Esther Rantzen, That's Life! and the TV Moment That Made Nicholas Winton a Household Name

Dame Esther Rantzen is being remembered not only for her charity work but for a broadcasting career that produced one of the most emotional moments in British television history. Alongside founding Childline, the helpline for children, and The Silver Line, which supports older people facing loneliness, she created a lasting television legacy during her long run on That's Life!

She fronted the hugely popular BBC One programme from 1973 until 1994, steering it from a consumer rights show into an issues-based series that attracted large audiences. Among the many items it covered, one episode in 1988 became the defining moment of her career, and clips of it have resurfaced repeatedly on social media in the years since.

That moment centred on Nicholas Winton, the man who organised the rescue of 669 children from Czechoslovakia after Nazi forces occupied the country in 1939. Dame Esther had been told his story and invited him onto the programme, where his remarkable achievements were finally shared with the public after decades of silence.

Winton, who was born to German-Jewish parents, had travelled briefly to Prague, where he compiled a list of children in need of sponsorship and set about finding homes for them in Britain. He worked with activists and humanitarians in Czechoslovakia to overcome complex political hurdles, including the challenge of moving children through the Netherlands, which had closed its borders to Jewish refugees. His efforts succeeded in part because of a House of Commons ruling on admitting young refugees, passed a couple of months before his rescue mission got under way.

With assistance from his mother, Winton placed photographs of the children in British magazines such as Picture Post in an effort to secure them homes, and he arranged for hostels to take in some of the refugees as well. He also raised money to cover the children's travel and to supply them with essentials once they arrived on British soil.

For nearly 50 years, his work went largely unreported. That changed only when his wife discovered a scrapbook in their loft containing the names of the children he had saved. The scrapbook was passed to Holocaust researchers, who helped track down some of those he had helped, and his story soon became national news.

It was Dame Esther who brought that story to a mass audience when Winton appeared on That's Life! in February 1988. Speaking in February 2024, she recalled getting in touch with him, whom she called Nicky, and congratulating him on his extraordinary achievement. She told The Radio Times that he had expressed disappointment about his efforts, remarking that "not enough" people had been saved.

"I was devastated that he felt he had failed," Dame Esther said. "I wanted to prove to this extraordinary man that every life he had saved was precious."

She invited him onto the programme, and during that first appearance his scrapbook was shared with the audience. Two women he had saved as children, Vera Gissing and Lady Milena Grenfell-Baines, then revealed their identities to him on television. They were seated on either side of Winton, who had no idea of the surprise being planned, something Dame Esther later described as "incredibly moving."

Lady Milena is among the most recognised Holocaust survivors in the UK. She left Prague with her younger sister Eva at the age of nine on a special train arranged by Winton, and the two sisters were cared for by a Tameside family until their mother, who had escaped via Norway, arrived the following year. Gissing, rescued from Prague in 1939 at the age of 11, lost most of her family during the Holocaust and settled in the UK after the war.

Dame Esther said the encounter was the only time in her career when she had to stop recording to wipe away her tears.

The production team was then contacted by viewers who had watched the show and realised their own connection to Winton, giving the programme's makers an idea that would become one of British television's most famous sequences. "In our next episode, I asked all those who owed their lives to him to stand, and Nicky, whom we had seated on the front row, turned to see the whole ground floor of the Television Theatre on their feet," Dame Esther recalled.

The scene has been rediscovered by new audiences in subsequent years thanks to social media, and Dame Esther said she watched the episode many times, finding herself deeply moved on each occasion. She kept in contact with Winton, meeting him regularly until his death in 2015 at the age of 106.

Although the programme forged a permanent bond between them, Dame Esther said hearing the stories of the children he had saved also made her feel immensely lucky to have been a Jew born in England in the 1940s.

Winton's humanitarian work was recognised with a knighthood in 2003, and his life has since inspired a number of films and documentaries, most recently the biopic One Life, starring Sir Anthony Hopkins. The film premiered at the Toronto Film Festival before going on general release, introducing his story to yet another generation.