Fay Ripley - Other Work

Other Work

During her time on Cold Feet, Ripley hosted the Channel 4 show Sofa Melt, a relationships chat show in the vein of Trisha. The show lasted for one series of 60 episodes, broadcast in 1999. In Scotland on Sunday, critic Stewart Hennessey called Ripley's presenting fantastic and called the show itself "utterly without any intelligent merit whatsoever. It is just unmissable because the people on it are hilariously stupid. Set the vid, show it at parties." Ripley said of the show retrospectively, "It was the most terrifying thing I've ever done." In 2003, she presented a short film advocating Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for the BBC's Big Read series and in 2009, she presented an episode of the Blighty documentary series My Brilliant Britain.

In 2004, she appeared on the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment of Top Gear, where she discussed her car history with presenter Jeremy Clarkson. On her celebrity lap of the Top Gear test track, she achieved a lap time of 1:53, making her 38th on the Suzuki Liana leader board. The same year, she participated in a major advertising venture by The National Lottery, playing "Lady Luck" alongside a unicorn voiced by Graham Norton. In 2008, she appeared alongside Martin Clunes in a series of advertisements for Tesco Direct and, since 2009, has starred with Mark Addy in a series of adverts for Tesco's various brands.

In 2007, Ripley announced that she would be writing a cookbook about family food. She said, "I want to help people prepare good food for their kids, really practical stuff that's easy, quick, healthy and you can whizz up in the blender for the baby." Fay's Family Food was published by Michael Joseph, an imprint of Penguin Books, in April 2009 and was selected by Marie-Claire Digby of The Irish Times as a "summer read". Ripley's second book, entitled What's For Dinner, was published in April 2012. Since the release of her first book, she has resisted offers from television production companies to make her own cookery series.