Step aside, kindly quiz show hosts: Anne ‘Queen of Mean’ Robinson is Countdown’s new presenter. “I think we’ll have lots of fun,” she tells Emma Higginbotham
When Anne Robinson began hosting Weakest Link – the high-pressure quiz show where she’d savage contestants with sarcasm and scorn before dismissing them with a curt “You ARE the weakest link, goodbye!” – her presenting style wasn’t quite what the BBC had in mind.
“I was meant be sympathetic,” she says. “I framed the original letter: they asked me to host because I’d look as if I knew the answers to the questions, and I could ‘ease the disappointment’ of the contestants when they were voted off.
“But the contestants were very competitive, and I thought I don’t have to be cheesy, I can just be me. And the banter was never any worse than we all say at home: ‘Isn’t she fat? Isn’t he ugly? Why doesn’t he know the answer to that?’ I just thought it would make good television.”
It did. Weakest Link ran for 12 years, and successfully transferred to the USA with a black-clad Anne, by now dubbed the ‘Queen of Mean’, at the helm.
So it was something of a surprise when the self-styled battleaxe was named as the new host of Countdown, Channel 4’s gentle words and numbers game. Nevertheless, she slid into the chair once warmed by such avuncular hosts as Richard Whiteley and Des O’Connor on 28 June, and has promised to tone down the snark.
“Weakest Link was the first show to judge people, and that’s gone, really. You wouldn’t get away with that now,” she tells Weekend over an evening phonecall. “I think we’ll have lots of fun on Countdown. As always, it depends on the contestant. Weakest Link was very much cast to get characters, and you’d be hard pushed to find a contestant who wasn’t looking forward to a good session with you. And actually I’ve found some great sports on Countdown.”
Some things never change, though. “We had a lovely contestant on, and on his biog it said he taught English to people for whom English was not their first language. And I said you mean you teach English to foreigners? And he said ‘we never call it that’,” says Anne, incredulously. “I don’t know who makes all these rules up.”
The first female host in the show’s 39-year history, Anne replaces Nick Hewer who, after nearly a decade, decided that 77 was the right age to retire. Anne will be 77 in September. Shouldn’t she be, um, taking things easy? “I agree, I’m the oldest woman on television not judging cakes,” she says. “But I’m physically very fit and my brain’s quite lively.” No doubt we’ll be seeing her trademark ‘don’t take me too seriously’ wink, too. Is that just for telly, or is she a winker in real life? “No, I never wink in real life!” she barks. “I started winking on Points of View, and the controller of BBC One told me to stop, so I’ve never stopped winking ever since.”
Doing the opposite of what she’s told comes naturally to Anne. She grew up in Liverpool, where her father was a schoolteacher and her mother a successful poultry wholesaler; at her Catholic boarding school, she admits she “can’t remember ever obeying any rules.” Her initial career plan was to act, but she turned down a coveted place at London’s Guildhall School of Music & Drama in favour of journalism. “I thought it was more interesting, really. I thought I could prosper better.”
After a stint at a news agency, she joined the Daily Mail in 1967 as a junior reporter and one of the few females on Fleet Street. Not that it fazed her, of course. “Not at all. I’d grown up in a household where my mother was the main breadwinner, and never showed any signs of being intimidated. No one told us to be victims in those days. You were usually the one woman in the newsroom, and you might almost say it was an advantage. They didn’t think you’d be much good at it, and when you were, they were pathetically impressed.”
Yet being a woman in journalism had its downsides. She had to leave the Mail the following year after marrying the news editor, Charles Wilson, because of a strict ‘no spouses’ policy, and after joining the Sunday Times there was no maternity leave when she had her daughter, Emma, in 1970.
But Anne was facing a far bigger problem. As her marriage broke down, she began to drink heavily and, in 1973, lost custody of Emma to her ex-husband. She dealt with the pain by drinking even more, going on lengthy benders that occasionally ended in hospital. Much of the mid-70s passed in a blur; at one point she was six stone and, she estimates, just weeks from death. Sacked from the Sunday Times, she went home to her mum in Liverpool to dry out, and hasn’t touched a drop since 1978. “If anyone asks me to give a career talk, I say well you get married, you develop a terrible alcohol problem and you’re completely unemployable for several years, and you pull yourself together and then it all starts to go your way. I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.”
Thankfully life really did go her way. Within two years of returning to London, Anne became assistant editor of the Mirror, the first woman to hold such a lofty rank on a national newspaper, and won notoriety as a no-nonsense columnist. In 1987 she headed to the BBC, first presenting Points of View, then consumer affairs show Watchdog, where she raised the game from exposing dodgy builders to taking on huge corporations.
“When they hired me I said, rudely, it was the ‘protection of stupid people programme’. I said we’ve got to go after the car manufacturers, the holiday companies, the private health, and have people in and slap them across the face. And we did! The ratings were brilliant. I only stopped because NBC wanted me [for Weakest Link], and it meant crossing the Atlantic every six weeks, and I simply couldn’t go on doing it.
“I loved Watchdog, I loved Weakest Link. I can’t say that anything I’ve done in television or on newspapers hasn’t been fabulous, actually. I think I’ve been very, very lucky.”
Will the ratings be equally brilliant for Countdown? Time will tell, but whatever happens, Anne will style it out in her famously feisty way. “Any new presenter will get the curiosity of people turning on, and you just hope to retain them,” she says. “But because I don’t do Twitter, or Facebook, or what’s the other one? Instagram, I remain blissfully ignorant of all the people who can’t stand me.”
Impossible to know on a phonecall, but hopefully she said that with a wink.
:: Countdown, Channel 4, weekdays at 2.10pm
And Anne-other thing...
Countdown was the first programme broadcast on Channel 4 when it launched on 2 November 1982, and remains one of the world’s longest-running quiz shows. Anne has been on Countdown before: resplendent in shoulder pads, she was a guest in Dictionary Corner in 1987.
Anne and her daughter are very close, despite Emma growing up with her father. On Mother’s Day 2001, Emma wrote an open letter to her mum in a national newspaper, saying she’d “triumphed in both career and motherhood”.
As well as homes in London and New York, Anne has a house in the Cotswolds, which she (and her spaniel Hattie) shared with Emma, son-in-law Liam, grandsons Hudson and Parker and their two dogs during lockdown.
Over the years she’s almost caused an international incident putting Wales into Room 101, suggesting Liverpudlians are thieves and making legendary Blue Peter presenter John Noakes cry on Weakest Link by bringing up the death of his beloved dog, Shep.
Twice married and divorced, she’s evasive about her relationship status. “The more you’re successful as a woman, the more difficult it becomes to date, because you’re more fussy,” she says.
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in July 2021 (c) Waitrose