Is this the new Dr Spock?

Supernanny Jo Frost's Channel 4 show has been the runaway success of the summer

11 April 2012

Supernanny, in her everyday guise as 34-year-old Londoner Jo Frost, is quietly drinking hot chocolate and whipped cream in a brown velvet armchair in Starbucks at the far end of the New King's Road.

On the runaway success show of the summer - Channel 4's Supernanny has pulled in a peak of six million viewers in its threepart run - Frost comes across as a busty, ruby-lipped dominatrix in a show that is a cross between Brat Camp and Wife Swap.

In person, however, she is anonymous in black stretchy trousers and a pink-and-white check shirt, black oblong glasses trapping her blue eyes like bookends.

Although friendly, the woman who is happy to hold your child firmly by both arms, lower her voice and scold him or her with: "You have been very naughty," comes across as rather reserved.

She displays a pragmatism that presumably got her the television job, and espouses methods that are simply "common sense".

So who is this modern-day Dr Spock, the Trinny and Susanna of the nannying world, and how has she captured the hearts of the capital's beleaguered parents facing another five weeks of holidays?

As those who have watched her in action over the past three weeks know, old-fashioned discipline is her key tactic. We see her observing a family for 48 hours before moving in with them for a week and laying down the law.

Take a two-year-old like Charlie Woods, who refuses to eat and throws his spaghetti around the kitchen. Supernanny's answer? She firmly disciplines him, telling him his behaviour is not acceptable and orders him back to the table, where another plate of food is provided.

Next, the cutlery goes flying. He is warned that if he does it again, he will he hauled to "the naughty step", a designated step where a child is told to sit. Within minutes Charlie finds himself sitting alone on the stairs.

In proving who is boss, Frost wears the child into submission with her consistent discipline. A similar strategy is used on sleepless toddlers.

This week we saw Supernanny at the home of Amanda and Kevin Charles, where she used "controlled-crying" to teach their 15-month-old twins to sleep through the night.

After five minutes of crying, a parent goes in, does not pick up the child but reassures them with a gentle "shush" and leaves, going back again and again at longer intervals during the crying until the child sleeps. Within a week, the twins were sleeping through the night.

She simultaneously tackled the twins' jealous four- year- old brother Jacob with endless trips to "the naughty room", and in the end, Jacob didn't want Frost to leave. "Parents get worried that kids will hold grudges," Frost says. "But they just don't."

Frost has been a nanny for 15 years, but her methods are not from childcare books.

Nor are they specifically from her upbringing. Two of her favourite forms of discipline are putting wayward children on the naughty stair or in the naughty room (a boring spare room devoid of toys). Did she have a naughty room as a little girl?

"No, I never had a naughty room," she insists. "My methods are all because of my experiences as a nanny. Parents have asked, 'How do you have an understanding of this when you have no children?' Maybe I just do and that's how it is. It all comes from my personality and what I believe in."

Although she auditioned for the show, Frost seems to have no great wish to be a star. The defining event in her life is not unexpected celebrity but the death of her mother.

Joa, a curtain-maker whose parents emigrated to England from Gibraltar during the war, is the source of Frost's dark Mediterranean looks. She died of breast cancer 10 years ago at 43. "It was devastating. She was a beautiful, petite woman, four-foot ten, with tiny feet, and it was hard, really hard, because I lost a friend as well as a mum."

She still wears her mother's rubystarred wedding ring, and lives with her dad, Michael, a builder, in Fulham. He has not remarried.

Her childhood, she says, was happy. She grew up with her younger brother, Matthew, now an electrician, and her parents were always supportive. "They never broke a promise. And they insisted on manners."

How did they teach that? She gives that Supernanny stare. "They just did!"

She left Hurlingham Girls' after O-levels, went to a college in Kingsway to do a diploma in English literature and theatrical studies, then drifted into babysitting. She got her first job at 20, nannying for a TV producer. She stayed for five years, and when the family moved she went on to "different families, trouble-shooting different ages".

To this end she has set up a consultancy called Before You Go Ga-Ga, offering the trouble-shooting services she performs on TV.

As for a family of her own, she would like one, but says it is hardly on the horizon. I say she might meet a husband by parachuting into the house of a child-challenged divorcé.

"That's what my friends say," she cries. "Or an older man. Because of the [dominatrix-like] uniform I have to wear in the series. My friends tease me that he'll live in Soho and be wanting a lot of discipline."

www.b4ugo-ga-ga.co.uk

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