Former Breakfast television presenter Selina Scott likes nothing better than being alone with her animals on her North Yorkshire farm. But she goes public to tell Hannah Stephenson of her anger at TV ageism and the NHS treatment of her late father.

SELINA SCOTT is an angry woman.

The willowy blonde, likened in looks to Diana, Princess of Wales, and famed for her interviews with royalty, has had her own “annus horribilis”.

While the 58-year-old broadcaster’s legal action against channel Five for age discrimination rumbled on last year, she claims that her father, 81, who was dying in Scarborough Hospital, was treated appallingly by NHS staff because of his age.

Today, she’s still incensed about ageism in TV and about her father’s treatment at the hands of the NHS. She’s angry, it seems, about quite a lot of things.

“The average spent on a new child being born in the NHS is £3,000. For every person who dies it’s £300. It’s wonderful that mothers should be given all these things in NHS hospitals, but when you come to the end of your life you’re lucky if you get a bed,” she says.

Ms Scott was hugely distressed by the treatment her father received, saying that staff acted as if he was too old to be saved. He died on Christmas Eve after suffering considerable pain from a terminal lung complaint and pneumonia.

“I’ve had letters from people all over the country who’ve experienced the same or similar in the NHS. It’s always older people and the issue is always lack of dignity, carelessness and sloppiness. They don’t care very much. They shovel them (old people) off into a corner and sedate them as far as they can.”

Her grief is palpable, but she wants to convert it into action. She’s still going through the official complaints procedure and says she will take legal action if she doesn’t receive a satisfactory response.

“I don’t know how I coped. It was a shock that he died in the first place, but we’d had to fight for the last two weeks of his life for anyone to take his condition seriously.”

The same month she reached an out-of-court settlement with Five, for a rumoured £250,000, after she was passed over for a new job.

She accused the TV channel of ageism after it gave Natasha Kaplinsky’s maternity leave position on Five News to Isla Traquair, who is half Ms Scott’s age.

It’s easy not to feel sorry for her over the TV ageism issue. After all, she didn’t complain about ageism when she was young and in great demand.

Critics have accused her of sour grapes and of being disrespectful and patronising towards her younger female colleagues.

Yet she’s not as haughty, sulky or sour as you might imagine, and isn’t blind to the irony of the fact that she may have unwittingly started the trend for the younger female/older male set-up on the TV studio sofa.

“I used to call it the ‘second wife syndrome’.

I looked like the younger second wife to Frank Bough. He was there to guide me through life and I had to snuggle up to him and look winsome and pay attention. It’s still the same,” she reflects.

“Men do have a longer longevity on British television. It’s not right, but that’s the way it is.

It doesn’t matter how much you might talk about it or campaign against it, it’s not going to change.”

Despite rumours about her private life over the years, she remains single, will not discuss her personal life and shuns the spotlight.

She loved the TV job which gave her the high profile, but hated the attention which that exposure brought. She spent her TV career surrounded by people, but nowadays is never happier than when she is on her own.

She rarely watches television yet appeared recently in a celebration of 25 years of breakfast television with Francis Wilson, Mike Smith, Russell Grant, Sue Cook and Angela Rippon.

She says: “It was a shock and was funny to see people I haven’t seen for 25 years, and they’d recreated the old set. I was the main presenter for the day. It was lovely to do live television again. I haven’t done live television for some time, but it was a bit like getting on a bike again. I do miss the buzz of live television.”

She chose to leave that world some years ago.

“Television was becoming more celebrityorientated and the questions that were required of me as an interviewer were the kind of questions I felt uncomfortable with.

“I remember doing a show for Sky and Darren Day was one of my guests. The producer said into my earpiece ‘Just ask him who he’s going out with’, and I didn’t really want to know. But that’s the way it is.”

She grew up in Yorkshire, the daughter of a police sergeant and journalist, and the eldest of five children. She began her career in newspapers in Dundee, later joining Grampian Television, ITV’s News At Ten and BBC’s Breakfast Time.

FOR the past few years she has lived on a farm in Ampleforth, North Yorkshire, and runs a business selling socks, made with the wool from her herd of 24 pedigree Angora goats. From time to time she escapes to her lovingly-restored holiday home in Majorca, the subject of her latest book, A Long Walk In The Hills.

She surrounds herself with animals – goats, three dogs, a cat and any other waifs and strays which cross her path.

She doesn’t feel that she sacrificed a family for her career, nor does she regret not having children, although she’ll say no more than that.

She certainly wouldn’t be tempted back into television through the many reality shows she’s been offered, including I’m A Celebrity and Big Brother. “The latest one was Hell’s Kitchen and I’d have quite liked to have met Marco Pierre White, but I’m not a cook so I didn’t want to do that.

“It’s celebrity for the sake of it and sometimes it’s quite cruel to watch people being made fun of. I remember Jennie Bond, a fine journalist, being buried in a pit and having rats crawl all over her in the jungle. I don’t understand it, and it’s a shame that someone who is talented had to do that for attention.

“I have no regrets. Life is very short and I’d like to do something with my life which will help make a difference.”

■ A Long Walk In The High Hills by Selina Scott (Ebury, £14.99).