Vanessa Collingridge

Vanessa Collingridge is a British author and broadcaster.

Youngest of the five children of Gordon Collingridge and his wife Irene (born Irene Keeping), Collingridge was born and brought up in Woking, Surrey in England. She read Geography at Hertford College, Oxford, where she earned a first class MA in 1990, despite contracting viral encephalitis in her second year which caused an almost fatal swelling of her brain. It was also at Oxford that she met her husband Alan Watt.

After graduating, Collingridge moved immediately to a career in television, first as a question checker on game shows Wheel of Fortune and Win, Lose or Draw, and then for 14 months as a weathergirl on BBC Scotland. In the early to mid-1990s she appeared from time to time on BBC television's Gardeners' World. She has since worked as a producer and presenter on all five British national terrestrial television channels, as well as BBC national radio.

In 2000 she quit her job as a television presenter on Tonight with Trevor McDonald to author two biographies, one of 18th=century explorer James Cook and one of Celtic warrior queen Boudica. During her research for the former, she discovered she shared ancestry with controversial Australian writer and illustrator George Collingridge, who asserted in 1895 that Australia was discovered by the Portuguese.

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