Selina’s secret sanctuary
When TV’s Selina Scott stumbled on an old finca in Mallorca, her life took an upward turn. Roderick Gilchrist travelled there and found her in relaxed mood but still angry over her very public case of age discrimination. Photographs by Andrew Montgomery
What happens when instead of reporting the news, you become the news? In Selina Scott’s case the solution was straightforward enough, if perhaps a little drastic. Despairing at the increasing intrusion of cameras into every aspect of her personal life, she found refuge in a crumbling finca on Mallorca, an island she barely knew. And she has never regretted her decision to embark on an ambitious restoration project which began over 20 years ago. This yearning to rebuild and renew might reasonably be interpreted as a metaphor for that stage of her personal and professional life.
She had stumbled across the 200-year-old stone house by accident in the mid-Eighties. Searching for a short cut to the fishing port of San Telm, she had stepped off a cart track in a pine forest and waded through a field of wild fennel into a valley of almond and olive trees. At its centre lay the house, shuttered, tangled in vines, seemingly deserted and unloved.
She returned home to England determined to put it out of her mind, but within months she was back on the island again. The owners told her it was for sale. They also told her it had no gas or electricity, no mains water, no roof to speak of, and on top of that it had a dangerously unstable track which tradesmen refused to drive down. Selina simply replied: “OK, I’ll buy it.”
“The more basic the place the better as far as I was concerned,” she recalls. “It was to be my secret sanctuary, a step back from the frenetic pace of my London life and career. When I told friends what I had done they said I was potty. What was I thinking of? It was then I came over all shaky myself.”
Now she has written a wry and affectionate book about her life in Mallorca, and how her growing love affair with the house gave her renewed purpose.
“The book is an appreciation of an island going through tremendous changes but which still has in its midst large areas of tranquil beauty. During the years I have lived here I have got to know the villagers who welcomed me and who have included me in their lives. I have watched this community as babies have grown into adulthood and older people I have known have died. Its about the cycle of life in a Mallorcan village which is beginning to disappear, and I wanted to put it all down while it was fresh in my memory.
“I still have plans for the house and garden, which will continue to develop. I don’t spend as much time here as I would like but whenever I think of my hideaway in Mallorca in the middle of a freezing cold English winter it fills me with pleasure.”
When she first arrived on the island she was one of the most famous faces on television, plucked at the age of 29 from the relative anonymity of Grampian TV in Scotland to become co-anchor with Sir Alistair Burnet on News At Ten. The viewing public warmed to her rapidly and when in 1983 she moved to the BBC to launch Britain’s first breakfast TV show with Frank Bough and Nick Ross, she was running Diana, Princess of Wales, close in the popularity stakes. The two iconic blondes even resembled each other.
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