Vanessa Collingridge
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Vanessa Collingridge | |
|---|---|
| Born | Vanessa Jane Collingridge 12 January 1968 |
| Education | Hertford College, Oxford (MA in Geography, First Class) |
| Occupations | Author, broadcaster |
| Known for | Biographies of James Cook and Boudica, historical cartography |
| Notable work | Cook: Obsession and Betrayal in the New World (2002); Boudica (2005) |
| Spouse | Alan Watt |
| Children | Archie, Angus, Finn, Dougal |
Vanessa Jane Collingridge[1] (born 12 January 1968)[2][3] is a British author and broadcaster.
Youngest of the five children of Gordon Ernest Collingridge (1927–2007)[4] and his wife Irene (born Irene Keeping), Collingridge was born and brought up in Woking, Surrey in England. She read Geography at Hertford College, Oxford, where she earned a first class MA in 1990,[5] despite contracting viral encephalitis in her second year which caused an almost fatal swelling of her brain.[6] It was also at Oxford that she met her husband Allan Watt.[7]
Career
After graduating, Collingridge moved immediately to a career in television, first as a question checker on game shows Wheel of Fortune and Win, Lose or Draw, and then for 14 months as a weather presenter on BBC Scotland.[6] In the early to mid-1990s she appeared from time to time on BBC television's Gardeners' World. She worked on Spanish public television in 1993 as a co-presenter of "That's English!", an English learning program for Spanish people.[8] She has since worked as a producer and presenter on all five British national terrestrial television channels, as well as BBC national radio.[5]
In 2000 she quit her job as a television presenter on Tonight with Trevor McDonald to author two biographies, one of 18th-century explorer James Cook and one of Celtic warrior queen Boudica.[7] During her research for the former, she discovered she shared ancestry with controversial Australian writer and illustrator George Collingridge, who asserted in 1895 that Australia was discovered by the Portuguese.[7][9][10]
She has described her very early interest in feminism in the introduction to her book on Boudica in 2005: "What started as a strong-willed desire for independence became a fully-fledged, bra-burning (if only I had been old enough to wear one) mentality... Certainly, I cannot remember a time when I wasn't acutely aware of the inherently political nature of woman's position in society and – much to my father's disgust and my now extreme embarrassment – by the grand old age of twelve, I would proudly read Cosmopolitan magazine and proclaim myself a feminist!"[11]
She returned to television in 2007 as writer and narrator of the four-part miniseries Captain Cook: Obsession and Discovery.[12]
