When Anne Robinson returns to the helm of the BBC’s Watchdog next week, surely the first thing she should investigate is what on earth is going on with her face. The smirking redhead had a well-documented facelift in 2004, but in a publicity shot released to promote the show last week, she looked positively bizarre — nipped and tucked and practically squinting. Had the bolts behind her ears been over-tightened? Is her Botox now so extensive she is unable to execute her characteristic wink?
The speculation has been silly-season feverish, with the result that I’m so keen to feast my eyes on the apparently new and improved Robinson death mask that I practically sprint down the row of neat, Victorian villas in South Kensington, London, where she lives. An assistant shows me into her sitting room (muted greys, animal print, a Margaret Thatcher biography on the coffee table). A moment later, a clipped voice inquires: “So, what have we here?” I turn to find a tiny creature standing in the doorway.
The verdict? Sorry sisters, but up close she looks amazing: sexy, sleek and healthy. Whatever Robinson, 64, has had done doesn’t make her look any younger, or even natural. But she does look good, and is obviously delighted about it. She says no, she hasn’t had another facelift, but I’d bet she’s had a tune-up — some filler in those pouty lips? Oh, it’s just down to “good living”, she insists, as she ushers me downstairs to an open-plan kitchen/living room. She kicks off her shoes and sprawls rather amorously on the sofa. Robinson has two gears for interviews — bitch or flirt. Today, I am clearly getting flirt.
“At least you’re not a woman,” she coos. Newspapers usually dispatch lady journalists to meet her. “They always drink all your wine, talk about how lonely they are, then ask you how to ask their boss for a pay rise ... then they go away and write a piece about how obsessed you are with money.”
Not as obsessed as she is with her keep-fit regime, it would seem. “I ran 3½ miles this morning,” she boasts. “I do weights and I don’t eat any rubbish, don’t drink, don’t smoke. Haven’t had a drink for 31 years.” That sounds very dull, I say. “Do you find me boring?” she fires back, arching a brow. “I think I was far sadder when I was drunk.”
Vanity is her motivator, a pathological fear of “bingo wings. My arms are better than Madonna’s”, says Robinson, who, at size eight, is minuscule. “I was in Yves Saint Laurent last year and one of Christophe’s assistants said to me, ‘You are a size smaller than she is’.” Was this the highlight of her life? “Yes,” she says, pursing her lips into that famous smile.
So, she’s in good nick. Well, she has to be. With the BBC scythe swinging dangerously near any woman over the age of 35, it’s hardly prudent to display one’s true years. Arlene Phillips’s non-surgical facelifts weren’t enough to save the 66-year-old from getting the chop at Strictly Come Dancing; female newsreaders are forever being pensioned off before men. Not very fair, is it?
She appraises me stonily. “How many columnists has The Sunday Times got over 60?” I falter. “How many of your fashion shoots involve people over 60?” she adds, picking up pace. “Newspapers are ageist, magazines are ageist, television is ageist.”
Yes, Anne, I am the weakest link — but the BBC, with its public funding, should surely set the tone? She rolls her eyes and starts speaking very, very slowly, as if to a simpleton.
“Television should be informative, entertaining and stop you switching channels,” she says. “As long as it does that, I’m thrilled to be part of it. I don’t believe that any television programme that features women should hire them to be representative. And you can’t start the discussion with Arlene Phillips.”
But people are upset about it. An ICM poll showed the majority of viewers were happy to see older faces on TV; Newsnight’s political editor, Michael Crick, wrote in the corporation’s in-house magazine that the Beeb had a “barmy” obsession with youth. “That’s because he needs to go on a diet!” she sniffs.
“Give him his due, he’s terrific on Newsnight, but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Take the case of Selina Scott, beautiful beyond belief, but when she was first hired as a newsreader, a lot of it was because she was female and she was very beautiful. I’m not saying she wasn’t good, but that’s how she came into the job. And women do often come into the job because they’re young and beautiful. Girls get a much better crack of the whip when they’re younger than men do.” She shrugs. “It’s just the way it goes. Alex Ferguson has not called to say I’m in the line-up for Manchester United. Life isn’t fair. Get over it.”
Well, that’s easy for her to say, the sixtysomething who’s been given an hour of primetime telly every week.
“First off, I don’t come into any category,” she says. “I was never hired by the BBC because I have great breasts or wonderful legs. I got hired because I could write a script. I’m a one-off. But if the BBC said tomorrow they wanted Kerry Katona to replace me for half the money, then that’s the BBC’s right. There’s no point getting all Norma Desmond about it.”
Instead, she appears to be on the brink of yet another comeback. She left Watchdog eight years ago when Weakest Link took off in America, and, though she adored the frills (a suite at the Beverly Hills hotel in Los Angeles, dressing room next door to Jay Leno), it ultimately suited a pistol-quick reporter to do something other than play the pantomime villain. After three years, she had had enough and came back — into the welcoming arms of the BBC. How was it, striking the deal with them, after all the furore over Jonathan Ross’s pay?
“I think we’ve come to an agreeable settlement,” she says, a little coy suddenly. “I’ve never thought any job was worth doing just for the money.” Oh come on, I say, tales of your money-grabbing are legion. “If you say I do the best deals I can, I’ll tell you here and now, I’m not being misrepresented,” she says. “I come from a trading family. The trick is never to be embarrassed talking about [what you’re worth].”
Her Irish mother was a market trader in Crosby, near Liverpool; the schoolgirl Anne’s holiday job was gutting the chickens they’d sell. The work may have been unglamorous, but the rewards were luxurious: posh clothes and holidays taken at the Carlton in Cannes. “We were very new money,” she says. She certainly learnt the value of money; her subsequent rise to being one of the best-paid hacks of the past two decades is now Fleet Street folklore.
She arrived as a trainee at the Daily Mail in 1967, in a sports car and fur coat, and married Charlie Wilson, its deputy news editor, before decamping to this newspaper. She lost custody of her daughter with him, Emma, now 39, when her drinking got so bad a judge made what was then regarded as a stunning ruling that she was an unfit mother. She gave up the drink and finally achieved glory as a highly paid columnist on the Daily Mirror in the 1980s, before taking over from Barry Took on Points of View.
She also married again: John Penrose was a Mirror colleague, who loved and understood her, curbing the worst of her excesses and keeping that acid tongue in check. Everyone was, therefore, surprised when they announced their divorce two years ago. She confirms that she’s still single, but won’t go any further — “That’s none of your business” — which makes me wonder, why didn’t she just stick it with John? “Well, it was quite a crazy thing to do at my age, get divorced,” she says, “but I’m not very good at putting up with stuff that isn’t working. I don’t think it was working for us.”
Still, “it was very, very hard. Surprisingly hard. You think if you’re agreeing on things, not falling out and no one’s yelling, ‘You’ve ruined my life!’, that it will be fairly comfortable. In fact, it’s like a car crash for two years. Every day, inexplicably desolate and low and you’re not sure why. There’s a sense of failure, and sadness that something very special has stopped working”.
It wasn’t the case, as everyone assumed, that you were the harridan, he your lackey, and only a matter of time before he scarpered? “I’ve never known John Penrose do anything he doesn’t want to do. He’s a gregarious old foreign correspondent. Our relationship worked brilliantly.” Why did it stop? “I don’t know. Maybe I was away too much, or the gap was too great between what I was doing and what he wanted to do. Who knows? There’s a good reason for saying if I’d known earlier I might have been able to do something about it.”
You would have worked less? She goes quiet. “I don’t know. By the time we looked at it, it wasn’t retrievable.” I don’t expect she was overjoyed about handing over her money in the divorce courts. Estimates of her fortune vary — in 2006 it was said to be £60m — and it’s been suggested she had to give as much as a third to Penrose. But clearly it’s the emotional fallout that stung.
How low did you get, I ask? “How low is low?” Did you go back to AA meetings? “Who says I had to go back to them? Who says I haven’t been at them all the time? I never talk about it because AA is anonymous, and I’d prefer you didn’t either.”
Did you become more reclusive? “Yes, I did, probably. I couldn’t quite see anything that would make me feel any better.” She pauses. “You tend to read about showbiz personalities and it seems as if they get divorced on Tuesday and remarry the next day. Madonna — how did she do that so quickly? Where was the bit I had, the two years of feeling, every morning, that I wanted to go back to bed? I thought that didn’t happen if you’re famous.”
But you didn’t act up, buying Ferraris and shagging 20-year-olds? “I probably bought a few more clothes than I was buying already.” I choke. Is that possible? “Yes,” she says. “Emptying Bond Street is one of my hobbies. In fact, I want you to ask me what I’m currently reading,” she says, gesturing to a pile of books in front of me. What are you reading, I ask. “The Bottega Veneta autumn/winter catalogue!” She laughs throatily, though I also notice a well-thumbed copy of the new Muriel Spark biography.
“I am ready for dating again,” she says suddenly. What is she looking for? “Someone who can punch at my weight, who’s bright enough, witty enough. It’ll be quite difficult,” she snorts, “and I don’t want anyone addicted to anything — except me.” Were the press reports true, that John’s drinking contributed to the divorce? “Johnny’s always been Johnny,” she says simply. “No more, no less.” It wasn’t the deal-breaker? “Johnny has always been Johnny,” she repeats.
Would she marry again? “I don’t think there’s any need, is there? I’ve spent enough on divorce lawyers. I’m not building any more second homes in Portugal for them.”
In fact, she seems to have run out of ambitions altogether. Her single desire used to be for a grandchild, but Emma produced Hudson, a baby boy, eight months ago. “He’s rather beautiful,” she says, careful not to let too much sentiment creep into her voice. “There’s a streak of red hair that I’m quite pleased about.”
So what’s left? She tilts her head to one side and gives a thoughtful smile. “I’d like to be size six.”
The new series of Watchdog begins on September 10 at 8pm on BBC1
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