Vanessa Feltz reveals Big Breakfast secrets and makes 'post-show orgies' admission

Imagine going to work every morning and your job is climbing onto a pretend bed with Charlton Heston, Jim Carrey, Andie McDowell, Alicia Silverstone, Johnny Mathis, Graham Norton or Goldie Hawn. Imagine getting glammed up in full makeup, false eyelashes and a fishtail ball gown at 7am, kissing Zoe Ball hello, gossiping with the Bay City Rollers and boarding a bed with the late great Joan Rivers.

The Big Breakfast was joy without an autocue. Chaos was king, yet our international celebrity booking team enticed the most dazzling A-listers in Hollywood’s constellation all the way to the backstreets of Stratford, East London. My two blessed predecessors – Paula Yates and Paul O’Grady – are sharing a cloud in Heaven, so you’ll have to rely on my testimony when I tell you that broadcasting on a bed does funny things to people. Some fall asleep. Some become amorous – after all, there’s a bosomy blonde within arm’s reach.

The BB bed was a dis-inhibitor that would jolt celebrities out of their rut. And it was transportable. If a cosmic superstar couldn’t find the time or inclination to go to the bed, the bed would go to them. Superstars didn’t know why they’d been manhandled down a hotel corridor to lie on a bed with a size 22 blonde, which made their answers to my impertinent questions even more authentic.

Eccentric, possibly stoned, Woody Harrelson distinguished himself by being the only on-the-bed guest to peel a mango meticulously throughout the interview without referring to it. I refused to give him the satisfaction, so I didn’t refer to it either. He peeled, and mumbled, and was difficult to love, but not as difficult as Dennis Quaid who removed his shoes and socks mid-chat without explaining why, wiggling his hairy toes in a belligerent simmering funk.

Joan Rivers was ridiculously quick-witted. Whatever I asked, she shot back an instant hilarious one-liner. People thought we’d been working on material for weeks.

There’s no need for A-listers to make nice, but some people are naturally polite and friendly. Goldie Hawn is one of those people. She hardly needed endorsement from a Channel 4 morning audience, but the moment our chat finished, she asked: “Was I okay? Was that fun for you?” She was adorable: lively, lovely, and worried about a small spot on her chin.

I’d smuggled my daughter Allegra in who was having a rough time at school. Goldie said she reminded her of her own daughter, Kate Hudson, just six years older. She exuded such concern that Allegra told her the whole story. Goldie’s team were waiting, but Goldie carefully explained that happy people don’t bully – and told her to feel sorry for the bully. Then Goldie hugged her. We’ll both adore her forever.

Get in. Flog the product. Get out. That’s the formula. Unless you’re actor Danny DeVito. He arrived on the bed buzzing. He’d seen a Russian play in French and didn’t give a fig for the film he was meant to sell.

Danny was also the only guest to bring chocolates from the Bois de Boulogne and distribute them to floor managers and makeup artists. He never got round to publicising his film.

The Big Breakfast bed was a cauldron of simmering sexuality. If I’d given way to my baser inclinations, I’d have enjoyed post-show orgies. I was ripe for seduction but wary of home-wrecking, especially mine. I politely declined.

Some no-thank-yous were easy. Others required more fortified moral fibre.

Wesley Snipes made a flying visit to the UK. His thesis on the bed was that he’d like to climb my twin peaks and push criminals to certain death in the crevice of my cleavage. Back then in 1996, I thought I was happily married, but when my husband f****ed off three years later, uppermost among my regrets was “Damn! I bloody well should have sh****d Wesley Snipes!”

Jurassic Park hero Jeff Goldblum was quite simply sex on muscular, exceptionally shapely legs. One look at him and my ovaries somersaulted. He paints, plays jazz piano and looks deeply into your eyes. He is the mensch against whom I measure all other men and find them wanting.

I think he liked me a little bit too. He invited me to a party in the West End that night. I took my husband with me. Jeff spotted me and waved me over. Am I overstating it to say his face fell as he saw my hand interlaced with my husband’s?

Then there were the worst bedfellows, including Madonna who was too gigantic to entice into our bed. Instead, we had an allocated 14 minutes at the London junket to publicise the movie version of Evita.

Madonna was late. Channel 4 were billing ‘Madonna and Vanessa’ on the hour every hour. Six hours later, I was pushed into the room for six minutes. She looked bored, knackered and hostile. She didn’t bother looking up. The cameraman barked: “Lean back, Vanessa. You’re obscuring Madonna”.

“Good Lord,” I snapped. “Obscuring Madonna would be the pinnacle of my career”.

Her head shot up. We were off. She said Lourdes, a couple of months old, was upstairs and she was exhausted breast-feeding her between interviews. I asked if she was still into sex two months after having a baby. She smiled and complimented me on my bountiful bust.

Years later, on my Radio London show, Boris Johnson would drop in once a month to answer questions. He was a huge hit with the team. If the milk ran out, they’d put in a call to Bojo who’d stop off on his bike and pick up a carton on the way in. Helmet askew, bicycle clips akimbo, he would bowl into the building. From a presenter’s perspective, he was unbeatable.

His rhetorical flourishes inevitably earned us front-page headlines. Did I wonder if his verbal volleying was sport and if he cared more for the performance than the problems he was meant to be addressing? Sometimes. Mostly, watching him was a masterclass in Kipling’s common touch.

'Leo was grumpy but Sly kiss made up for it'

Soon I was on my way to Liverpool’s Albert Dock to join Richard and Judy on ITV’s This Morning. And if Hollywood stars refused to budge from the Presidential Suite at the Dorchester, the show sent me to interview them. One day I trotted to the hotel to find a monosyllabic 19-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio wearing a woollen beanie hat and surly slouch. He’d just starred in his breakout movie, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and was a typical truculent teenager.

I came up with an emergency strategy. Ask something unexpected. “If you weren’t stuck in this room with me right now, what would you rather be doing? And in what position?”

He perked up and engaged. Forcing Leo to cough up conversation was just the start. Later, I accosted Sylvester Stallone and was rewarded with a deep, fabulous French kiss from Rocky in full view of fans in Leicester Square.

I know this would be unforgivable today. But in 1993, I’d been married for eight years, and a bit of tongue action from one of the world’s most charismatic chaps – though surprisingly short, I’m five feet two and our embrace was eye to eye – wasn’t entirely unwelcome.

'I’d no idea Harris did this to other women'

Guess who you’ve got on the Big Breakfast bed tomorrow, Vanessa? if you’d promised Valerie Singleton and John Noakes with Petra and Shep, I wouldn’t have been more excited. Rolf Harris was part of all our childhoods, flipping a wobble board and splashing blobs of paint on a giant canvas.

Boarding the bed, he oozed affability. In his slipstream, his smiling wife Alwen, jammed into the tiny bedroom alongside the floor manager and cameraman.

On air, Rolf was jokey and full of beans. Then I heard a scratchy sound. It was the noise of the beads on my dress being crunched together as he gathered up the fabric at my ankles and started pulling it further and further up my legs.

I tried wriggling away from him. The bed was smaller than a real one. There was nowhere to go. I put the cushion I was leaning on between us. It made no difference. Rolf kept talking. His hand kept moving. His adoring wife was three feet away. We were live on TV. He was laughing as if everything was completely normal.

I couldn’t yell: “Rolf Harris is assaulting me!” I didn’t want to upset Alwen and disturb our viewers. His hand curved round to my inner thigh.

Every TV presenter learns on day one that you never throw to an ad break unless the floor manager cues you. That day, I had no choice. Just as Rolf’s hand touched my knicker elastic, I leaped a foot in the air and spluttered: “Oh, my goodness. Let’s go to a break. Now! Now! Now”.

I disentangled his fingers by jumping off the bed. Utterly unperturbed, Rolf chatted calmly to Alwen. The ad break finished. Rolf and I climbed back on the bed and made polite televisual conversation until our interview wound up. I didn’t make a complaint. I didn’t want to ruin his marriage. I was fine, really, and this is crucial: I didn’t know Rolf was doing the same thing to other women, underage girls, children. I didn’t know his wife was often a hovering presence. I didn’t know he had ever behaved like that to any woman except me.

I tried not to think about Rolf Harris after that and managed pretty well, until 2013 when two police officers turned up at my front door as part of Operation Yewtree. They had the footage of my interview from 17 years earlier. I gave an interview telling my story. In the end, I was never asked to appear in court.

After the interview, in the Sunday Express, I was vilely trolled, but more disturbing was the number of well-known female presenters who sought me out to confide Harris had done the same, or worse – sometimes far worse – to them.

I suppose our collective silence stemmed from fear of being hated for toppling an idol and branded a trouble-maker. #MeToo didn’t gather momentum until four years later.