‘I come from a line of wild Irish wolves’

Anne Robinson is hosting a special edition of Weakest Link for Children in Need – but is she still the Queen of Mean?

As is to be expected from a broadcaster worth an estimated £50 million, Anne Robinson lives in a smart part of central London in an attractive and substantial Georgian house.

The beginning of our interview fits the expected drill. The housekeeper, Barbara, comes to the door. She has been with Robinson for 15 years and her boss seems to appreciate her employee’s unsparing honesty. Of Robinson’s olive dress on her recent TV programme on abortion, Barbara pronounced in her strong Eastern European accent (as repeated by Robinson): “The green – I don’t like it.” And what did she think of the programme itself? “Boring, so boring.” Robinson finds this extremely amusing.

After a short time left to my own devices in the ground floor drawing room – paintings in moody greys (Robinson’s hobby is buying art), books on the shelves by politicians and journal­ists, no sign of any mess anywhere – my host arrives, a trim five foot three figure who manages to carry off black leather trousers, black pumps and a tight black sweater.

“I’ve done my hair for you!” is her opening gambit.

Later, when the interview becomes less predictable, she allows me to mess up her polished, silky barnet and spray sea salt into it, and it looks fantastic.

We descend into the relaxed open-plan kitchen/dining/living space in the basement, sink into a striped modular sofa – Robinson curls up at one end – and get stuck in. Her ancient cocker spaniel, Ellie, whose russet colouring matches her owner’s, sits by her feet.

I check my tape recorders by asking her what she had for breakfast, and we soon get onto diets: “I never have breakfast. I’m permanently on a diet. I’m like Victoria Beckham – you know, when she’s really, really, really hungry, she has a piece of lettuce.” I suppose you have to be thin to be on telly. “You don’t necessarily, but in order to be on television when you’re old, you have to be clever and thin.”

We are here to talk about her return, after five years, to one of the components (the other being property) that made her fortune: Weakest Link. Robinson is hosting a celebrity one-off for Children in Need. She gets up to show me a framed letter from 2000, written to her second ex-husband, the journalist John Penrose, who was acting as her manager: “I am writing to ask whether Anne Robinson would be interested in hosting Weakest Link, a new quiz show pilot which the Entertainment department is producing for BBC2 Daytime.”

That show, with Robinson as host, ran until 2012, finishing on its 1,693rd episode. In the US, where she was also host, it launched on NBC in 2001 but was cancelled a year later. The presenter was flying to the States every six weeks – and was so busy that she was unaware that her marriage was in trouble: “It took me a long time to realise there was discontent.”

How was her American stint? “Fabulous. I knew it would be a ridiculous adventure that wouldn’t last forever but that for about two years I would be able to get any table I wanted in Los Angeles, and that’s exactly what happened.”

The surprise of the interview is how warm Robinson is. She’s not quite tame (as if ) but certainly pliant and playful, keen to please (which I had not anticipated) and flattering (ditto). She is every bit as funny and quick as you would expect. Just once or twice, during and after the interview, there was that glimpse of steel that one would be foolish to ignore. She is also not immune to the odd boast.

I phrase her possible return to hosting Weakest Link in a way that doesn’t suit her and she says firmly: “Can we just get this the right way round. I have said I will do it for Children in Need. They hav e asked whether I will consider doing celebrity shows, Saturday nights, next year. And I have said I will do Children in Need and see how I feel.”

One of her attractive qualities is her honesty, as well as her journalist’s curiosity. She is happy to mention her age – 73 – and talk about the surgical work she has done to her face. She looks so much softer and prettier close up than on the telly, where her face can look strangely immo­bile. When I say this, she responds: “I haven’t got time to sleep with lighting.” Sorry? “If I could always sleep with the lighting man… Because it’s all about lighting, isn’t it?”

She really doesn’t look her age; I know she’s had lifts and whatnot. “Actually, the work was 14 years ago.” No top-ups? “I have a bit of Botox – not a lot. But to be fair, I don’t drink or smoke. I don’t eat crap and I run and do weights.” She shares a trainer with the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont. Did you ever think you would be one of those… “No, I didn’t actually.” You and Jane Fonda…

This reminds her of a story. “I was in the hair­dressers the other week. And there was this old trout with her legs akimbo who produces a picture of Jane Fonda’s hair and I’m afraid I couldn’t stop laughing. I went up to the Italian guy afterwards and he said [cue strong Italian accent] ‘What could I say? I have a comb not a f***ing wand!’”

I ask her for the age of her daughter Emma Wilson, who is also a TV and radio presenter. “Er… in her 40s.” Anne, you must know your daughter’s age! “I do, but she doesn’t like me to say, whereas I couldn’t care less.” She puts on her deadpan expression, which presages mischief. “I used to be the same age as so many people on television, and I don’t know how it happened, but now they’re all younger than me!” Like who? “Lynda La Plante – she’s at least ten years younger than me!”

We move on to her recent BBC2 d o c umentar y Abortion on Trial, which was an examination of whether the Abortion Act is still is fit for purpose 50 years after it was passed. Robinson’s customary sharp intelligence was there, but the way she handled her guests – nine women who’d all had abortions but were on different sides of the fence, and one man whose part­ner had undergone an abortion against his wishes – was mark­edly kind and gentle.

She describes the programme as a combination of Panorama and Big Brother. Why did she suggest filming it at her home? “Part of me felt that it was the least I could do and another part of me – because my snobbery is tested so easily – thought that they’ll find some crappy house in Wimbledon with stones in it and people will think it’s my home!”

It’s an important and emotive subject. Robinson admitted for the first time on televi­sion that she had gone through an abortion as a newly and unhappily married young woman and, coming from a Catholic family, that she still felt deep shame about it 50 years on. (Her husband was Emma’s father, the former editor of The Times, Charles Wilson.)

I think your voice cracked a little bit at the very end when you thanked them all? “It did. Once you start thinking about life – and I think about Emma and Hudson and Parker [her grandsons] – that is very different.”

After the abortion, Robinson fell into a “black doom”. Is it too pat to make a link between the abortion and your alcoholism? (Robinson has talked and written about her drinking days; she had her last drink in 1978.) “Probably too pat. I suspect I’m an addict and at that stage if there was anything I didn’t like, I started drinking. All I know is that by the time I knew I had to live or die, it didn’t matter how I’d got to that stage.”

You said your mother drank heavily – was she an alcoholic? “Yes. Listen, I come from a long line of wild, alcoholic Irish wolves. I mean, really wild, wild people. That’s why I wouldn’t do Who Do You Think You Are? – I know it would end with guns in a peat bog in 1916.”

She is friendly with both of her ex-husbands – enough for them to attend her 70th birthday party, at any rate. But it’s clear that she would like a man in her life, if only she could find one who is on a par with her. He would need to be “single, solvent, serious and funny”. She would consider: a historian, a barrister, a politician or maybe even a conservationist.

This comes on the back of us talking about Dame Judi Dench’s recent comments in this magazine (with this interviewer) about how she still felt desire and was so happy sharing her life with conservationist David Mills. Robinson would like it known that she, too, likes sex. “It’s great. I’ve always enjoyed it and I’ve never felt that getting older has made it less interesting.”

Robinson piles in with questions about Mills (Dame Judi met him when he asked her to open a red squirrel enclosure at his wildlife centre). “Hmm… I was just thinking because I’ve got a pair of barn owls… maybe I need to work the barn owl angle, do you think?” To entice men? “Yeah – because they are quite rare.” Come up and see my barn owls? “Yes, I could do that – I think that’s quite a good move.”

Is it because you fancy the look of Dame Judi’s boyfriend? (He does have a touch of Bill Nighy about him.) “No. It’s because I quite like the idea that after being married for a very long time to that lovely Michael Williams [who died in 2001], she is having another go on the merry-go-round.”

Do you suffer from loneliness? “Yes. Not as lonely as I’ve been in marriage but I don’t think living on your own is a natural state. The trouble is that I’m not lonely enough to settle for a second-rate part­ner. I see girlfriends who were too lonely and have ended up with tossers.”

She does love being a grandmother; her grand­sons call her Noni, which appears to have come from Penrose, who is half-Italian. “Emma is quite strict about what is allowed: television, sugar and homework. This generation of mothers take all their management skills home. You really have to imagine you’ve got a zip on your mouth.”

Like all subversive grannies, Robinson does a bit of rule-bending, “but it’s quite a tricky thing to say to the children, ‘Don’t let your mother know.’ They love The Simpsons and they like cartoons, actually. It’s no good asking them to watch a documentary on Churchill – they’re only seven and eight!”

The media is deep in the throes of the Harvey Weinstein fallout when we meet and she hazards a joke that she would certainly not be able to get away with if she were a man (vide James Corden and Michael Gove): “I’m quietly upset because [Weinstein] only tried to buy Weakest Link – he never tried to deal with my body.”

After the abortion programme, Robinson would like to make half-a-dozen more. “It taught me the merits of discussing a subject over two or three days instead of people in a studio shouting at each other. I’m interested in sexual harassment on trial and a hundred years since the suffragettes – prospective title ‘What the F*** Happened?’” As she uncurls herself, cat-like, from the sofa to say goodbye, Robinson wants to make sure I don’t represent her as more of a champion of women than she actually is. “Look, I don’t want to sound like some great campaigning person because I’m far too selfish, but I am – on a daily basis – disap­pointed that women are still having such a tough time in the workplace. I keep saying to Emma, ‘This isn’t what I marched for’. And she says, ‘Mum – you never actually marched!’”

Radio Times