It will McCall be fine in the end..
Davina has learned to relax and enjoy life, says Rick Fulton
WITH tears pouring down her face Davina McCall raced to pick up her kids.
Despite giving them a comfortable life thanks to her TV success in shows like Big Brother, her own upbringing tripped her up.
She was brought up by her grandparents from the age of three after her parents’ divorce.
And her French mum Florence was an alcoholic who she only saw on holidays.
Davina, 54, wanted better for her kids Holly, 20, Tilly, 18 and Chester, 15.
She said she was so determined to give them the upbringing she missed out on “that when I messed up, I gave myself an irrationally hard time. If I was 10 minutes late to pick them up, I’d be in tears.
“It stopped when I realised they were all quite well balanced; they had a roof over their heads, they all knew the foundations and they all felt loved.’”
Now Davina, a judge on The Masked Singer and presenter of Long Lost Family, doesn’t see the end of her second marriage to Matthew Robertson, the father of her children, as a failure.
She said: “There’s no such thing as failure if you learn something along the way … we were married for 18 years. We didn’t go the distance but we did well, and made three great kids.”
Lately Davina has been a voice for women going through the menopause, tackling it on Monday on Channel 4 in Sex, Mind and The Menopause.
She said: “I wanted to learn more about the menopause for myself and, as I did, I thought, ‘How is it that all women don’t know these things, when 51 per cent of the population is female?’
“What’s lovely is that being able to use my platform to spread the word has given me purpose at this stage in my life.”
She became perimenopausal during 2013 series Stepping Out. Davina said: “I was forgetting the names of contestants and making mistakes on autocue.
“One day, the producer came into my dressing room and said, ‘Are you OK? … When she left, I cried. I thought ‘What’s happening to me?’”
Davina now lives in Kent with boyfriend Michael Douglas. She has plans to travel more when Tilly and Chester leave home.
She said: “I’ve always wanted to go to Bhutan, and I dream of going on a wellness retreat.
“I once went to Brazil thinking I was doing exactly that, but it turned out to be more like a boot camp.”
● Read the full interview with Davina in the June 2022 issue of Good Housekeeping, on sale now.