Twenty-five years ago, Anne Robinson got a fax inviting her to host a new quiz show called The Weakest Link. The presenter, then best known for being an audience ally as presenter of the BBC’s consumer affairs programme Watchdog, recalls that her brief was to: “Look like you know all the answers. Then ease the contestants’ disappointment when they have to leave.”
“But when I met real quizzers, I realised they were quite prepared to be horrible to each other and ruthlessly competitive,” she recalls today, via video call from her home in the Cotswolds.
“I remember one rehearsal, in a shabby room at the BBC where I asked a man why he was voting off a woman called Janet. He said: ‘Anyone who can’t name the Teletubbies shouldn’t be here.’ That put a light on in my head. I thought: ‘GREAT! I can be myself! I can look at the contestants and say what people on the sofa at home are thinking: why are you so fat? You’ve got an annoying laugh. Were you on medication when you bought that top?’” She shrugs. “I said nothing I wouldn’t have overheard in my old office at Fleet Street.”
And thus was born teatime telly’s dominatrix. For 11 years, contestants queued up for a tongue-lashing from the BBC’s smirking “Queen of Mean”.
“The format was so successful, we sold it all over the world, to over 100 countries,” boasts Robinson today – possibly exaggerating as I can only find reference to just over 70. Still, it’s been a global phenomenon, and the host’s brutality is its USP. On YouTube you can find montages of stern-faced hosts of all nationalities, clearly styled after Robinson. “They all had to come to Pinewood and watch me record the show,” she says. “They all had to dress in black, wear glasses and dye their hair red.” She grins, because many of her clones did just that.
“I said at the beginning I’d do The Weakest Link for 10 years and in the end I did 11 years,” she says. “Over 3,000 shows if you count the ones I did in America.” She’s glad she stopped when she did, because, she says, “you wouldn’t be able to say the kind of things I said on TV today.”
In her heyday, Robinson didn’t just challenge people over their weight and fashion sense. She also pulled up the single mother of three boys (who reasonably claimed that child-rearing was a full-time job) for being on benefits and asked how many of her sons had ASBOs or wore ankle tags.
In 2006, she was called out by LGBTQ rights group Stonewall over what they said was a “derisive and demeaning” attitude to queer contestants. On one occasion she sneered that a woman “dressed like a lesbian”. On a Celebrity Chefs edition of the show she asked Reza Mahammad: “What do you do in your restaurant? Just mince around?”
But under the BBC report on Stonewall’s attack, you can read comments by many gay readers arguing that they loved Robinson’s “banter”, which they argued was all part of the game. One of my oldest friends – a gay man – appeared on the show in 2001, won £13,000 and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
“She was much smaller than I expected,” he recalls. “She went off set between rounds and didn’t talk to any of us before filming. But I was obviously very excited about winning enough money to rip up the credit agreements I’d just signed for windows and a boiler in my first house, so she gave me a small hug.”
Robinson smiles with genuine warmth when I remind her of this. “Lovely!” she says. “I made a point of not meeting the contestants when they weren’t playing so I could keep my horrible face on at the podium. Particularly when I did Celebrity Weakest Link. They’d all try to say, ‘Hi Annie!’ I just wouldn’t answer because you really want them to be as scared as possible before you start.”
Indeed, she takes a swipe at her own publicist before our interview – suggesting he hasn’t combed his hair well enough – and tells me off for keeping up my Christmas tree past 6 January.
During our half-hour conversation she says both that the insults she dished out on the show were “all me”, but also says she doesn’t have any issue with fat people, gay people or single mums. Indeed, she was a single mum of sorts herself, separating from her daughter Emma’s father (journalist Charles Wilson) in 1973 when Emma was two, and losing custody to Wilson.
In her brilliant 2001 book Memoir of an Unfit Mother, Robinson is harder on herself than on any quiz show contestant. She’s blisteringly frank about being a greedy, ambitious alcoholic at that point in her life. But she’s also a savage critic of the patriarchal system, noting how her witty assertion that she’d “rather cover the Vietnam war than hoover the living room” was thrown against her as a failure of femininity. She noted that during the custody battle she was asked in court if she drank alcohol in the morning. She did. But so too, she reckons, did the lawyers and the judge presiding over her case.
This was a boozy, macho era in which she was punished for her success as a woman in Fleet Street, where she rose from “Wednesday witch” columnist status to become deputy editor of The Daily Mirror. To be deemed a good mother, the court would have expected her to stay at home. For Wilson to gain custody required no such commitment. He was allowed to continue at work – going on to become editor of The Times – while outsourcing the childcare.
Because we now know Robinson as crisply presented and crisply spoken – scathing about any hint of disorder in others – it’s hard to imagine a time when, as she describes in her memoir, she’d regularly wake up “with my knickers round my neck in a bed I didn’t recognise, surrounded by vomit and having not the faintest idea where I was”. But she quit drinking and joined AA in December 1978 after picking her daughter up from school and driving to a petrol station to buy a bottle of vodka, then watching the child cry as she drank it.
Today she tells me, with a twinkle of pride, that she “comes from a long line of Irish Catholic, alcoholic thieves”. Much of the persona she inhabits on The Weakest Link seems inherited from her dazzlingly beautiful, energetically entrepreneurial, sharp-tongued mother, whom she has described as “part-monster, part-magic”. In her memoir, Robinson writes that both she and her older brother, Peter, could have been forgiven for thinking their names were “Hurry Up!” as young children.
Robinson’s mother’s hustle was running a hugely successful chicken stall in a Liverpool market. She’d made a killing on the black market during the Second World War and Robinson is proud to tell me she grew up in a house “with an in-and-out drive”. Anne and Peter were both sent to boarding school. At the beginning of the summer they’d come home and be expected to put on white coats and put in two solid weeks’ graft on the market stall before being whisked away to the luxury of the Carlton hotel in the South of France.
Today Robinson argues that she learned more on the stall than at the convent school from which she was booted out after the fifth form. “I learned how to talk to anyone. I learned that to sell anything you must first learn to sell yourself.”
Robinson’s father was a teacher, for whom her mother had scant respect. “She thought men were rather silly,” says Robinson. “Do you?” I ask. “I think quite a lot of men are quite comical,” she shrugs. “I think a lot of them talk about themselves too much. I don’t think they do irony as well as women. We’ve all sat next to somebody like that at dinner. I make a point of telling them: ‘We’re nearly at the end of the second course now and we’ve only talked about you.’” In the blunt agony aunt column she now writes for Saga magazine, she has advised other women of her generation to enjoy themselves challenging potential suitors in the same way. “What have you got to lose?!”
In her memoir, Robinson is rather disdainful of her second husband, journalist John Penrose, to whom she was married between 1980 and 2007. She gloats that however badly she treated him, she only had to snap her fingers and he’d come running. These days she is rumoured to be in a relationship with Queen Camilla’s ex husband, Andrew Parker Bowles. When I ask her if this is the case she snaps back: “None of your business.”
Still, it seems likely the pair are connected in some way, as the Queen’s son, Tom Parker Bowles, is set to appear in the one-off stage version of The Weakest Link that Robinson will be hosting at the Barn theatre in Cirencester on Saturday, to raise funds for her local primary school. The royal-adjacent food critic will be competing against a line up including pop star and Strictly contestant Toyah Wilcox, Sky News presenter Kay Burley and Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley.
“I’m delighted that the former prime minister’s father will be on the stage with me,” says the woman who’s expressed public admiration for the anti-Thatcher tirades of comic Ben Elton, but has also been courted to stand for Parliament as a Tory MP. Today she’s all but licking her lips at the thought of tearing strips off the old buffer. When she was interviewed on GB News two years ago, Robinson expressed her contempt for Boris Johnson as a liar who begins to believe his own falsehoods “the moment they’ve left his mouth”.
“I think the whole Johnson family are full of self confidence,” she says. “They’re a lesson to us all. Yes, Boris was funny but you don’t want Michael McIntyre running the country, do you? He was not a serious politician.” Does she think the apparently less bombastic Keir Starmer makes a better leader? She pulls a face. “He talks to me as if my dog has just died. I don’t like that. I think it’s quite important to have somebody leading the country who’s personable and has a good delivery. I don’t think he’s good at public speaking.”
As we talk, I can see her already working out the jibes she will throw at her new cast of contestants. “Kay Burley’s had a facelift,” she grins. But so have you? “Oh yes!” she agrees. I’ve always admired the way Robinson was so honest about having cosmetic surgery back in an era when most celebrities lied about it. “It wouldn’t be fair to other women of my age not to be honest,” she agrees. She tells me that one of her best friends’ husband is a dermatologist in Los Angeles, and so the idea of cosmetic surgery seemed more normal to her than it did to others. “I didn’t like watching myself on Watchdog and thinking: ‘Why is my mother on television?’”
But – while noting that older women were regularly binned from TV jobs in the 80s and 90s while male contemporaries were allowed to age on screen – Robinson oddly denies that women are under any more pressure to go under the knife. “There’s no pressure!” she says. “Show me the statistics proving that there’s pressure. It’s a personal decision about if you want to look better or not.” She shrugs. “I always tell people it’s no different from getting your ears pierced. If you’re happy to put holes in your ears to change your appearance then why shouldn’t you put holes in your face?”
At this point, Robinson points out that “you’ve had half an hour now”, and is clearly ready to exit the call. Her publicist reminds us that we need to talk a little more about the live show, because there are still a few tickets available. “It’s going to be a great night,” says Robinson. “I’m really looking forward to it.” Although her own grandchildren are at a weekly boarding school, she is clearly concerned about the kids in her village primary school. “If we don’t raise enough money with this show then they’ll be stuck in leaky prefab classrooms for another decade,” she says. “Goodbye!”
‘Celebrity Weakest Link’ is on at the Barn Theatre, Cirencester, on Saturday (barntheatre.org.uk)