Accomplished Newton Abbot make-up artist Eve Wignall was given a sharp rebuttal by Ann Widdecombe over the rise in pension ages for women, in a BBC show airing tonight, March 4.

In the BBC Inside Out South West programme the former Pension’s Secretary blasts women’s pension campaigners as ‘unreasonable, self-indulgent and entitled’.

She clashed with Eve, a member of Women Against State Pension Inequality (WASPI), over tea and scones.

Make-up artist Eve Wignall has worked on some of the biggest film and TV productions in the UK. But at 60 – the age she expected to retire – she now struggles with the 16-hour shifts.

Because of pension changes introduced by Ann Widdecombe while in Government Eve will have to work until at least 2023, something she says is unfair. Debating the issue at her Newton Abbot home, she said thousands of women did not know about the change early enough to make contingency plans.

She said: ‘You get towards 60 and you know you’re not going to retire but you know you can’t do what you’ve always done.

‘It’s an exhausting, frightening trap you’re suddenly in. We didn’t know these plans weren’t going to work out.’

But Eve’s views found short shrift with Ann.

Ann said to her: ‘How do you think the state is going to afford - year in, year out - for us to retire five years younger than all the rest of the world is retiring?

‘When the age was set after the First World War you were darn lucky if you got to 75. We’ve now got 15,000 centenarians in this country.

‘I’m sorry I’m going to be blunt here: it is unreasonable, self-indulgent and entitled to think that you can retire at the same age with a much longer life expectancy at the state’s expense. I’m not saddling the current generation with that and nor should you want to.’

And to Eve’s claim that she was not aware until too late that the women’s pension age was going to rise, she added: ‘We sent out five million letters between 2011 and 2013, five million darn letters.’

The programme is part of the BBC’s Crossing Divides season, which examines the possibilities arising from bringing together people of different ethnicities, class, faiths, politics and generations.

Eve told the BBC: ‘No government should be able to do what it wants when it wants and just do a cash grab of older people’s money which they worked for.

‘I think they feel really abandoned by this Government. It’s about the Government’s response to these women and what help they are going to get going forwards.’

BBC Inside Out South West airs on BBC One tonight, March 4, at 7.30pm. It will be available on iPlayer afterwards.