Anne Robinson is hosting a new Channel 5 show, 'The Sentence - You be the Judge'. At 80, she tells Harry Mount about facelifts, drinking and Robert Maxwell
What’s the laziest job in the world?
Donald Trump’s personal trainer? Lord Lucan’s diary secretary?
Or teaching Anne Robinson how to ask rude questions on The Weakest Link? That was my job 15 years ago – and it was entirely pointless.
Robinson had an innate gift for examining human character – and tracking down its weak spots. She didn’t need any help from me.
One middle-aged lady on the show gushed, ‘Anne, I’m starting an Open University course.’
Quick as a flash, Robinson said, ‘Oh, have you just got divorced?’
The contestant stared at her, open-mouthed. How on earth had she worked it out? Her divorce wasn’t on the CV we’d been given.
Robinson’s witticisms came bubbling up from a bottomless well.
‘What do you do when you’re not eating?’ she asked a fat contestant.
And, to a Welsh careworker, whose job was to bathe the elderly, she said, ‘Why don’t you put them in a van, let the windows down and go through a carwash?’
Anne Robinson presented the show from 2000 to 2012 – not so long ago, but light years away from current TV mores.
‘You’d never be able to say all that now,’ she says. ‘Half of it would be stamped out.’
The thing about The Weakest Link is that contestants liked her being rude to them.
‘I’ve always thought the contestants would feel short-changed if I’d been nice,’ she says. ‘When we had a rehearsal with real-life people for the first time, I realised how competitive they were. I’d say, “Why are you voting off Janet?”
‘And they’d say, “Because she has Jesus sandals and quite bad BO.”
‘And I thought, “Great – we can all be ourselves.”’
Anne Robinson doesn’t mind her nickname – ‘The Queen of Mean’ – in the slightest. ‘I had spent years in a newspaper newsroom where that’s the common banter.’
She can turn on that rude banter at will. But she is only rude to those who want it or deserve it. I once introduced her to a moronic Sloane friend of mine, who poured out dim platitudes and errors about the Royal Family. Robinson sat there quietly, politeness itself.
Only when we left the Sloane’s house did Robinson say to me, ‘I decided not to go for her because she’s your friend and we were in her house.’
We went on to a party nearby, where an old friend of hers started telling long-winded anecdotes.
‘Edit! Edit!’ she said to the old friend in a world-weary way – but with no malice.
I get the same directness when I ask about the latest gossip. Is she still in a relationship with Andrew Parker Bowles, the Queen’s ex-husband, as she said in a recent interview?
‘I won’t comment on any of my private life,’ she says. ‘You’ve got to ask and I can tell you to mind your own business.’
She gives this warning with comic top spin. You know she won’t mind being asked anything, even if she won’t answer everything.
So she’s perfectly happy to talk about turning 80 on September 26.
‘I’m not dreading it – I’m quite surprised by it,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think my generation would ever be old. And 80 is huge. I don’t feel very old. I’m quite fit.’
She’s happy, too, to talk about the facelift she had in 2004.
‘I wrote about it and, for ages afterwards, men would come up to me and have a serious conversation and then at the end say, “My wife wanted to know if I could ask you where you got your facelift.”
‘Gordon Brown’s female sidekick had a serious conversation with me about inheritance tax at a party and then at the end said, “How much did your face cost?”’
This complete honesty about saying what she thinks makes her very funny.
In 2017, before the deeply sad funeral of the late Alexander Chancellor, the sainted former editor of The Oldie, we were sitting next to each other in the silent church. Just before the service began, Robinson said, out of the blue, ‘Why do all posh women have untidy hair bunched in a clip?’
I looked round the church to see clip after clip, bunching untidy hair, and burst into laughter.
Her toughness, honesty – and drinking – came from her mother, who turned the family chicken stall in Liverpool into a huge wholesale business, supplying ships, railways and hotels. Her father was a teacher who joined the family business – but, so his wife would say, ‘He’s not learnt anything in 40 years, because he just liked people to like him.’
Despite the success of the business, Robinson’s mother always kept the chicken stall.
Robinson says, ‘We used to come home from boarding school and do two weeks with white coats on, selling chickens. Then we’d go off for six weeks in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. So it was quite schizophrenic, really. She also insisted that we never talk about ourselves. Customers were royalty and they shouldn’t know where we went to school or anything.’
Robinson describes it as ‘new money’: ‘In and out drive, lots of cars, mink coats.’
Her mother had the same instinct for the way of the world that made her daughter a natural journalist.
‘My mother would say, in about October, that turkeys are going to be on the floor or sky high and she was never wrong. There is an instinct in journalism that, somehow, you know things other people don’t because you’ve been at it that long.’
After Farnborough Hill Convent, a private school in Hampshire, Robinson went into newspapers.
‘I thought I could write and I wanted to be famous,’ she says. ‘My ambitions were very low level. A rich suburban childhood – you wanted something more interesting.
‘I’ve always been the most underqualified person in any job I’ve done in television. To get into the BBC in those days, they’d all been to Oxbridge. A lot of them are quite stupid, actually.’
The newspaper world half a century ago was a different planet. When Robinson was 22 and on the Daily Mail, the chief sub would drop her copy and make her pick it up – so the back bench could see her knickers.
‘I didn’t know it was MeToo behaviour then,’ she says. ‘I remember thinking, “I’m brighter than all this lot and I’ll soon be in charge.”
‘Now it has created a team of women who are victims. If you start protesting, you lose your place on climbing up to a better job – you have a reputation.
‘I’m just a pragmatist. But I grew up in a household where my mother was the breadwinner and she thought most men were stupid. I never either got upset or took it too seriously when they behaved in a silly way.’
Robinson got her first Mail scoop in 1967, when she tracked down the details of Brian Epstein’s suicide. While the other hacks went off to the pub, Robinson stayed outside Epstein’s Mayfair house and saw the family solicitor from Liverpool come out. She gave him a lift to Euston and promptly got all the details.
She says, ‘It was a bit of luck – and my natural instinct to completely ignore what I’ve been told to do by people who had no right to tell me to do it.’
Robinson had to leave the Daily Mail for the Times on marrying Charlie Wilson, the Mail deputy news editor, in 1968 – that was the rule then.
She was also developing a serious drink problem, as laid out in Robinson’s Memoirs of an Unfit Mother (2001).
‘When you finally realise you’ve got a drink problem and realise you’ve got to do something about it, you don’t spend much time wondering how it got there,’ she says. ‘I’m from a long line of Irish Catholic, alcoholic wolves. I had a childhood with a mother who was a binge-drinker – it’s astonishing that you find yourself in the same place.’
She divorced Wilson in 1973, losing custody of her daughter, Emma.
‘Charlie was furious with me for being unfaithful and fought for custody and he won it because the judge decided I was more ambitious than he was,’ she says. ‘I should have lost it because my drinking was bad. It meant, for Emma’s early years, she was with him and that was quite hard to overcome.’
At her lowest ebb, Robinson weighed six stone and was given six weeks to live. But she doesn’t blame it on Fleet Street: ‘I’d have had a drink problem being a nun. I didn’t drink well ever.’
By 1980, she was working at the Daily Mirror, bought by Robert Maxwell in 1984.
‘He was easy to deal with,’ says Robinson, who negotiated a pay rise and a Mercedes out of him. ‘He’d had two older sisters and he quite liked clever, sharp women. He just liked me. He didn’t seem worse than anyone else and he just amused me.’
Maxwell’s larceny from the Mirror pension fund didn’t surprise her.
Robinson says, ‘He'd put a lot of non-entities like the number 3 on the picture desk on the pension fund. Nobody questioned him. He was just a joke. A really funny joke.’
TV fame began with Points of View in 1986 on BBC1.
She says, ‘Because it came on after Dallas, which was 10 to 9 on a Wednesday, if you wanted to watch the news, you got me in the middle. I got more famous than I deserved. Ernie Wise once came from the back of the plane to say hello. I thought, “Gosh, there’s a Mafia of the famous.”’
Robinson thinks herself of as a journalist rather than a famous TV star. ‘I haven’t got any showbiz friends at all. I don’t know anyone famous.’
Her years as a hack mean she knows how to handle the press.
One day, the Mail’s showbusiness editor rang up to ask if she had cancer.
‘Not as far as I know,’ said Robinson
‘We’ve got it on very good authority that you’ve got cancer,’ the journalist said.
‘Can you tell me who told you?’ said Robinson.
‘We can’t reveal sources,’ he said.
Robinson said, ‘We’re at a bit of an impasse here. You say I’ve got cancer and I don’t know about it.’
He said, ‘All right then. You didn’t turn up at Jeremy Clarkson’s birthday party.’
Robinson said, ‘I’m just going to get my medical dictionary to see if that is one of the signs.’
Fundamentally, she doesn’t have a high opinion of herself. ‘I’ve just earnt a living being nosy,’ she says. ‘I don’t know that I’m very clever. I’ve got no measuring stick. Some clever people are very stupid. You wouldn’t get them to run your bath.’
She acknowledges she has the crucial element of a good journalist – speed of thought – and the ability to make a piece interesting: ‘Good journalists have a radar, which made The Weakest Link so easy.’
Robinson returned to TV to present Countdown from 2021 to 2022. ‘It was very great fun,’ she says, but she stopped because the filming schedule was relentless, and for financial reasons.
‘The Channel 4 lawyers said you have to go on the payroll,’ she says. ‘I said I came from this Irish alcoholic tribe. We didn’t go on payrolls. We nicked them.’
So what will she do, now she’s entering her ninth decade?
She says, ‘The Observer asked me what ambitions I had left. I said, “To get to the end of a Melanie Phillips column.”’
