Presenter and longtime nude sunbather Esther Rantzen has said she doesn't regard the au naturel pastime as too far away from the outfits on Strictly Come Dancing, and has urged people to try it because "it just feels completely different".
The 78-year-old former That's Life host and I'm a Celebrity contestant told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that people who take issue with neighbours stripping off should "look at something else".
"You must try it, it just feels completely different - you haven't got the sweaty bits where your clothes are overheating you, you haven't got the bit where the straps cut into your flesh," Rantzen explained.
"You have got whatever draft or soft breeze there is on every pore and every cell of your body and it really makes you feel wonderful.
"And far from neighbours complaining, when I did it on my 50th birthday - I wasn't completely nude because I was wearing a hat and a necklace too, actually - the neighbours came round with their children, who started to giggle.
"It's a good thing they did because my late husband was quite cross with me and was trying to remonstrate with me, because he's a little bit more inhibited than me, and when he saw the girls giggling he went and got his camera.
"And so the photographs exist but the terrible thing is, in my senior moment, I'm trying to remember where those photographs are and I don't know."
Rantzen said she had been offered £2,000 for nude photographs by a newspaper but declined because they would not meet her figure of £6,000.
"I was a bit upset at the time, I thought they had valued me a bit cheaply," she sighed.
Commenting on a dispute over nude sunbathing in the English town of Reigate last summer, during which police were called, Rantzen said: "Really, if someone doesn't like the sight of you in the nude all they have got to do is turn around and look at something else.
"The CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] says that the wider public has to be protected from harassment, alarm and distress. All that about a few extra inches of flesh! Have they seen Strictly Come Dancing? Have they noticed the public enjoys the view?
"Though, mind you, I don't look very like the professional dancers these days at 78, but I'm still sunbathing in the nude."
Rantzen was then asked by Today presenter Martha Kearney if she was sunbathing "at the moment".
"Not as I speak," she replied. "But I've got a tiny roof terrace in London and I used to throw everything off on that until I saw some very tall cranes and I realised that the gentlemen working at the top of those cranes might catch a glimpse and fall off.
"That did worry me, you know? On humanitarian grounds... It would be awful, wouldn't it? Think of the court case!"
Rantzen signed off by saying: "Thank you so much. And please don't visualise me."
