Trust me, there’s no such thing as a happy house husband
She’ll have feminists fuming, but TV’s Queen of Mean says it NEVER works when women earn more than their husbands ... they must learn to act like geishas
Sex at 70? It’s the same as sex when you are 50
ON THE shelves in the basement living room of Anne Robinson’s West London townhouse are a pair of DVDs entitled Magnificent Lovemaking. They offer ‘Seven Dimensions Of Sexual Connection’ but are still in their plastic wrapper. Is this because the Queen of Mean has nothing to learn from them or because, after two divorces, she’s content to go to bed with a mug of cocoa and this month’s Vogue?
I have to ask. ‘How’s sex in your 70s?’ ‘It is just like sex in your 60s and sex in your 50s,’ she replies, without missing a beat. ‘I am of the Sixties generation. We were never meant to get old. You don’t think you are 70, whereas the idea your mother had sex when she was 70 was appalling.’
But the TV quiz mistress does not want to be quizzed over who is sharing her bed. ‘I don’t think it is fair – it just screws things up, it gives someone publicity they don’t need and didn’t ask for,’ she says.
The presenter, who has managed to terrorise everyone from tycoons on Watchdog to contestants on The Weakest Link, is 72 tomorrow.
Not that she looks it, of course. The 2003 facelift is taut and fresh thanks to a few touch-ups with Botox, she has been on a diet for the past 60 years, and she has very expensive hair. She has devotedly taken HRT since her 50s.
‘My body is OK. I don’t mind showing it to people,’ Anne says. ‘I try to maintain looking good. I don’t think that is the same as trying to look younger than I am.’
If she frets about one thing, she says, it’s having thick ankles.
In some ways, however, the years have caught up with her – Anne’s own weakest link is her hearing. A virus has all but killed the hearing in her left ear. She has worn a discreet hearing aid for the past three years. It means she needs people to shut up – presumably not something she struggles with.
‘It doesn’t affect my work,’ she says. ‘I just won’t have anyone talking in the studio because I have no ability to channel the noise I don’t want to hear. I won’t have people chattering. I don’t think it can get any worse because there is only a tiny amount of hearing left – maybe 15 per cent.’
Does it make her feel vulnerable? ‘No. But my ankles do.’
It’s a classic Robinson line: fast, sharp and funny. It’s also a reminder she’s as uncompromising about herself as she is about others. A former alcoholic, she has not had a drink for 40 years. She doesn’t smoke, has a strict exercise regime, and eats plain, light food prepared by her personal chef. She never wastes a second and with a self-made fortune of about £60million, she delights in earning money and spending it.
Anne has so much she can afford to be sanguine about a tax bill of £4million which she reveals she has just settled. Like celebrities including footballer David Beckham and Gary Barlow, she had invested in a controversial tax shelter scheme called Ingenious which took advantage of tax breaks to boost the British film industry. The Revenue subsequently moved to close the loophole. ‘The taxman has just taken £4 million off me,’ Anne reveals. ‘Ingenious are fighting it but for the first time ever the Revenue said you either can settle and pay a small amount, which some people did, or you can fight it, and if you fight it we want what we would have from you if we win and we are having it now. That £4 million is what the investment would have paid me.
‘You could sue the accountant or Ingenious but… I am still here, I have two homes, two housekeepers, everyone is healthy. There is a limit to how much you can say, “Oh dear, this is terrible.” You just have to put it to the back of the bus.’
The tax bill is hardly small change but with a property empire stretching from Gloucestershire to Manhattan, plus her lucrative TV work, canny Annie isn’t exactly facing ruin. She could easily afford not to work but she loves TV as much as it loves her, with her trademark smirk, caustic tongue and sly wink.
Her stint presenting the BBC consumer show Watchdog finished last year, and she ended a 12-year run on The Weakest Link in 2012, but she is back on our screens with a new three-part series called Anne Robinson’s Britain next month.
Her shows ask: Are You A Good Enough Mother; What’s The Point Of Your Pet? and What’s Wrong With Being Ugly?
As the titles suggest, they see her acid tongue unleashed on 21st Century mothering, the British obsession with animals, and body image.
Anne was the mother who lost custody of her only child, Emma Wilson, for eight years because of her alcohol addiction. Today mother and daughter live a few minutes apart on opposite sides of Hyde Park, and Anne is a doting grandmother.
She would have liked a bigger family. ‘I could have done better the second time,’ she says. ‘But I had a miscarriage in my second marriage and nothing happened after that. I
tried but I don’t think it’s easy once you hit in your mid-30s and I never went down the medical route.’
She made no secret of her longing to become a grandmother, not just once but twice over. ‘When my first grandson was six months old I had him on my own for two weeks and sent Emma off on holiday to the Caribbean so she could get pregnant again. I told her to. I thought she was cracking on a bit.
‘She did and there is only 17 months between the children. I think I am a good grandmother because I mind my own business. It’s about keeping your mouth shut and being on tap.
‘They cycle over with their big stupid dog and have supper and stay overnight and I take them to school the next morning. They spend a lot of time in Gloucestershire with me, too – they were there the whole of August and I was quite glad to see the back of them. Then they turned up the next weekend…’ She looks pretty happy about it, though.
Anne hates the fact that mothering has become ‘a competitive sport’, and doesn’t approve of stay-at-home dads either. ‘There’s no such thing as a happy house-husband. No mother puts her son on her knee when he is two and says, “Son, when you grow up you are going to marry someone who is brighter than you, who earns more money than you, and is more important than you.” What you have is house-husbands resentful that they have to stay at home and go on play dates with other mothers, and a woman who is earning the money and walking on eggshells so as not to upset him.’ Anne says this as someone who was the breadwinner in her second marriage to her former agent, John Penrose. They were married for 27 years. ‘For the girl to be main breadwinner is a ballbreaker,’ she admits. ‘I probably did not realise it until too late – not that I could have done much about it. ‘I was genetically programmed. I had a career mother who said, “Do not do what I have done, be the breadwinner and work your socks off but find a man to keep you,” while not on a single day of her life showing me the skills to do that. I didn’t have any geisha skills. I still don’t. I did not know how to say, “You are the most handsome man in the world or aren’t you clever.” That’s where I went wrong.’
Her mother was Liverpool-Irish, a woman described by Anne as ‘Mother Teresa styled by Vogue and schooled by Stalin’. She imbued her daughter with ambition and selfbelief, as well as an appetite for designer clothes. By the time Anne broke into journalism, she sent her to Fleet Street with a mink coat so she wouldn’t get cold on doorsteps.
Anne gives herself a seven out of ten for her own mothering skills and says Emma’s ‘miles better’ than she ever was. But she’s not one for looking back. ‘I am very glad to be alive, I nearly killed myself with alcohol and have had 40 years of unadulterated pleasure since then.’
For her part, Emma says her job is to walk around after her mother saying sorry because she’s so rude. ‘Yes,’ says Anne, ‘Emma’s very good at being on crap control.’
After parenting, pets and body image there’ll be another documentary, tentatively titled How Happily Are You Married? which will delve into modern relationships, though probably not Anne’s own.
While she may be dating, she’s unlikely to marry again. ‘I’d never say never but I can’t see the point. And I doubt I would have a live-in relationship again. I don’t mind a sort of part-time relationship. That suits me best. You do get fussier and fussier – you want someone funny, with integrity.’
It turns out the sex DVDs were a freebie brought home from an American spa holiday with Emma ten years ago. ‘They are still in the wrapper because I’ve never bothered to get them out. Magnificent Lovemaking? Maybe I should unwrap it before I go to geisha classes…’
And what does she think she might study at geisha classes? ‘I could learn to be nice and stop never letting a thought go unsaid. I don’t filter because it is funnier not to.’
It also makes for great television… parents, pet obsessives and porky people, you have all been warned.
I’ve just had to settle a £4m bill with the taxman
Anne Robinson’s Britain, is on BBC1, on October 6, at 8pm.