Scots TV star Gail Porter is using her turbulent life story to help those struggling with dire poverty turn their lives around.
The resilient former presenter believes her own struggles qualify her to inspire struggling families to come back from the brink during this current cost of living crisis.
She spoke out after new findings show 1.6m Scots are dicing with poverty. And 29 per cent of Scots have zero savings.
Gail she is spreading a message of hope that she hopes will allow others bounce back from the despair caused by homelessness, bankruptcy and mental health trauma – all of which she’s survived.
She is fronting a campaign by Fair for You, a reputable, not for profit lender, which helps seal credit for those with poor credit ratings.
Gail said: “Once you’ve gone through quite a lot of negativity, like I have, you’re qualified to tell people who find themselves in abject poverty: ‘You’re not alone – this could happen to any one of us.’
“We could all lose our homes, especially nowadays, with the cost of living crisis.
“So many people are worried about whether they will have a roof over their head by the end of the year. Will they be able to afford the bills?
“People have to know that it’s ok to ask for help.”
Gail, from Edinburgh, became one of the 1990s most visible icons and an image of her naked body was beamed onto the House of Commons building in a stunt by lads magazine FHM in 1999.
The years after that saw a spiral of decline where she lost virtually everything – her home, her mental health, her marriage and all possessions.
She ended up in bankruptcy and being sectioned after a mental breakdown.
And she was finally reduced to owning nothing but one black bin bag of personal suggestions, as she sofa-surfed from one friend in London’s home to another’s.
Gail said her blackest days came around 11 years ago after she’s endured a painful divorce and was made bankrupt, dealing with more and more stress and the loss of her hair through illness.
She said: “When things started going bad for me, they quickly got out of control.
“I’d lost my hair. I was losing work because of the way that I looked and, agewise, I getting on a bit and I’d gone through a divorce.
“I had a young daughter to look after and the bills were coming in and I wasn’t actually getting much paid work.
“And my mental health was suffering and things were getting worse and worse.
“So suddenly I found myself in a situation where I had to sell the house I was living in and downsize and everything was going one way – downwards.
“I couldn’t really get my feet, I couldn’t get back on to figuring out how to how to build myself back up again.”
Gail’s alopecia, which caused hair loss in 2005, also knocked her confidence severely.
She said: “When my hair fell out, I wanted to make a statement to other people. My mum had gone through chemotherapy, so she lost hair for a different reason.
“And I thought, well, I’ve just lost hair, and it’s just cosmetic, you know, I’ve still got my health, I’ve still got everything else, and if I can help other people accept if they look different.
“But it was also a double edged sword, because people are saying ‘just wear a wig and you’ll look better and you might get more work’.
“And I just thought, I’m not doing that just to make everybody else happy.
“Anyway, that was on top of everything else, which all kind of just got worse and worse and then eventually I just couldn’t afford the rent of the place I was staying in.
“And one day I woke up to the fact that I was, financially, totally screwed.”
Gail was then forced to move out of the flat she was renting and turned to friends and a long period of sofa surfing.
She said: “It was quite an embarrassing time for me, sofa surfing at that age and my daughter, Honey, was staying with her father.
“I just couldn’t see an end to it, and I ended up sort of sitting on a bench in Hampstead Heath in London one day just thinking, oh my gosh, you don’t know who to ask for help. You don’t know where to go.”
Gail’s turning point came when she was booked to appear on Big Brother in 2015 – which she found to be exploitative but admits it gave her a financial foothold once again.
She said: “I knew they were coming to me because I was at my lowest ebb and broken down.
“I think I was the lowest paid person ever to go on Bib Brother but it was a means to an end and it did alter the course my life was on.
“I got a tiny flat, but then I didn’t have a bed, I didn’t have a washing machine or a TV – or anything else.”
Shockingly, Gail had lost all her possessions after putting them into storage then failing to recover them as she couldn’t pay the ongoing fees – meaning they were sold off.
She said: “I had put everything I owned in storage, but then I couldn’t afford to get it out, so I watched that program, Storage Wars, just to see if I could see who might have got my stuff for a song.
“I can laugh about it now but it was a dreadful thing to happen. Everything I owned just got sold off because I couldn’t afford the storage fee and the prices.
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“It was everything – wardrobes, beds, everything that I owned was in storage because my flat that I got, which was meant to be a stop-gap, was so tiny, like the size of a kitchen, and I couldn’t get anything in it.”
That experience of hitting rock-bottom made Gail feel a connection for all Scots facing the same desolation today.
Simon Dukes, chief executive of Fair for You, said: “The latest data from Fair4All Finance shows that more than a third of Scots are in financially vulnerable circumstances, and data earlier this year showed that 29% of Scottish households have no savings.
“When people have no financial safety net, they may feel they have no option in a moment of financial stress but to turn to high-cost credit or illegal lenders.
“We’re proud of the support we do provide, and we are helping more and more customers all the time thanks to Social Investment Scotland – and also now thanks to Gail, who is destigmatising the issue of financial exclusion by being so honest about her experiences of appliance poverty and just how hopeless it can feel without the right support.”