Gillaine
Hathaway - From Beauty Chats on BBC radio in the ‘60s to becoming events
contributor to Essential Guide in 2002, my working life has been long,
varied and interesting. But the key to over 40 happy years in the media
has always been the boss. From the BBC’s Brian Willie, my directors
and editors at GBC, the Gibraltar Chronicle and Spanish national radio
plus the excellent editors of the magazines for whom I currently work,
whatever success I have had is due to them.
My media career started
back in the ‘60s on television because of my beauty training. In
those days the only work for women was on women’s or children’s
programmes. It was the same in Gibraltar, where I ended up after coming
to the Costa del Sol in 1964 (for a six-month holiday from which I never
returned) and where I had my own weekly women’s programme on TV.
“Woman’s World” was fun and attracted a great many male
viewers across the frontier as well as on the Rock. Not because of my
genius but because of the array of gorgeous girls I had appearing each
week!
As an international
consultant for Estee Lauder, I travelled around the world several times
a year, launching in new countries, visiting existing markets, taking
training schools and doing lots more TV from the Middle East to Australia.
I also used to compere the Gibraltar Song Festivals and, as the British
Song Writers Guild were involved, when their representative, Brian Willey,
an executive producer at the BBC, flew over, he asked me to do some beauty
chats on what was then their Light Programme.
Whilst in Gibraltar I was asked to write a beauty column in a local newspaper, something I enjoyed because, even though I had had no official journalistic training, it was beauty-based and was easy. Then, soon after my family moved back to Marbella in the late ‘70s, Jon Searle, the Gibraltar Chronicle editor, asked me to write a Costa Column. A bold idea, in my opinion, as the frontier was still closed and, as I hastened to assure him, I was no journalist! But he encouraged me and I went on to work for the Chronicle for the next 18 years.
