After 12 years and 230,000 questions, Anne Robinson is leaving Weakest Link. TV's Queen of Mean talks about knowing when it is time to go - in both work and marriage
Anne Robinson may like dogs ? Ellie, her working cocker, lies curled in a basket, unbothered by the personnel (publicist, housekeeper, stylist, photographer, interviewer) traipsing through the small Kensington kitchen ? but she is much more like a cat. After an hour or so of photographs, she submits to being interviewed, throwing herself on her sofa, feet up, can of Diet Coke in hand. Seemingly relaxed, but waiting to pounce. You can almost see a tail twitching.
Not that this cat doesn't need an occasional stroke. There's a revealing moment when she appeals to Barbara, her housekeeper of 10 years, with a playful "I'm not horrible, am I?" (All I suggested was that she might be a little controlling). "She's just looking for compliments," Barbara says fondly.
There is a level, of course, on which Robinson is playing up to expectations: the woman who, as a journalist on Fleet Street in the 70s and 80s, was known as Mrs Awkward; who graduated, nearly 12 years ago, to terrorising contestants on Weakest Link, earning herself the sobriquets "rudest woman on television" and "the queen of mean", as well as millions of viewers, a hit show in the US, and many millions of pounds. Who says now, proudly, "I think we've got much more daring. When you look at the very early ones it's incredibly tame. I mean, I never said things like 'Why are you so fat?'"
And "you mustn't think twice. I wouldn't have a job if I thought twice. Woody Allen always says that if it's real wit you hear it at the same time as you say it." It's a comment that betrays a certain hubris ? "Why are you so fat?" has shock value, but it isn't wit. On the other hand, she is very quick, and enjoys proper verbal sparring. "What you're always looking for is someone to play with ? a witty contestant who is up to you. It's fabulous [when it happens]." And she says she does keep a close eye on how her jibes are taken. "I occasionally come off and say 'Cut that out' ? not often, but I did it the other week, actually. I said to a student, 'That dress must have looked nice when it fitted you', and afterwards I said, 'Don't put that in, that hurt her'. So I hope we have a bit of judgment about it."
Her persona on Weakest Link does not appear to be an act, but an exaggerated aspect of herself. In interviews she uses it as a kind of gate-keeping device. Don't want to answer a question? Pour scorn; pounce on any vagueness ? then answer rather vaguely yourself. It's not that she isn't OK with information about herself being available ? she did, after all, write a very personal, self-critical account of her childhood, disastrous first marriage and alcoholism in Memoirs of an Unfit Mother (2001); she has cheerfully talked about her facelift, her shopping habits, her divorces ? it's just that she wants to control exactly how and why that information arrives.
And today she has an announcement to make: next spring, after 12 years, 1,693 episodes, 15,000 contestants and 230,000 questions asked, she is leaving Weakest Link. She insists it was her decision; that reports of her salary being halved were incorrect: "My fee wasn't cut. I said I'd do 10 years and then, because we went to Scotland and they were brilliant, I did a year more than I intended to do." She is trying to write a second book (out of years of diaries), that she jokes will be called How Much Did Your Face Cost? but hasn't the time. As "Rosemary Verey [who landscaped her country garden] said ? 'if you sell the house the garden isn't yours any more.' I was quite prepared if they had put someone else in." But the BBC will not be replacing her, and so the programme will go off air.
This news is a kind of compliment to a woman who has (mostly) run her extremely successful career on her own terms. She knows she is unusual in this: she told a BBC4 interviewer that in another life she'd like to use the experience to "give classes to clever women, so they don't constantly feel hurt and upset". And what would she teach? How to ask for more money, for one thing: she is straightforward about wanting lots of it, spending it, enjoying it; but more importantly, that refusing to be bound by what others want to pay you is the quickest way to earn equality, and freedom.
Another lesson would be to always look your best. "I remember interviewing Edwina Currie years and years ago and I said, 'There aren't enough women MPs, how would you tell women to go about it?' and she said, 'Tell them to lose a stone.'" Robinson laughs. "And I can see the logic of what she was saying, in that you need to feel as good about yourself as humanly possible." Her own mother sent her off to her first print job in a mink coat, with instructions to get a facial once a month, and advice never to do housework when she could pay for it. These days her maintenance regime includes manicures and pedicures, eyelash tints, HRT implants, fortnightly haircuts, frequent lowlights, Botox, work-outs and bikini waxes. "I want to sound as frivolous as I possibly can, so your readers are incredibly annoyed. Oh, and I have to have my moles checked, because I had a melanoma."
She gets testy when I point out that she requested a stylist for the interview, while she says that she doesn't mind what people say about her ? why?
"What it says about me is that I've probably been in television long enough to have learned the best way to get a decent photograph, and that it matters to me. What it says is that if by now my track record" ? she was an investigative reporter on the Sunday Times in an era when newsrooms hardly ever had more than one woman; was assistant editor of the Mirror when the Falklands war began; and viewing figures for Watchdog rose from 3 million to 8.5 million in the five years after she took over ? "has not given you an idea of what I can or cannot do, then it's beyond me to worry what your perception of me is ? that's what it says."
We have an unhelpful wrangle about older women on TV: "Do you know that the average woman of my age is sized between 16 and 18 and has at least two chins?" she demands. "I've nothing against that, but you can't simply talk about age ? you have to look at the restrictions of television." She does, in fact, have a more nuanced position ? that "a lot of young women, very, very pretty, not over-bright women, just bright enough to know how dim they are, can get on television, whereas guys, who aren't too pretty at that age, couldn't get on television now"; that when she began it was just as important that she was a good journalist and could write; that TV presenting requires a set of skills different from those required for print interviewing; "the world changes".
Selina Scott (who sued Channel 5 for ageism, winning a settlement and public apology) recently said that Robinson has survived on TV by becoming a caricature of herself. What did she think of that? "I don't know that I thought very much about it, except that she was perfectly entitled to say it. She hasn't said much that's witty, has she?"
One must address the treachery ? in her view of the working world, there is always treachery. But don't address it by being a victim, by claiming it's because you're a woman, by, God forbid, going to a tribunal. Work at your luck, and be unashamed of ambition.
But if she shies away from that word ? "I never thought I was ambitious, I thought I was just impatient" ? it's understandable. In 1973 she lost custody of her daughter Emma, not because of her drinking, but because of what the judge called her "undoubted ambition". The fact she had once said that she would rather cover the Vietnam war than vacuum the sitting room was largely what did for her. Much of her pride in her work now ? and her doting love for her daughter and grandsons, who live just across Hyde Park ? is underlined by the fact that she was able to stop drinking, and to come back from this blow.
For a long time afterwards, she could only mimic the outsize confidence she had inherited from her mother, a successful Liverpudlian market trader who bullied and cajoled and war profiteered (and also drank, heavily), but never failed to tell her daughter that she could do anything she put her mind to.
So she dealt with crippling fear, professionally, through full-frontal attack; but behaved with her new husband, John Penrose, like a "belligerent doormat": "I was only just learning to brush my teeth again. So it was hard for me to say to my husband, 'I really don't like having to go out and sit there while you knock off two bottles of wine,' or 'Why do we have to have people stay until 2am?' ? I think I was very, very frightened and unsure of myself. It took a few years to get back to who I was."
Things became more difficult when she was promoted, over her husband's head, at the Mirror to assistant editor. She earned more, was more powerful, and it only got worse when she started doing TV. "And where, oh where," as she put it in Memoirs of an Unfit Mother, "was my dilemma covered in Germaine's Female bloody Eunuch!"
"I'm going to have a chapter in my next book called 'There's no such thing as a happy househusband'," she says now. "I don't believe that women are that used to being the main breadwinner. I don't think they've adapted. There's a bit of a Barbie doll in all of us, to want a lovely, white wedding, and a man to look after us, and I think it's tough for both sides when it's the woman and the mother who's going out, and the guy's left, because his mother never ever put him on her knee when he was two and half or three and said, 'When you grow up you're going to marry someone who earns more money than you do'."
In 1990 they separated, for a few years, until one night, lonely and missing him, she called and he returned. The main discovery in her book seems to be that one of the most valuable things in life is a harmonious relationship, and that she was willing to do the hard work required to achieve it. What did that involve, day to day? How did she sort it out? "I don't think I did," she replies quietly. Four years ago they divorced; she is dating now, and is somewhat bafflingly surprised by the difficulty of finding someone who can punch at her own weight. "I think I learned you either accept how people are, or you get out. If you genuinely can't be happy with how they are, you have to throw in the towel." Her voice is quite low. "I couldn't make it work. I kept reading about people who'd got divorced, married and then married again ? and I was still thinking, "Am I happy?'"
"I think it's really sad for both sides. And you know ? my ex-husbands are two of my closest mates, and therefore the second marriage ? it was very sad. I think we both came to a reasonable, regretful decision about it, and therefore I didn't really expect to go down into a great dip, which I did." And then she can't resist puncturing the seriousness: "But I'm not bipolar! I'm the only person who's famous who's not bipolar!"
I wonder whether something similar will happen when she walks off the set of the Weakest Link for the last time. Or will she be relieved? "No no ? I'll miss it. It's been superb. So it is a hard decision. I've always tried to leave before you think you're going to be tired of doing something." She will still host Watchdog, and another series of My Life in Books, but neither is the same as being in two million living rooms every day. It will be like walking off a cliff, won't it? "Yes ? I think [that's what happens with] all change, good change and bad change ? [But] I've always been good at change. I mean my life has always been about change, up and down, I did 11 years as a columnist at the Mirror. I did 11 years of Points of View. I am not saying it will be easy, but easier than it might be for a lot of people."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2011/apr/23/anne-robinson-weakest-link-interview
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