DAVINA ON PARENTHOOD I had to tell the children all about my past life as a drug addict.. in case they google me
FACING TV cameras and never being lost for words is something presenter Davina McCall has always taken in her stride.
And when it came to telling her children about her past drug addiction, the straight-talking model mum knew she had to do just what she does best – be brutally honest.
Davina, 50, reveals she told Holly, 16, Tilly, 14, and Chester, 11, about the battle she had in her early 20s with alcohol and heroin before they found out from the internet.
And she tells how she’s moving on from her marriage split with fellow presenter Matthew Robertson and “getting her mojo” back when it comes to her career.
But the one thing she’s been most careful to get right has been parenthood. “I’ve had to be very honest about my past with the children – especially now they have access to the internet,” said Davina.
“Actually, I had to be brutally honest quite early on when I thought other kids might talk to them about it. They grew up with ‘Mummy’s going to a meeting’ – they just didn’t know it was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
“When each of them got to about 10 or 11 I’d say, ‘Let me explain what those meetings are’. I’d say, ‘Mummy had a problem but I stopped a long time ago and these meetings help me stay on the straight and narrow’.
They were all really very accepting. They’d say, ‘We thought it was something like that. Is that why you don’t drink?’.
HONESTY
“Kids know stuff. I never give them credit for what they know, but they are smart like that.”
Davina revealed in a Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast that the honesty works both ways – and she encourages her children to reveal any issues they have without fear of being judged.
“I want them to know they can come to me at any age and tell me anything and we’ll work it out,” she said. “The best bit of advice I’ve ever been given is ‘never say no to a teenager’. When I first heard that I was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’
“Anyway, when my eldest daughter comes to me and says she wants to come back from this party at 1am, in my head I’m going, ‘Not on your nelly’, but I say, ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it’.
“I always say ‘how about a compromise’, so she feels like she’s won. We don’t have slamming doors. I listen to her and in turn she’ll listen to me.”
The former Big Brother host could be excused if she were over protective.
She battled addictions in her late teens until a last remaining friend gave her an ultimatum.
“From about 18 to 24, I went clubbing a lot and took things to keep going,” she said. “I was a drug addict, a complete mess. You name it, I took it – cocaine, ecstasy, even heroin, but not injected.” “I’d lost all the good people. There was one person left, and she said to me, ‘look, we all know you’re a junkie… I’m not going to stand around and watch it any more’.” It was the wake-up call Davina needed and by 25 she was clean. Now she neither smokes nor drinks – and is also super-fit, fronting her own fat-burning DVDs and working towards qualifying as a personal trainer. Her TV career really took off in 2000 when she started her 10 year stint on Channel 4’s Big Brother.
That same year she married Pet Rescue host Matthew Robertson. But in a shock announcement last November the pair announced they were divorcing.
Davina told how their marriage came under immense strain when they had kids. “The first one had a huge impact on our relationship as we’d been so selfish, Matthew and I,” she said.
“Like coming back from lunch on a Saturday and going to bed for two hours. Suddenly all of that had gone. It’s a huge life change. But I look at my kids now and they are fantastic, I love hanging out