Miquita Oliver has revealed she was once 'terrified' of Fearne Cotton as the pair finally opened up about the insecurities behind their decades-long feud. The TV presenters have cleared the air more than 20 years after their frosty relationship spectacularly spilled into public view, when Oliver branded Cotton a 'she-devil' in a 2005 interview.
Two young presenters, mutual insecurities
Oliver, 42, and Cotton, 45, were both fixtures of British television in the early Noughties, having entered the industry as teenagers and found themselves navigating fame at roughly the same time. But while viewers may have seen two young presenters competing for similar jobs, it turns out each woman was privately looking at the other and feeling as though she didn't measure up.
Appearing on Cotton's Happy Place podcast, Oliver admitted she had been deeply intimidated by her fellow presenter. 'I was terrified of Fearne,' she said, explaining that she regarded Cotton as 'everything a TV presenter should be'. Oliver recalled comparing herself unfavourably to the former Top of the Pops star, who she saw as 'very beautiful with blond hair and very slim'. Meanwhile, she remembered feeling 'very black and overweight' and worrying that her own hair 'wasn't right'.
The 2005 'she-devil' comment and its fallout
According to Oliver, coverage of the pair at the time then fed into insecurities she was already carrying. 'The press sort of compounded that fact, so I was like, "Oh I hate Fearne Cotton, it's Fearne Cotton that I don't like," because I was scared,' she explained.
Their strained relationship became public in 2005 after Oliver was asked by NME what she would do to improve Top of the Pops. Her answer was blunt: 'Get rid of the she-devil Fearne Cotton.' The comment reportedly resulted in Oliver losing her job at BBC Radio 1 and helped cement the idea of a rivalry between the young presenters.
Reflecting on fame and media scrutiny
Yet, speaking two decades later, both women suggested the reality was considerably more complicated. Oliver argued that some of the language used about young women in the public eye at the time felt 'kind of violent'. Cotton similarly reflected on the effect of becoming famous while still extremely young. She began presenting professionally at 16, while Oliver was just 17 when she landed Popworld.
'We're in a really weird job for starters, where you become instantly exposed to lots of people that don't know you,' Cotton said. She added that it required an unusually 'resilient mind' not to be affected by that scrutiny and admitted it had impacted her negatively in 'all different ways'.
And while Oliver had spent years viewing Cotton as the impossibly polished presenter she couldn't compete with, Cotton had formed almost exactly the opposite impression. She remembered seeing Oliver as effortlessly cool while thinking of herself as the 'biggest geek ever'. Cotton pointed to her background in children's television, joking that she was the presenter wearing 'bunches' while Oliver was socialising with the likes of Lily Allen and people she considered far cooler. 'I just felt like the biggest geek ever,' she admitted.
Clearing the air after two decades
The pair said that, in the absence of any meaningful conversation between them, their assumptions about one another were allowed to flourish. 'There's this void between two people with zero communication, and all it is is assumption and a projection about who that other person is,' Cotton explained. While Cotton had worried that Oliver saw her as 'unsophisticated' or 'a bit thick', Oliver had actually considered her 'unsackable' and 'threateningly good' at her job.
Despite their history, the two remained civil over the years and their lives occasionally overlapped — including when Cotton dated Oliver's former T4 co-host Steve Jones in 2008 — without them ever properly discussing what had happened. That finally began to change last year. Oliver had spoken on her Miss Me? podcast about her experiences with the press, prompting Cotton to reach out after seeing a clip. By then, Oliver said she had already experienced a 'revelation' about how much the media environment surrounding them had influenced the way she interpreted her feelings towards Cotton.
'I think the world was sort of bringing us together,' she said. More than two decades after one infamous interview turned their private discomfort into a very public falling-out, the pair have now been able to compare what they actually thought of one another at the time. And for Oliver, discovering just how far their perceptions had been from reality prompted one simple conclusion: 'It's so weird what a bit of conversation does.'
