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Gail Porter (born 23 March 1971 at the Simpson's Memorial Hospital in Edinburgh, Scotland), sometimes known by her married name Gail Hipgrave, is a Scottish television presenter.

Biography

Born in Scotland, after making an unsuccessful bid to join the presentation team of the BBC children's show Blue Peter, ¹ Porter has tended to present family-friendly television programmes, or ones aimed directly at children. This includes The Movie Chart Show, Top of the Pops, and Live & Kicking, work for CITV , and other programmes such as The Big Breakfast and Gail Porter's Big 90s for VH1.

In the late 1990s she began to pose for photos in men's magazines such as FHM. Probably the best-known product of her many photo-sessions is one particular still in which she is seen completely nude from behind.

Porter projected onto Parliament in 1999

The image became well known due to the events of one night in 1999, when FHM, along with guerrilla marketing company Cunning Communications, beamed an enormous projection of her onto the exterior of the Houses of Parliament, with an accompanying message urging people to vote for Gail in the FHM Top 100 Sexiest Women Poll.². In her autobiography, Porter claims that she did not know about the stunt until it was reported in the news the following day.^{citation needed}

In 2001, Porter took part in the Reality TV show Celebrity Blind Man's Bluff ³ and in 2003, she was a contestant on Channel 4's The Games, although injury truncated her participation.

Recently she presented three series of Dead Famous and episodes of The Gadget Show, temporarily replacing Suzi Perry.

Personal Life

Porter dated The Prodigy lead singer Keith Flint, moving in together in a house in Essex. They were known as 'Beauty and the Beast' due to Porter's innocent beauty and Flint's hair raising style. The couple split in 2000, because it was too far away for Porter to commute on a daily basis for her work in the city, and their relationship wasn't working out.

She married Toploader guitarist Dan Hipgrave in August 2001, with whom she had a daughter, Honey, in 2002. They separated in the summer of 2004, and Porter has spoken publicly about her ensuing battles with stress, drugs and post-natal depression. In 2005 her conditions triggered alopecia areata, causing her to lose much of her hair.⁴ She refused to wear a hat or wig, deciding instead to maintain a public profile and raise awareness of the condition. On an appearance on the Richard & Judy show 15 February 2006 she showed that her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were beginning to grow back.⁵ On 12 April 2006 Porter said "It is possible that I'm going to get my hair back."⁶

Porter's experience with alopecia areata was the subject of the BBC ONE Life series documentary Gail Porter Laid Bare on 31 May 2006 ⁷. Gail is a frequent user of Twitter.

Her autobiography, Laid Bare: My Story Of Love, Fame And Survival, was published in September 2007.

Footnotes

External links

• Gail Porter at the Internet Movie Database