‘Being the high earner can bring problems in a relationship’
The Queen of Mean tells Julia Llewellyn Smith why earning more than her husband contributed to her marriage split
Anne Robinson is sitting in a bland boardroom in central London and, at 72, looking fabulous in a designer ensemble that, conservatively estimated, cost about £3,000: patent Céline wedges, Japanese label Sacai gingham skirt, MSGM top, Yves Saint Laurent handbag, Hermès watch – though the pink-tinged glasses are from the children’s £25 range at Specsavers. She is musing on the recent outcry over BBC women’s pay.
“Girls are hopeless, aren’t they?” muses the erstwhile Queen of Mean who in her Weakest Link heyday was receiving £3million a year from the Corporation, and now puts her wealth at around £50million. “These very clever girls go to job interviews but have no idea how to pace a negotiation.
“Early on, boys are incredibly unsure of themselves, while girls are incredibly confident, but there comes a point where they don’t take the risks guys take; particularly at university, when a boy will have a go at the question and a girl will think: ‘I don’t know enough about it.’ We’re good girls – too good. In the office, we all check everything and make sure everyone has a birthday card, while the boys just get their squash kits and p--- off.”
Surely Robinson, who in person is simultaneously friendly, fun and terrifying, isn’t a good girl? After all, this is the woman who made the late John Noakes cry by teasing him on air about the death of Shep, and was investigated for racial hatred after describing the Welsh as “irritating and annoying”.
“I think I’m a good girl. I worry all the time.” So what’s the difference between Robinson, with her Kensington, Cotswolds, Fifth Avenue and Hamptons pads, and the rest of us swots struggling to pay the gas bill? “My mother,” she explains.
Indeed, Mrs Robinson Snr was a fearsome Scouse wholesale poultry dealer, whose earnings enabled her daughter to spend every summer in the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. “We heard her bartering all day, so it didn’t seem at all odd to think you’d have a barter. I would have felt ashamed not to get a good deal.”
Robinson rarely mentions her teacher father Bernard. Today, however, she’s been remembering him in her role as eye health ambassador for the Royal National Institute of Blind People, and Specsavers, which has just released a report revealing half the cases of sight loss in the UK could be avoided by us all having eye checks every two years.
“My father was the original Mr Chips, always in charge of the no-hoping class. He’d teach them arithmetic with betting slips, music with television commercials. Reading was terribly important to him, and it wasn’t until he came to visit me in London that I realised he couldn’t see anything without a magnifying glass – he had cataracts but didn’t want to admit he was struggling.
It’s a 10-minute procedure to have them removed! With them gone, he could read comfortably again.”
She’s now concerned for her two grandsons – Hudson, eight, and Parker, seven, by her 47-yearold daughter, Emma – who should have been having regular eye tests since the age of three. “Like all of that generation, Emma thinks she’s the best mother in the world, but maybe she should be less concerned about poo and more concerned about eyes,” Robinson muses.
When it comes to mothering style, I daren’t point out the welldocumented fact that Robinson lost custody of Emma aged two, when a judge deemed her alcoholism made her an “unfit mother” (she hasn’t touched booze since 1978). Still, Robinson’s making amends with the next generation.
“I babysit, I take them on holiday, I’ve just had them staying with me for the whole summer, but I do what I’m told with them because you girls are all so strict.” So no stuffing them full of sweeties and allowing unlimited screen time? “Not sugar, because I don’t eat it, but telly? Slightly. We have a deal – ‘Don’t tell your mother!’” They’re not intimidated by granny? “I won’t be called that. It’s a problem for my generation – we don’t want to think of ourselves as grannies. They call me ‘nonni’, which is Italian for grandparents. But, no, they’re not scared of me in the least. Round them, I just melt.”
Emma was the result of Robinson’s first marriage to Charlie Wilson, former editor of The Times. Ten years ago, she divorced her second husband, John Penrose. Now, according to recent reports, she’s looking for love on dating app Tinder. “I’m not on Tinder,” Robinson sighs. “I wouldn’t know how to get on it, and I don’t think it would work for me.”
So is she courting? “Mind your own business,” she smiles, sweetly. Recently, Robinson has kept a relatively low profile, presenting a briefly revived Watchdog and the occasional BBC documentary. In November, she’ll be hosting a Weakest Link celebrity special for Children in Need. “The best celebrity we ever had was [Eastenders star and former cocaine addict] Danniella Westbrook. Really! The worst was every hairdresser…” There’s also talk of the show being revived next year in a prime-time Saturday-night slot. “They want me to host Weakest Link celebrity shows,” Robinson confirms. “But I don’t know yet. When Mrs Thatcher left Downing Street and they asked, ‘What’s the most important thing you’ve learned?’ she said, ‘Never make a decision until you have to.’ It’s quite nice doing documentaries. I don’t want to get over-busy again.”
This was, after all, one of the contributory factors to the end of her 27-year marriage to Penrose, with whom she’s still on good terms. “I was working far too hard, it’s really sad but it really stopped working. I was filming 200 shows a series, three a day, crossing the Atlantic every six weeks, and for a long time I was so busy that I didn’t have time to notice that things weren’t working.”
Another factor was that Robinson outearned her ex-hack husband. “When you’ve started off in the same profession, it’s difficult. You don’t realise the sort of problems being the breadwinner can produce.”
A recent study revealed that men who earn less than their partners suffer worse health than male highearners. “There’s no such thing as a happy house-husband; no mother puts her son on her knee when he’s three and says, ‘When you grow up you’re going to marry someone who’s cleverer than you and earns more money than you do.’”
Robinson’s hearing is dodgy in her left ear (I sit on her right) but, otherwise, she shows few signs of decrepitude, her skin glowing and taut. She swears there’s been no further “work” since her 2004 facelift. “I have Botox… but I don’t smoke, I don’t drink, I don’t eat sugar, I run. I feel like I should take a tiny bit of credit for how I look.”
She had the facelift after realising that in the Weakest Link’s “goodbye” shot she was “starting to look like my mother. You can’t be fat on telly, and you can’t be old on telly, unless you’re an expert like Mary Beard. I was never hired because I was pretty,
‘I’m the oldest woman on television who doesn’t bake cakes’
I was hired because I was a journalist and could write a script – that’s what gives you longevity. I’m the oldest woman in television who doesn’t bake cakes.”
Image being (almost) everything, Robinson is unimpressed by Theresa May. “I feel sorry for her. I thought she was quite an impressive home secretary, though a lot of the shoes and outfits were wearing her, rather than she wearing them. But I feel she is a very nice person who is being pulled here, there and everywhere.
“Jeremy Corbyn has just turned out to be much better front-of-house. It helps if you’ve had the same views for years – you don’t have to think – and with the polish he’s been given, he seems more authentic. It’s not about whether he really is authentic, it’s about whether my Auntie Betty in Birkdale is going to be impressed.”
Would she like him as prime minister? “I don’t want either of them.” Perhaps she could invite the two party leaders on to the resurrected Weakest Link? “I’d be thrilled to have him on. Or her. Who wouldn’t like to see them do the Walk of Shame?”
Anne Robinson is ambassador for the Royal National Institute of Blind People and Specsavers’ Transforming Eye Health campaign (specsavers.co.uk/ eye-health/rnib)