Davina McCall, The Sunday Telegraph

INTERVIEW
U
tterly
Davına
PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER MURPHY
Davina McCall doesn’t do things by half measures, which is why
she nearly destroyed herself with drugs, and why she’s become
the undisputed queen of reality TV. She talks to TIM AULD about
fighting her demons and her unlikely new addiction: get-fit DVDs
Tucking into a fishcake in a hotel in Tunbridge
Wells, a few miles from her home, Davina McCall
is reflecting on her life, aged 44. Lightly made up,
she looks the picture of health, relaxed in skinny
black jeans, ankle boots, and a grey T-shirt.
‘I am literally the dullest celebrity you are ever
likely to meet,’ she says chirpily. ‘I may potentially
have a blindfold from Agent Provocateur in the
bottom of a drawer somewhere that I got for
Christmas, but that’s about it. So I’m not that
exciting at the moment. It’s quite nice in a sense.’
It’s classic Davina McCall – disarmingly honest,
ungrandiose and just a little bit naughty.
It’s also not true. McCall may no longer be the
brassy face of Big Brother, but a glance at what
she’s up to reveals she’s busier than ever. Tonight
she’s back on our screens hosting the second
series of Got to Dance, and the day we meet
she’s about to film an episode of Long Lost
Family with Nicky Campbell. She’s also fronting
another series of The Million Pound Drop and
another series of the fat-loss-bootcamp knockout
show, The Biggest Loser. She’s the face of Garnier
Ultralift cream, has designed a fitness range
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for Next and is releasing her second fitness
DVD, the first one having been a massive,
and surprise hit.
From drug-addicted ladette to fitness guru,
McCall has travelled an unlikely road. ‘By stealth
I have quietly muscled my way into the fitness
arena,’ she says, laughing. ‘Up until 25 the only
fitness I did was nightclubbing.’ McCall is not,
she’s the first to admit, naturally sylph-like. ‘I’m
a yo-yo sort of person. It’s a constant thing I have
to think about. It’s really a pain in the a—.’ Never
one to do things by halves, McCall has become
evangelical about health and fitness. I tell her,
trying to suck in my gut, that I cycle to work.
‘How far? she immediately counters.
‘About three miles.’
‘Not far enough. Sorry, mate. Not good enough,’
she says, a twinkle in her eye. ‘You are a prime
candidate for a workout DVD.’
McCall has been clean from drugs for nearly two
decades, and doesn’t drink or smoke anymore.
One of her little indulgences used to be a chocolate
bar or two, but no longer. As we both launch into
our second Diet Coke, she tells me, ‘I’ve tried to
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at the moment anyone heard [contestants saying]
anything mildly racist they should have all been
chucked off the show. It was not nice for somebody
who loves laughing and loves entertainment, and
though Jade was my all-time favourite housemate,
it was really an unpleasant time.’
I don’t doubt McCall’s regret, but it is hard to
credit that the Big Brother team, overseen by
sophisticated outfits like Channel 4 and Endemol,
who knew that controversy was the fuel that fed
Right: with Matthew
Robertson on their
wedding day in 2000.
Below: as a toddler with
her grandmother. Bottom:
aged 19 in Hong Kong
with her half-sister, Millie
M
From top: McCall
with the controversial
Big Brother contestant
Jade Goody in 2002;
with Cheryl Tweedy
(now Cole) on Popstars:
The Rivals in 2002
cCall’s life started to go wrong at three
years old when her flamboyant French mother,
Florence, walked out and went to live in Paris. Her
father sent her to be brought up by his parents in
Surrey until the age of 13, when she moved back to
live with him and his second wife. She attended
Godolphin & Latymer (a private school in west
London where she earned good grades) and spent
school holidays in France visiting her mother, who
was by this point an alcoholic. For a gregarious
teenager like McCall it was a total disaster. ‘At that
point I thought my mum was pretty cool because
she let me do whatever I wanted,’ she says. ‘So for a
lot of the time I was, like, “I wish I lived in France.”
But actually, I look back in retrospect and I think,
“Thank the Lord I didn’t or I’d probably be dead.”
Because nobody kept an eye on me out there.
I’d be clubbing at 14. It was a mad, mad existence.’
Her drug taking – which by the end included
cocaine and heroin – started while she was still at
school (‘I was the only one, I just have to say, for
Godolphin’s sake. I was the only one in my class’).
Her ambition back then was to be a singer, but
that didn’t happen, so instead she worked from the
age of 18 to 24 as a booker at a model agency and
running nightclubs. She had an alien tattooed
on her bottom and a pair of devil’s horns on her
haunches; she wore rubber dresses when she went
out dancing. Despite her addictions she managed
to keep turning up to work. Did her family know
about her problems?
‘I was very good at hiding all of it, and my father
never knew I was taking drugs, until the end when
it was pretty obvious. It was all about front for me,
and my big thing was I must never let anyone
know.’ Through a 12-step fellowship, and also with
the help of Eric Clapton (a family friend whom
she had also briefly
dated), she cleaned up
her act. She admits that
addiction remains a daily
battle. A friend once
said of her, ‘[She was]
like a lot of those
middle-class girls
who went on to
make something of
themselves, [and] you
never really worried
about the fact that she would eventually be all
right.’ But did McCall share that certainty?
She pauses. ‘Well, I never got to the stage where
I thought the world was so bleak that there was
no light. There’s always light. And that’s the cuphalf-full thing. That optimism is the thing that
keeps you going; I always thought at some point
I’d be all right. One of the things about being an
addict is that you’ve got to take responsibility.’
the ratings for a show like Big Brother, were so
totally ambushed by the Shilpa Shetty saga.
However, who better to have on hand than McCall,
the turbo-charged patron saint of second chances,
whose own life story made her the perfect foil for
such public demonstrations of flawed humanity?
Previous page: jacket and blouse by Alexander McQueen, from Matches; hair by Michael Douglas; make-up by
Cheryl Phelps-Gardiner; styling by Hew Hood. This page: Rex
really, really cut down on sugar. It’s a toxin. Sugar
feeds tumours. I read that somewhere.’
I’d wondered before meeting her if McCall’s
down-to-earth, I’m-your-mate, hell-I’meveryone’s-mate persona was just that: a cleverly
confected persona. But it’s not. The warm,
bordering-on-rash openness she exudes on screen
is all there in the flesh. Where most celebrities put
their private lives out of bounds, McCall is access
all areas: her thoughts on plastic surgery (‘I’m
talking about when I’m 70’); her recovery from
addiction; her bouts of therapy; her relationship
with her mother. She shies away from none of it.
She’s feisty, too, though, when challenged
about controversy. She rejects accusations that
Big Brother – which was applauded in its opening
season for being a daring experiment, but
increasingly derided by the broadsheet press –
became a freak show.
‘I think that’s terribly judgmental. I really do. I
remember people calling it a freak show because it
had gay people on it or people with Tourette’s and
I’m, like, “Hello, these are people from society.”
Calling it a freak show is the most inhumane and
worst thing you can possibly do. But you’re talking
to me. You know, I love everybody.’
One of the people she particularly took to
heart was Jade Goody, who went from loveable
anti-hero to public enemy number one during
the racist bullying incident with Shilpa Shetty.
By the time the row broke McCall and Goody
shared the same agent, and McCall was criticised
for the ‘soft’ interview she gave Goody on her
exit from the house. Seeing as the production
company Endemol had asked Goody back on the
programme knowing she was a loose cannon, was
McCall damned as a hypocrite if she gave her a
hard time, and damned as complicit if she didn’t?
‘I didn’t feel damned either way,’ she says. ‘I felt
as if I owed it to Jade because we got her on the
programme and this was the programme that
for a while ruined her career. So we got her on,
we begged her; well, we didn’t have to beg her
because she was really keen, but we got her back
on. So we did have a certain level of responsibility
to make sure she wasn’t thrown to the wolves.
But,’ she gets serious, ‘God, she had to answer
some questions because she behaved appallingly.
I was horrified. I was so upset. I thought, “This is
my Jade. I love Jade, what’s she doing? This is so
un-Jade,” but it was like the girls all got together
and it was all bitchy and then it was bullying and
it was excluding and it was horrible to watch.’
But shouldn’t someone, McCall even, have
stepped in to stop it? ‘Do you know what should
have happened – and in subsequent years it
happened off the bat without thinking – [is] that
I
Got to Dance returns
at 6pm tonight on Sky 1.
The fitness DVD
Davina: Ultimate Target
is out now
t was Clapton who suggested she try for a job
in television and in 1992 she landed a slot on
MTV. This led to the late-night ITV game show
God’s Gift (a brasher version of Blind Date) and the
programme that really set her career on its upward
trajectory, Streetmate, in which she careered
around provincial towns setting up dates between
single boys and girls. Her up-and-at-’em spirit
eventually won her the Big Brother gig in 2000.
Meantime there were boyfriends, among them
the former Liverpool footballer Stan Collymore
and a marriage to the actor Andrew Leggett in
1997. The marriage is one of the few things McCall
prefers not to talk about, but on the basis that it
lasted three months one can assume it wasn’t
an unqualified success.
But McCall’s luck changed with a chance
meeting, while walking her dog on Clapham
Common, with Matthew Robertson, then the
hunky presenter of the television show Pet Rescue,
now head of an adventure-holiday company.
They married in 2000 and have three children –
Holly, 10, Tilly, eight, and Chester, five.
Throughout all this McCall’s troubled
relationship with her mother bubbled away.
It boiled over, however, when in the aftermath
of McCall and Robertson’s wedding her mother
gave an interview to a tabloid describing how
McCall nearly fell off the wagon a week before
the ceremony. McCall was furious.
Three years ago her mother died and, though
they never resolved their differences, McCall does
seem to have achieved a kind of peace: ‘For about
a year before she died I was seeing a cognitive
‘I had a mother who was
alive but was not mothering
me. I was cataclysmic with
grief about it… But I can
remember her fondly now’
behavioural therapist and we were trying to get
to the bottom of the fact that I had a mother who
was alive but was not mothering me, and how
sad that made me feel. I was cataclysmic with grief
about it. But when my mum died I went to the
therapist the week after and I said, “I don’t need
to come again.” And she was, like, “Why don’t you
make an appointment for a month?” And I said,
“OK, I’ll make an appointment for a month but
I will cancel it, I’m just letting you know, because
I feel completely freed, because there’s no longer
this person who is not being [my mother].” It’s
the weirdest thing. Because now I’m allowed
to remember her fondly, even for the alcoholic
moments that were… they were funny, and she
was a brilliant woman.’
As to what comes next, well, daytime television
may beckon. Meantime, as McCall’s done all her
life, fair weather or foul, she’s determined to
keep on trucking: ‘I’m lucky because I get to do
a job that I really enjoy. If I just quit tomorrow
I’d be a bit, like, “Who am I?” I think that I’m
a really good mum, but I feel as if I am quite
defined by what I do, and that’s quite an
interesting thing, because if I did stop, would
I be all right? Would I be OK? I dunno. I’m not
putting it to the test for a while.’ }
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