Viva Davina!
With a new man after that painful split – and a follow-up to The Masked Singer that promises to be just as brilliantly barmy – Davina McCall tells why, at 53, it pays to be fearless
Davina McCall is extolling the virtues of the gown she has lined up for the series finale of her latest show. ‘It’s awesome,’ she reveals. ‘Strapless, blue, totally fabulous.’
Then again, she’s thrilled about pretty much the entire wardrobe of glamorous outfits she will unveil as one of the panel of judges on ITV’s new extravaganza The Masked Dancer, a follow-up to the brilliantly bonkers ratings hit The Masked Singer, which starts next weekend. ‘I’m wearing dresses I never dreamt I would be wearing on TV at my age. I’ve been on TV for years and years and I thought my shiny-floor show days were over,’ she says of her return to the Saturday night primetime slot. ‘But here I am having the time of my life.’
She certainly looks like she is: at 53 and wearing not a scrap of makeup, Davina glows as she waltzes in for our interview and photoshoot, clear-skinned and toned in a pair of jeans and a pink blazer from Zara. Of course there’s always some soreness under the surface. The break-up with her husband four years ago has been well documented, and just a couple of weeks ago she laid bare her struggles with the menopause in a very personal documentary. Add to that her eldest daughter fleeing the nest for university in the midst of a pandemic, and it’s clear that life has thrown her some challenges.
But her cheery relatability makes Davina an enduringly popular television presence – even when set against the bizarre backdrop of a singing unicorn and a giant warbling bumblebee, as she has been recently on two series of The Masked Singer.
For those who missed the show, it saw a cast of anonymous celebrities concealed in elaborate head-to-toe costumes competing in front of an audience and a panel of judges – Davina, Jonathan Ross, pop star Rita Ora and latterly comedian Mo Gilligan – who had to work out their identities from their singing ability and a few tantalisingly scattered clues.
Part talent contest, part zany guessing game, on paper it should never have worked but it became a ratings juggernaut, pulling in a whopping ten million viewers for the finale of the second series in February. Not that Davina had any doubts about it. ‘I knew it was a hit the minute I started filming,’ she says. ‘The moment a unicorn in sequins stepped out I thought, “Who is that? This is great!”’
Much of the show’s success was down to the banter between the judges, so it’s little surprise TV bigwigs have transposed this winning formula (minus Rita Ora, who is replaced by Strictly professional dancer Oti Mabuse) to a similarly eccentric show, but this time on the dance floor. Like The Masked Singer it’s all pre-recorded, including the final, with everyone involved sworn to secrecy as to the dancers’ identities until they’re unmasked.
It promises to be every bit as bizarre too, with a flamingo, a knickerbocker glory and a rubber chicken among the performers dancing to everything from ballet to ballroom, sometimes alongside a masked professional partner. It rather begs the question: can you really suss out who’s beneath the costume from the way they sashay across a dance floor? Particularly if they come dressed as... a car wash? Davina insists you can.
‘When Car Wash first came out I did think that, clearly, whoever they were they were not going to be a great dancer – but actually because the costume has got those kind of shimmy fringe effects it looks amazing,’ she says. ‘And this time there are a lot more clues than on The Masked Singer. There are clues in the costumes, on the dancers dancing with the contestants, in the backdrop, in the choice of song – there are clues everywhere. And we still get the vocal clues too – you still get to hear a disguised voice, so you can try and work out if they’re a man or a woman, are they faking an accent?’
The judges seem to be having a
OTI KNOWS THE DANCE MOVES, WE JUST KNOW WHAT WE LIKE WHEN WE SEE IT
hoot again too, albeit without Rita who Davina affectionately calls an ‘absolute nut job’. ‘Obviously, she’s an incredibly serious and successful pop star, but her funny side is the thing that makes Rita so different and special,’ she says. ‘She will just come out with whatever. And of course, Jonathan takes the mick out of her relentlessly.’ Jonathan himself is a long-standing friend of Davina’s. ‘We’ve both been around a long time, and it’s great because you can say to a mate, “That’s absolute twaddle” and nobody takes offence.’
Mo Gilligan, who replaced
Korean-American comedian and actor Ken Jeong – star of The Hangover film series – for the second run of The Masked Singer, is also on The Masked Dancer panel. ‘All he has to do is start laughing and I’m off,’ Davina says, while newcomer Oti, who has won the last two series of Strictly, has proved more than an equal match for her new colleagues. ‘I didn’t know Oti before this but apart from being brilliant at dancing, she’s just a really good TV personality – she knows what’s needed in a show. The rest of us are all neanderthals when it comes to dancing; we just know what we like when we see it. But she knows all the dance moves and what they should be doing, and on top of all that she’s just a super-nice woman. Also she’s quite sassy so she gives Jonathan a run for his money. It’s all been huge fun.’
While Davina’s flying high on
the work front, there’s no doubt her glow is partly down to contentment in her personal life following what she called the ‘emotional turmoil’ of her 2017 split from husband Matthew Robertson, father of her three children. Since 2019 she has been in a relationship with celebrity hairdresser Michael Douglas, 47, who she first met on the set of Big Brother two decades ago when she was presenting the show. Michael did her hair and
the pair have been friends ever since. Their newfound romance means he’s off the agenda today – Davina has previously stated she won’t talk about their relationship out of respect for their former partners and children – but their affection is evident in the selfies Davina posts on Instagram, and today at our photoshoot Michael is styling her hair.
He comes up in conversation naturally though, when Davina refers to Making The Cut, the podcast they host together in which they recommend their go-to products and culture fixes, be it movies or mascara. ‘We’re always saying, “Guess what I’ve found for you this week?”’ she laughs. ‘We love doing the podcast because basically we’d been doing this for 20 years, just recommending things to each other, so it doesn’t feel like work. And we’re not working together as partners, we’re working together as mates, which is something we’re very comfortable doing.’ They don’t live together. Davina has spent the majority of the past year locked down at her home in Kent with her daughters Holly, 19, and Tilly, 17, son Chester, 14, and latterly two of her daughters’ friends, making a rather overwhelming female-tomale ratio in the house. ‘There were six of us and Chester was with five women, so that was quite something,’ she says. ‘He’s going to be the best boyfriend in the universe.’
Like all of us, Davina’s had her lockdown ups and downs. ‘The first one was OK although I was worried about work,’ she admits. ‘Five months of stuff going out and nothing coming in, I did think, “Oh my God”. But I had a lot less to worry about than most people because I was living in a house, my kids were safe and nobody was sick. And then, just mentally, there was the winter. The kids struggled more and if the kids aren’t happy, I worry. Emotionally I struggled with the last lockdown. It was horrible.’
With Holly and her friend now back at university Davina says she misses her desperately. ‘It’s funny because for my kids’ entire lives I’ve been thinking my whole job is to give them wings so they can fly away, which is exactly what Holly’s done – but I do really miss her,’ she says. ‘I went to the supermarket recently and it was as if there was some really sad ballad playing in my head as I walked past the oat milk, because I don’t drink it but she did, and now I don’t need to buy it any more. At the same time, I’m proud she’s a girl who knows where she’s going and what she wants to do.’
No doubt Holly gets that formidable drive from her mother: ever since Davina burst into the screen presenting Channel 4’s cult dating show Streetmate in 1998 she has worked pretty much non-stop. Aside from 11 series as the host of Big Brother, she’s also fronted everything from primetime game shows like The Million Pound Drop to tearjerking factual series such as Long Lost Family.
She had been scheduled to join Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen as presenter of the revamped 90s makeover show Changing Rooms, only to have to drop out when the rescheduling due to Covid made it impossible to fit it around other
I GAVE MY DAUGHTER WINGS, BUT NOW SHE’S FLOWN I REALLY MISS HER
work commitments (she’s since been replaced by Anna Richardson).
A documentary on the menopause, inspired by her own struggles over the years, aired a couple of weeks ago. She brought her trademark candour to the show – there aren’t many primetime presenters willing to talk hot flushes on air – and admits she’s almost evangelical about bringing the topic out into the open. She’s champions hormone replacement therapy (HRT), which she says sparked an instant transformation when she started taking it seven years ago after years of feeling terrible. ‘It was straight away that I started to feel not just normal, because I hadn’t been normal for years, but better than I had done in ages,’ she says. ‘It was like being reborn, but then the shame set in because I’d had three home births and I never took a pill, and I felt I was doing something unnatural. What I’ve learnt is there isn’t anything more natural than body identical hormones [plant-based hormone substitutes]. I will take them until I die. They’ll be pumping them into my coffin.’
It’s not just HRT she credits for feeling ‘amazing’. In recent years Davina has become something of a fitness guru. A recovering addict who’s been teetotal for almost 30 years, she’s been the flag-bearer for a ‘strong not skinny’ look in a series of well-received exercise DVDs and via her Instagram stream (she has 1.3m followers).
Now she’s off to film the series finale of The Masked Dancer in that fabulous blue dress. We chuckle about the fact that she was trolled on social media following an episode of The Masked Singer after wearing a skimpy white number with spaghetti straps. ‘Cover up!’ spat one viewer. No chance of that, I suspect. ‘Absolutely not,’ she laughs. ‘I’m flying the flag to show all these youngies that it’s all going to be OK.’ nThe Masked Dancer begins on 29 May at 7pm on ITV. Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace starts on Monday, 9pm, UTV.