On the way into her production company, just off Tottenham Court Road in central London, someone who looks exactly like Myleene Klass ducks in ahead of me, carrying a stack of soft drinks. Either she is a singularly unstarry star, famous to varying degrees since she joined the band Hear’Say in 2001, and still going to the corner shop herself rather than sending a minion. Or, she is a narcissist who only employs people if they look like her. Such are the pitfalls of 15 years in the public eye – judgments peak and trough, praise one minute, insinuation the next, so that by the end of it, you could be anybody. Incidentally, she is the first – the person who still gets her own fizzy pop, and gets everyone else one while she’s there.
If you only follow the sidebar of shame with one eye, you might think of Klass as one of those people who is notable merely for existing at high visibility. She gets written about a lot for no obvious reason – on one occasion of peak Daily Mail, the subject of an article about how “she covered her enviably slender frame with a covetable red dress”. This endless, bitter-hearted papping could trick you into thinking she herself has no content, and is just moving the cups so fast that nobody notices there isn’t a pea. In fact, she is extremely productive. “I’ve worked so hard over the past 10 years,” she says of her clothing ranges – a baby one for Mothercare and womenswear for Littlewoods. “The hard work comes from my mum and dad, being in the forces and in the NHS.” There is an edge; actually, more than that, more like a wedge, of defensiveness, as if she is underlyingly livid at the workshy reputation a pop-star-slash-model-slash-TV-personality might have, but she swears that criticism doesn’t even make it on to her radar.
“At the end of the day, all those criticisms that get thrown at me, they don’t pay my mortgage, so until they do …” Her delivery, for these interludes of indignation, becomes staccato and stage-school, slightly overdone, with a pause for emphasis after each word and a terrifying urgency … “Until. Those. Criticisms. Pay. My. Mortgage. They don’t make any difference whatsoever. It’s actually none of my business what people I’ve never met think of me.” I don’t believe she is even a tenth as angry as she sounds. I think there is a kind of amplification demanded by pop culture, where celebrities always have to smile a little wider, speak a little slower and raise their eyebrows a little higher to get across what they’re trying to get across. When it’s jollity, sexiness or enthusiasm, it all makes sense; but when it’s magnified politics, anger or justification, it takes you aback a bit, and all the way through the interview tape I can hear myself underneath, murmuring: “Yeahyeahyeahabsolutelyyeah … Nononononoyou’recompletlyrightyeah,” as if trying to placate a hurricane.
Klass – whose mother is from the Philippines and whose father was Austrian – grew up in Norfolk, in the 80s, where “[since I wasn’t] black mixed race, I wasn’t even asked where I was from, I was asked: ‘What are you?’
“When I used to do exams, I used to look at those boxes ... it will mean nothing to you, but it would fill me with fear. I didn’t know which box to tick. I wasn’t Chinese English; I didn’t have a box. I would have to write ‘other’.”
Klass’s mother came to the UK as a nurse; her father was a refugee.
I try to get her to talk about immigration and the EU referendum, but she demurs: “All I can say from my own experience is that I’m the daughter of immigrants, and proud to be.” The reason I thought she might have any view on Brexit is the main difference between her and a regular TV personality – she has opinions, and is prepared to say them out loud, but they don’t always fit into any obvious ideological constellation. She caused a furore recently when she tweeted a request by a parent at her daughters’ school that, instead of bringing any old present to a birthday party, parents club together to buy the kid a Kindle. Social media was beside itself at the spoiltness of it.
“Trust me, it would be way easier to go: Here’s the 20 quid. But I had just landed from a trip to Nepal with Save the Children where, for 20p a day, you could buy the inoculations needed or feed a family. I just thought: No more, enough. Why can’t we just be happy with what we’ve got? I got loads of emails of secret support from other parents, saying: ‘You go, you! I don’t want to cause any trouble for myself, but you go.’” (Indeed, she did cause trouble for herself, and got told off by the headteacher.)
Another controversy was when she confronted Ed Miliband about his plans for a mansion tax, on ITV’s The Agenda, at the end of 2014. These two positions don’t seem natural bedfellows: that, on the one hand, we should stop consuming and be happy with what we’ve got, yet on the other, a £2m house is relatively small fry and shouldn’t be taxed. But she says she wasn’t disagreeing with it per se. “I just asked a question. How many houses are worth this much and how much do you need to raise? I. Asked. A. Question … That. Was. My. Question. And I pay my taxes, as [the press] opened my knicker drawer to show, yes, I bloody well do, and I’m proud to do so, and I’ll tell you why: my mum is a nurse in the NHS. My best friend is a nurse in the NHS. Three of the band in Hear’Say were nurses in the NHS. All my life, I’ve been raised by nurses. My dad was in the forces … They only brought me on that programme because they wanted me to be a hairflicky pop star. But that’s not who I am.” (Yeahyeahyeahcompletelyyeahmetoo.) The next day, she says: “Ed was ringing me, asking: ‘Can I come back on your radio show?’ And then David Cameron was ringing me, everybody wanted to come and see me. And I was, like, I’m so sorry, I’m on the school run.”
While, outwardly, things may have looked relatively quiet after that – Klass presented ITV’s BBQ Champ, which got 2 million viewers but was no match for The Great British Bake Off’s 10 million, and was axed after one season – in the meantime, she divorced the father of her children, Graham Quinn (the pair have two girls, Hero, now five, and Ava, eight), and had been mulling over the condition of single parenthood.
“I remember the first time someone said: ‘How does it feel to be a single mum now?’ I was so frightened of the stigma of the title, but it’s the best club I’ve ever been in. I feel very privileged – I know how hardworking the members of it are, there is a mutual respect.”
This has led to her new show, which started off with the title Single Mum and has morphed inevitably into Single Mums on Benefits. Working against the stereotypes, she approaches it with sympathy, not judgment, letting you know with her winning smile and explosive diction that everything you think is wrong.
“I went around vox-popping in a certain area in London: what are the first words that come to you when I say ‘single mum’? We had to move areas, because nine times out of 10, people said ‘teenage mum’. But the average single mum is 37. So already that’s given you a completely different view of what a single mother is. What I could not believe is that the two teenage girls on the show who are single mums aren’t entitled to claim benefits because they’re deemed children in the eyes of the law. It was as if the record player stopped. There is no such thing as a teenage mum on benefits, unless you’re talking about only 19-year-olds. They don’t have any options other than begging from their friends or going to their family. That idea of teenagers having babies to get council houses is completely insane. Most single mums are like you and me.”
She zones in on how tough it is to live on benefits – “I lived with a family in Wales, and every morning the mum woke up and checked her bank balance” – and, despite the title, the programme also includes single fathers. “It’s 50:50. One of the single dads that I interviewed said that, on the whole, when most people first hear it, he feels judged for being feckless. But when they find out that his wife died, he’s instantly a hero. That heroism isn’t necessarily ascribed to his single mum friends. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances are; no matter how you got there, you’re there. I get it already without having to understand your backstory.”
If you object on principle to programmes that define human beings by their financial relationship with the state – and I know I do – you might have to park that. Klass has done something unusual. She has taken her very mainstream and intensely commercial sensibility (her ambitions are very no-nonsense: expand the clothing lines into more countries, extend their range) but rejected the limp-wristed impartiality that usually goes with it, where canny people concentrate on their bikini lines and don’t take a view. I liked her. YeahyeahyeahhonestlyIreallydid.
•Myleene Klass: Single Mums on Benefits is on ITV1 tonight at 9pm
