Career: Originally intending to follow her father into acting, Britton spent two years at drama school and three years as a theatre stage manager before her first broadcasting job with ITV's Westward Television, based in Plymouth, in 1979. After a switch to TVS's regional news programme, she braced herself for 3am starts with breakfast programmes for the BBC and ITV before quitting to do Ready Steady Cook. She began co-presenting This Morning alongside Phillip Schofield in 1999 and stayed with the show for 10 years. More recently, she has co-presented Mr and Mrs and interviewed high-profile personalities about their religious beliefs in Fern Britton Meets... In 2012, she partnered professional dancer Artem Chigvintsev on Strictly Come Dancing, a year after her short-lived teatime chat show Fern was axed. She is now the presenter of BBC Two's The Big Allotment Challenge.