Denise Robertson, who has died aged 83, was agony aunt of the ITV daytime television show This Morning. Over the course of her 27 years with the show, she is estimated to have helped 200,000 viewers. She would answer letters or respond to calls during programmes, but she would also stay behind after each show, often for hours, to counsel callers who had not been able to get time on air. Her own experiences, of debt, depression, bereavement and many other issues, helped her advise others facing similar situations.
She was born in Sunderland, younger daughter of Catherine (nee Cahill) and Herbert Broderick. Her father’s shipping business failed before she was born, there were constant financial worries and, Denise recalled, “I had to be old before my time … when I was five my mother was terrified of thunder. She would lock herself in the cupboard under the stairs and I remember saying ‘It’s all right mummy, it will stop in a minute.’”
Denise went to Sunderland high school and was a bright scholarship girl but, feeling she was needed at home, she declined the chance to go to university and took a first job as a clerk at Sunderland Royal Infirmary, although she was soon promoted to medical secretary. In 1960 she married Alex Robertson and their son, Mark, was born in 1962.
She worked as a counsellor in the early 1970s and began writing fiction, winning £1,000 in a BBC competition for a TV play. In 1972, her husband, sister Joyce and mother died, and Denise found herself having to sell her jewellery, including her wedding ring, to feed herself and her son. The following year, despite her anxieties over what people might think, she married Jack Tomlin, the widowed father of her son’s best friend, and in the process acquired four stepsons. But the north-east in the 70s was a hard place to live – his business also collapsed, and Denise, Jack and their five children lived in sub-standard housing.
Determined to build on her earlier writing success, Denise began producing short stories, television scripts and novels. Her first novel, Nurse in Doubt, a hospital romance, was published by Mills & Boon in 1984. The trilogy that followed, The Land of Lost Content (1984), A Year of Winter (1986) and Blue Remembered Hills (1987), was set in a fictional Durham pit village, Belgate, and reflected her love for the north-east. The last of her 20 novels, Don’t Cry Aloud (2015), looks at forced adoption, an issue she had encountered as an agony aunt.
Denise also turned her hand to writing for magazines about the many issues she had had to deal with or saw others struggling to overcome. “People started writing to me and I would reply,” she said. Soon she was appearing on Metro Radio in Newcastle as an agony aunt and then, in 1985, the BBC invited her to appear as the agony aunt on Junior Advice Line, a segment in Breakfast Time. She left in 1986 to concentrate on her fiction but in 1988 she was asked to take part in a new morning programme, This Morning. She intended to do it for a year; in the event, she stayed for nearly 30.
She had her own show on ITV, Dear Denise, in 2000, and appeared in a wide range of programmes, from The Paul O’Grady Show, Loose Women and Big Brother’s Bit on the Side to Any Questions. She had an advice website, DearDenise.com, wrote a column for Candis magazine and published a number of advice books. Of a series of eight self-help books she edited in 2007, covering postnatal depression, bereavement, debt, breakups, addictions, infertility, depression and domestic violence, she joked: “Of the eight topics, there are only three I haven’t experienced.”
She served as an independent on her local council, drove for Meals on Wheels and for 10 years chaired a local club for disabled people. In 1983 she formed a trust, funded by the Manpower Services Commission, to provide work for the long-term unemployed; within five years, it had found jobs for more than 240 people. Her autobiography, Agony? Don’t Get Me Started, was published in 2006. In that year, too, she was appointed MBE for services to broadcasting and to charity, and was given the freedom of the City of Sunderland.
Denise approached everything she did with compassion and passion. She earned viewers’ trust, respect and affection because she was utterly genuine; the person you saw on screen was exactly the person she was in real life.
In 2008 she joined fellow agony aunts and representatives of family and child charities in an alliance called Kids in the Middle, addressing the plight of children caught between warring parents facing separation. On one occasion we met government ministers led by Ed Balls, then secretary of state for children, schools and families. Denise thumped the table, fixed Ed with a gimlet eye and demanded more money for charities such as Relate and Family Lives for essential support. He gave it.
Jack died of a stroke in 1995. Denise is survived by her third husband, Bryan Thubron, whom she married in 1997, and by her son and three of her stepsons.
• Denise Robertson, television agony aunt and writer, born 9 June 1932; died 31 March 2016
• This article was amended on 6 April 2016. Denise Robertson won a BBC competition for a TV play, rather than a radio play, and her winning entry was broadcast as The Soda Water Fountain on BBC2 in 1972.
