“They don’t make ‘em like they used to” can be said of all manner of types of people, from end of the pier comedians to head waiters. But when it comes to agony aunts, it may well be true. Last week, This Morning’s much-loved problem-solver Denise Robertson died, aged 83. She was a contributor who swiftly became an inviolable TV fixture, cosy as a nesting hen on the studio sofa, dispensing firm but fair assessments of wildly complex emotional issues. Last year, I edited the monthly subscription magazine Candis, and she became our agony aunt.
Every month she’d send in pristine copy, carefully tailored to the word count and audience, in her ninth decade, and still kindly but briskly solving reader’s troubles with a combination of empathy and straight talking (opening a back issue at random, one of her replies begins: “There seems to be a number of people who think their role at work is to cause trouble.”) Now she’s gone – and that breed of old-school agony aunt may well have gone with her.
The internet, with its endless forums, debates and user-generated content, has done away with the idea of experts advising the ordinary folk. If you have a problem nowadays, it’s unlikely you’ll sit down and craft an email to a stranger, wait weeks for it to appear in print or be read out on TV, and then gratefully enact their advice. Instead, you’ll just go on Mumsnet, (“anyone else in love with the postman?”) post a vague update on Facebook (“what’s up hunni, u ok?”) or scour the hundreds of thousands of online forums where similar problems to yours are detailed and answered. I sought advice online last year, when I was particularly stressed, and once I’d filtered out the US mid-west answers – “I handed my pain to Jesus Christ” – I found my fellow sufferers to be just as helpful as any professional.
This is, of course, a recent phenomenon. When I was growing up in the 80s, the only option, if you had a problem you were too embarrassed to talk to your friends about, was to write to an agony aunt – from Jackie magazine’s sensible older sisters Cathy and Claire to Just 17’s groovy agony uncle, Nick Fisher. Everyone turned to the advice pages first, and when I graduated to nicking my mum’s Cosmo, I learnt all I needed to know (and some things I didn’t) from Irma Kurtz.
Agony aunts evolved early, a gradual formalising of the wise woman of the woods. Where factual advice – legal and medical – was traditionally male, emotional support was largely the preserve of women. In Victorian magazines, “Shy Violet” would write in about whether to wait for the suitor she loved or make a sensible marriage with the one her parents had approved, and receive stern, morally instructive replies: “Do not let youthful foolishness obscure your mother’s good sense”. The agony aunt endured throughout the 20th century (“my sweetheart is away fighting, and I have lost my heart to another,”) but it wasn’t until the late 60s that sex reared up in the problem pages (before that, it was generally called “being silly” or “going too far with a boy”.) But once it did, courtesy of Cosmo and its ilk, the letters came pouring in.
Agony aunts such as Marjorie Proops and Claire Rayner opened up a world that had previously been only whispered of in kitchens and clinics – advice on orgasms, contraception, gay rights and domestic violence was now being read over breakfast.
By the 90s, it was perfectly acceptable for a teenage girl to write to a magazine asking about threesomes, or how her boyfriend wanted anal sex and she wasn’t keen. I became the “sexpert” agony aunt for Company in the late 90s, aged 27. It was less my personal expertise and more my non-judgmental stance they liked, I suspect – because the one thing a modern agony aunt never offered was moral superiority. Everything was perfectly normal, lovey (thank you, Claire Rayner) and our main job was to offer advice that was both practical and general – so that every other reader who was worried about her lady parts, or her oral sex technique, or her cheating boyfriend, could benefit too.
It worked on TV and radio, it worked in print, and the celebrity agony aunt – most recently, Graham Norton offering wisdom in a weekend broadsheet – is still a fixture, presumably on the basis that it’s impossible simultaneously to remain famous and question other peoples’ morals.
I wonder, though, whether Denise, as she was always known to her loyal fans, was the last old-school agony aunt, whose words were absorbed by millions, and who walked the narrow path between sense and censure so effortlessly. It was clear that like past beloved agony aunts, she was a woman with a wealth of experience to draw on, a genuine wise woman. By contrast, current generations seemingly prefer feel-good nuggets of advice from ubiquitous vlogger Zoella, or the “me too” inclusivity of Mumsnet.
Print magazines are fewer and thinner than they were, TV advice now involves couples trying out sex toys on camera – and the agony aunt is a throwback to a time before Sex and the City, where sexual information came in medical pamphlets, and talking openly about feelings was for the emotionally incontinent.
Things may be better now, with the field now also open to men to share their pain too, and campaigns focusing on gay teens, mental health issues and sex education flooding Twitter. But I feel we have lost something with the passing of Denise and those like her – if only the sense that somebody, somewhere, was older and wise than ourselves – and always knew exactly what to say when we most needed help.
