TRUTH BEHIND THIS PICTURE
A defiant Anne Robinson insists that startling picture of her this week was plain unfair. Just look at me 12 hours later, she says. Besides, how come everyone’s begging for the name of my surgeon?
That was a very cruel thing to do a frail pensioner. Goodness knows, it’s not easy being seventy-one-and-three-quarters and hoping to nip out discreetly for an early morning blow-dry ahead of a day’s filming.
It could have been worse, of course. the photographer who took my picture this week actually caught me leaving the salon, which is two doors down from my house in Kensington, West London. hence the hair was OK.
But I think we can agree that beneath the fringe it mostly looks as though someone has screwed a bicycle pump into the back of my neck, and my eyelids and cheeks are the nicely inflated result.
It’s all the puppy’s fault. She’s an English setter, eight months old, who belongs to my grandsons and is already the size of a small pony.
I’m not quite clear why she spends more time in my home than her own. But I do know she chews anything in sight, which the night before annoyingly included my Celine sunglasses.
Obviously if I’d had them to hand as I left the house on Monday morning, the paparazzo would have kept on driving and my dignity would still be intact.
to be fair, later on the same day, I did manage to scrub up and look roughly presentable as I arrived at the V& a museum with my daughter, Emma. We were guests at the Man Booker International Prize awards.
Comparing the two pictures, taken 12 hours apart, is a handy way to illustrate a universal and irreversible truth. For every 10,000 women in the afternoon of their years, there are probably fewer than a handful who can walk out without their slap: audrey hepburn, Katharine hepburn and anna Ford come to mind.
the rest of us know that the gap between with mascara and without mascara is many a kilometre.
as it happens, the filming I’m busy with at the moment is for four documentaries you’ll be able to see on BBC1 later in the year.
Each of the hour-long programmes is asking a nosey question. are You happily Married? are You a Good Enough Mother? What’s the Point Of Your Pet? and, fittingly, the final one: What’s Wrong With Being Ugly?
I’ve called it that because I want to examine how we’ve all become increasingly obsessed with our body image.
these days it’s a brave female television presenter who allows her grey hair to show. and a foolish politician who thinks he can get away with being scruffy.
Indeed, if hillary Clinton looked more like Jane Fonda and less like too many men’s first wives, Donald trump wouldn’t be half so sure of himself.
DO I Care about how I look? Of course I do! Would I be earning a decent living at my age on primetime TV if I were a dead ringer for Evan Davis’s older sister or John humphrys’s twin? I don’t think so. am I complaining? Not for a minute.
I was trained from an early age. Unusually for my generation, I grew up with a mother who ran a sizeable business, was the family bread-winner and thought most of life’s problems could be solved with a couture outfit, a regular facial and a harrods credit card.
When I landed my first job in Fleet Street in the late Sixties, as the only girl reporter in the Daily Mail newsroom, she bought me a mink coat so I wouldn’t get cold waiting around on doorsteps. So, unsurprisingly, I’m mildly dedicated not so much to looking younger, but to looking good and to being fit.
thirty years ago, when I was presenting Points Of View, nothing was a struggle. I was an effortless size eight, with a sharp chin and unassisted bright red hair.
Now, the maintenance is endless. What do I do to keep up appear- ances? Let me count the ways. there’s a tuesday and a thursday workout at the gym (weights, treadmill, exhausting press-ups, painful stretching) with Jamie my personal trainer. at weekends, I run near my home in the country: four miles on a good Sunday.
at richard Ward’s Chelsea spa, there’s the weekly manicure, fortnightly pedicure, monthly haircut and highlights. Plus the regular eyelash and eyebrow tints. add to that the six-monthly hrt implants to guarantee me strong bones and masses of energy. I have been having them for 20 years.
Oh, and let us not forget the regular trips to Dr Nick Lowe at the Cranley Clinic in London for face peels — a mild, painless hosedown of the skin with a chemical formula. I also have the occasional Intracel — micro-needling of parts of the face by radio frequency. It’s the equivalent to taking five layers off the surface of the M40, and has me softly screaming. By contrast, the twice- yearly injections of Botox are a walk in the park.
Of course, it helps that I don’t drink, don’t smoke and don’t eat junk food.
regrettably, however, no amount of iron willpower can save me from the occasional late-
night binge on chocolate and vanilla ice cream. Last Sunday, I returned from my biannual fortnight of fasting at the Buchinger Wilhelmi Clinic in Germany. Fourteen days of daily hikes, swimming, running, gym work and massage. All on two daily bowls of vegetable broth. It works — I’m back to a loose size ten. In a perfect world, of course, a journalist with my experience should be employable on prime-time television however she looks. But life is not fair. So if I had two more chins and three more stone, I’d probably be looking towards a job in local late-night radio. Thirteen years ago, I had a face-lift. Not particularly because I feared for my career, but rather because I’d begun to see on screen not me, but my mother saying: ‘Good night and thank you for watching Watchdog.’ It helped that I’d spent three years in Hollywood presenting The Weakest Link for NBC. In Los Angeles, it would be quicker to write a list of stars who haven’t had surgery than those who have. I wrote about my face-lift shortly afterwards. Why not? It hardly seemed fair for other women to imagine I was magically blessed with everlasting youth. I never expected the piece to cause shockwaves. But ever since, I’m hardly ever alone at a party. ‘My wife wanted me to ask who did your face and how much it costs?’ is a typical question. (Barry Jones, 14a Upper Wimpole Street, and about ten grand.)
The other week, I was discussing the plight of Syria with a Foreign Office mandarin, only for her to grab my arm as I attempted to exit and whisper: ‘Would you mind telling me the name of your surgeon?’
A decade or so later, I’m delighted that ordinary women feel free to spend money on improving their looks and become more confident into the bargain.
PUZZLINGLY, though, I still appear to be one of the few females on the small or big screen to need to take advantage of what surgery has to offer. If only I and the rest of womankind could discover the galeforce wind that has allowed Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Diana Rigg and the rest to naturally retain their wonderfully sharp jaw-lines, single chins, line-free brows and flawless complexions.
All those years ago, my generation marched for equality. (OK, I didn’t actually march.) But I hoped that the fight was so women would have the freedom to do what they wanted. Be thin, be fat, have face-lifts, bigger breasts or wear purple. I don’t want be lectured on how I should grow old gracefully. I’ve chosen to earn a living in an industry where my looks need to match my brain, so I am not complaining. I love what I do.
I just wish more clever young women in their 20s, 30s and 40s had the self-assurance needed to take risks. I wish they’d learn to be fearless in asking for what they want, better at negotiating their salaries and stop thinking that talking about money is a horrid thing to do.
Equally, good luck to my fellow sisters, who prefer never to pluck a stray facial hair, can’t be bothered to buy a packet of blonde rinse and feel most comfortable in frocks that look like tents.
A couple of years ago at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, the distinguished academic Mary Beard chose to begin her lecture by announcing: ‘This is what 59 looks like when you haven’t had any work done.’
Next day, on the same stage, I countered: ‘This is what 70 looks like when you have.’
There’s plenty of room for both of us. Though, obviously, Mary has the extra time to make longer and more complicated television programmes.