and her Gen Z resurgence, McDonald did what countless mid-level entertainers do: worked without fanfare. After her number one debut album in 1998 came two decades of mediocre chart positions, with McDonald choosing to focus on touring and cruise ship performances rather than mainstream pop stardom. But her appearances on daytime television – especially Loose Women – helped keep her in the public eye.
Much of McDonald’s success is down to her gay fanbase. She has secured entry into the coveted “hun” club (short for “honey”, it’s a term of endearment usually given to female celebrities who express solidarity with the gay community) populated by figures such as Hammond, Denise Welch, The Only Way is Essex’s Gemma Collins and Hannah Waddingham.
And while the Mighty Hoopla is one of Europe’s largest dedicated LGBTQ festivals, there were also plenty of young, straight fans in attendance. Everywhere I looked were groups of 20-somethings singing along to Queen of the Night, Jai Ho and If I Could Turn Back Time, shouting to their friends how “iconic” she was, despite not even having been born when The Cruise first aired. A group of my friends (none older than 26) travelled from Newcastle to the festival solely to see McDonald in the flesh. Reflecting on her increased popularity, McDonald says: “My fans have always been loyal, and for that I am truly grateful, but these past few months have seen a whole new legion of fans coming through too – crossing all ages and genders – and that is just fabulous.”
As her fanbase has grown, so has her bank balance. In 2016, two years after leaving the permanent panel of Loose Women, her company reported estimated profits of £68,000. Last year, it was £3.2m. Now, another £1m has been added.
“She’s been very savvy with how she markets herself and to whom,” a music industry source who handles bookings for major festivals tells me. “Having a largely LGBT fanbase is always good news for a pop star – just look at Kylie, Madonna or even Charli XCX. They all benefited hugely from having a sort of niche but loyal fanbase who would support them even when they weren’t necessarily performing well in the charts. With Jane, she’s been smart enough to play up to the ‘camp icon’ thing both in her music and on TV, and it’s paid off.”
The figures speak for themselves. All four of McDonald’s memoirs, the first released at the turn of the millennium, have been bestsellers. On television, she spent 10 years on Loose Women from 2004 to 2014, had a regular spot on Celebrity Gogglebox with her best friend, Sue Ravey, and has hosted no fewer than 13 travelogues for Channel 5. She earned the broadcaster its first Bafta in 2018 for Cruising with Jane McDonald. Channel 5 boss Ben Frow told The Telegraph two years later that Cruising was his favourite show – saying: “I love the spirit of it, the ambition, the campness” – and admitted that, to celebrate the Bafta win, he took McDonald out for dinner and wound up with a £6,000 bill. “The champagne was £1,450 a bottle and I’d been sticking ice in it. Jane only drank two glasses.”
Later this year, McDonald will embark on a UK arena tour, which is already sold out. In October, she will hark back to her glory days on the Seven Seas and hop on another ship: for no less than £1,799, fans can spend seven nights floating around western Europe with the Queen of Cruises herself. In March 2022, 4.4 million Britons tuned into a Channel 5 special where she explored the Caribbean. Sovereign Holidays, which had a product-placement deal with the programme, saw a 75 per cent rise in sales for trips to the locations mentioned. It seems that McDonald has that rare gift among British celebrities: to be uber successful (and rich) without making other people bitter and jealous.
Yet despite her huge workload, McDonald has admitted she loves nothing more than lazing around. Her favourite way to spend an evening, she has said, is collapsing in front of the TV “like a sack of spuds” with some Doritos, a glass of wine and a boxset. In an era of contrived, fake reality stars and unknowable celebrities, McDonald’s essential ordinariness is refreshing – the sort of woman who, despite being worth more than £4m, you would actually enjoy going to the pub with. More power to her.