Anne Robinson is back on TV with a new 5 documentary about prisons and shows a softer side in new interview
The Weakest Link made Anne Robinson a huge TV star(Image: Daily Mirror)
She was the queen of mean on TV in The Weakest Link, but at 80, Anne Robinson appears to be mellowing, possibly even going soft.
She wants the chance to keep on making TV and spoiling her grandchildren for decades to come. Asked about her mortality, Anne says: “I do think about it quite a lot. And I look at the obituaries saying, oh, golly, they went at 70, they went at 72. But then the other day there was a woman who died at 116. So what I do is I try to keep fit, and live in the day and be grateful for wonderful grandsons, my daughter and my son in law, although he supports Everton, but you can’t have everything… And I love clothes. I keep buying clothes, I don’t think, Oh, well, I won’t need any soon.”
She adds: “Medically, and in our heads, we’ve just progressed a great deal. If you look at Jane Fonda, I don’t know she must be 83, 84, and she’s looking fantastic. It’s why, when I had a facelift, I immediately said that I’d had one, because I didn’t want people who are my age to think, why don’t I look like her with no lines? I’ve just thrown money at my face. Not sure it’s working anymore… But not everyone has those options. I have been very lucky.”
Anne’s new show for 5 this week looks at prison sentences in the UK and asking if they need to change.
Anne, who is dating Andrew Parker Bowles, says she surrounds herself with younger people “in their 50s” which helps her keep feeling young. She clearly adores her grandchildren, Hudson and Parker, although she says they are “at the grunting stage at the moment, because they’re 15 and 16”. She lets them use her tennis court at home and was amused rather than angry when they pulled an iPad out of her wall when their mother took their iPhones off them recently.
Asked if she is soft with her grandchildren, she adds: “Yeah. I think it’s true for all grandparents, particularly ones who probably worked during their children’s years, that you utterly appreciate your grandchildren. I’m very lucky. Very, very lucky. “
Anne is speaking as she returns to TV in a new 5 documentary looking at prison sentences in the UK and asking if they need to change.
It is a return to the hard-hitting subject matter she covered as a journalist, and the determined campaigner we remember from Watchdog.
Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link(Image: BBC)
You Be The Judge examines four real life sentences with participants taking part in reconstructions and asked to compare how the judges came to the decision when it comes to sentencing.
“It’s certainly a topic that should have more publicity,” She says, sounding more like the serious and agitated Anne we are used to seeing on screen.
“Do people realise that prison isn’t working? Each government that comes along says they are going to be tougher on crime, and that means longer sentences, which also means the prison system is working less and less. We are 120% overcrowded in prisons, we don’t have enough officers and the prisons themselves are Victorian – it’s just not working. There are too many criminals and not enough staff. If you asked a prison governor why prisoners can’t spend their time learning to read and write, or learning a trade like carpentry, they will just tell you they don’t have the staff to make that happen.
“We need to embarrass the government. They’ve just got to find the money.
” I want Yvette Cooper to sit down with a supper on her lap and watch this from beginning to end, because I need the government to be embarrassed.”
The truth is, the documentary even managed to stun Anne.
“This is without a doubt the most shocking documentary I’ve ever made. I was pretty shocked when I made a documentary on abortion and learned people’s views on it, but if you watch this programme from beginning to end you will be terrified at the state of the British justice system.”
Anne back in her days on the Daily Mirror as a writer(Image: Daily Mirror)
Anne was married to Charles Wilson, a former journalist and newspaper executive, until 1973 and her second marriage to John Penrose ended in 2007. She would like to do more TV like her latest project, but looking back over her career, one of her favourite times of her life was being a trailblazer at the Daily Mirror. Whilst there in the Eighties she had her own column and argubaly developed the vitriolic style which made her a household name later on TV.
“I love journalism, of all the things I’ve done, and I’ve crossed the Atlantic doing Weakest Link in America and here. But my favourite time was working for newspapers, and a lot of that was at the Daily Mirror, we were a great campaigning newspaper and it was crazy. There was one, perhaps two, women reporters in the newsroom. There were no women sub editors, and I was the first woman ever to regularly edit a national newspaper. So we’ve come on leaps and bounds. I sometimes think youngsters don’t realise what it was like in the old days.”
So is it a pain that most people still know her as the woman from the Weakest Link? It doesn’t seem to be, and the money she earned including a reported £10m golden handcuffs deal at it’s heights of success, may have helped soften any blow.
“Listen, they’re all customers,” she says of the audience, making it clear she is much more approachable off screen than she was speaking to contestants on it.
“I never refuse a selfie. I never refuse an autograph. Because if the people who are stopping me weren’t there, I wouldn’t have had the career I’ve got. So I’m probably quite unusual like that. I mean, I’m thrilled if someone wants a selfie. I’m not so thrilled if I’ve got no make-up on. We went to boarding school, but we had to go to my mother’s market stall in the holidays, so that we learned to meet the customers and to know the customers were very important. And that’s never left me, really.”
And Anne being a selfie fan is not the only surprise during the interview. She claims to have never watched Romesh Ranganathan host The Weakest Link “I’ve purposely never looked at it, but I’m told he’s very good actually. He’s got to conform to what the rules are now, not what I could get away with. I was working at the best time in television”
But there is one other quizmaster she has a lot of time for; step forward Lee Mack.
“I love The 1% club. I know people’s heroes are Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, but Lee Mack does it for me,” she says.
“He’s genuinely funny, and you watch him on anything else, he’s not just The 1% club, but he’s very quick witted. And when I was doing weakest link, I was quite fascinated by the fact that old comedians were much better at responding to me quickly and in a funny way than New Age comedians. I hate all this hugging on TV these days, and Lee Mack doesn’t do that. He only really needs to hug me.
Asked to confirm she means she finds Lee attractive, she adds: “It’s a deep crush. He actually looks even sexier with his glasses on.
“His mother and I went to school together. I think he is brilliant. We bumped into each other at Salford, at the BBC studios, and that’s when he said to me, you were at convent school with my mother. That’s how I know.”
Lee’s quiz show is a big success on ITV whilst Anne’s ran for 12 years on the BBC. But she still remembers how the stand out hit almost didn’t happen for her.
“A fax came in from the BBC saying we’ve created a new game show, and we think Anne Robinson would be suitable, because she’ll look as if she can answer the questions.
“My manager said, ‘I’ll tell them, you’re too busy’. And I said, No, let’s take the meeting. And it’s a very good example, if girls are going for jobs to just explore them, take the meeting, even if you don’t think the job is for you.
“I think it’s Gary Player who says you have to work at being lucky. He used to say, the harder I work, the luckier I get. I think it’s also about taking risks. Yeah, you know, I don’t think I realised that when the Weakest Link started, that people were going to find me a horrible person. I just thought, Oh, this is original, and it’s me. And although I earned a great deal of money after having created the character, in fact, it was me.
“In the early days, it was quite tame, we got more and more naughty with it as time went on. Also because it was a successful show in the afternoon, I genuinely don’t think all those toffs at the BBC were particularly monitoring it. At the end of every round I’d say, Do you think we’ll get away with that? And we did because they weren’t watching television, they were too busy angsting about Question Time and Newsnight.”
