The former Watchdog star - who became known as The Queen of Mean thanks to her cruel put-downs on the teatime BBC1 quiz - will mark her milestone birthday at the end of the month. But as the no-nonsense presenter prepares to enter her eighth decade in the fiercely competitive world of entertainment, Anne says she is ready for all the age-related jokes that are bound to come her way. In fact, Anne, says she cant wait to blow out all her candles when her big birthday comes on September 26.
She laughs: “I’m not dreading it. I’m quite surprised by it. I didn’t think my generation would ever be old, and 80 is huge. I don’t feel very old. I’m quite fit.” Anne, who was the first female host of Countdown, has tried to turn back time over the years, most notably in 2004 when she was mocked by some after having a facelift when she was around 60 and at the peak of her powers on The Weakest Link. The presenter recently told how she wished she had waited longer before debuting her “new look” on TV.
But with all the jibes now firmly behind her, Anne is admanant she has no regrets about going under the knife, saying it is often a topic of curious conversation when she is surrounded by men. She says: “I wrote about my facelift for ages afterwards. Men would come up to me and have a serious conversation, and then at the end would say, ‘My wife wanted to know if I could ask where you got your facelift’.”
Anne says her cosmetic procedures even once attracted attention at the highest level of government when she was once quizzed about her facelift during a glittery function at No 10 Downing Street. She remembers: “At a party once, Gordon Brown’s female sidekick talked about tax, and then said to me, ‘How much did your face cost?’”Ever the trooper, Anne has brushed such intrusive comments off over the years.
She says her tough, thick skin is down to her formative years as a journalist on Fleet Street, notably working as assistant editor of The Mirror. During her stint on our paper she made her own name as a columnist under the pseudonym of the Wednesday Witch, in which she developed her vitriolic style. But despite seemingly appearing smarter than the rest, Anne says her critics should not peer too deeply, admitting: “I’ve just earnt a living being nosy.
"I don’t know that I’m very clever. I’ve got no measuring stick. Some clever people are very stupid. You wouldn’t get them to run your bath.” Ever forthright, Anne jokes she may in-fact owe her success to legendary American soap character JR Ewing, played by the late US actor Larry Hagman. Back in the 1980s, more than 20 million viewers used to tune in to watch US mega soap Dallas. And her public opinion show Points Of View was scheduled immediately afterwards.
“Because the show came on after Dallas, which was at 8.50pm on a Wednesday, if you wanted to watch the news, you got me in the middle”, says Anne, who fronted the public opinion show from 1987 to 1997. “[So] I’ve got more famous than I deserved.” Anne went onto appear on a number of the BBC ’s biggest shows including Watchdog, Breakfast Time, and Question Time before her debut on The Weakest Link in 2000. She hosted it for 12 years, notching up 1,693 episodes.
Her cruel put-downs to members of the public even made her a star in the US where she reportedly earned £1million a year on NBC. Anne admits she was hungry for fame - thanks to her grassroots upbringing in Crosby, Merseyside, by her schoolteacher father, Bill, and mother, Anne, who was an agricultural businesswoman from Northern Ireland. Watching her parents work hard for a living, made Anne strive for a life outside the regular nine-to-five grind.
She says: “My ambitions were very low level growing up in a rich suburban childhood. You wanted something more interesting. I’ve always been the most underqualified person in any job I’ve done in television. To get into the BBC in those days, they’d all been to Oxbridge. A lot of them are quite stupid actually. I thought I could write, and I wanted to be famous.”
Looking back, Anne says she got her journalist instinct from her mother who often kept an eagle eye on food prices during her years running a market stall. She remembers: “My mother would say in about October, that turkeys were going to be on the floor or sky high (prices), and she was never wrong. There is an instinct in journalism that somehow you know things other people don’t, because you’ve been at it long enough.”
Sadly like her mother, Anne also inherited her troubles with alcohol. The star has previously told how she was once given weeks to live after seeing her weight drop to about six stone when she was in her mid-30s. In a new interview with The Oldie magazine, it’s clear the struggle played a part in who she is today - despite being sober since 1978.
She says: “When you finally realise you’ve got a drink problem, and that you’ve got to do something about it, you don’t spend much time wondering how it got there. I’m from a long line of Irish Catholic alcoholic wolves. I had a childhood with a mother who was a binge drinker. It’s astonishing that you find yourself in the same place. My drinking was bad. I’d have had a drink problem being a nun. I didn’t drink well, ever.”
Today, Anne is in a much happier place. Her idyllic life in the Cotswolds, remains private despite being recently linked to Queen Camilla ’s ex husband, Andrew Parker-Bowles. At the end of last year, Anne admitted to dating the 85-year-old ex-cavalry officer, telling Saga magazine at the time: “Yes, Full stop.” Now almost a year on, Anne is remaining tight-lipped over whether their romance is still going strong, only saying: “I won’t comment on any of my private life. You’ve got to ask, and I can tell you to mind your own business.”
But what Anne is outspoken about is the current state of television. Fans were expecting a lengthy TV comeback in 2021 when Anne was named the new host of the Channel 4 day-time quiz Countdown. But her return was cut short after just 13 months, following a reported frosty rift between her and the show’s maths whiz Rachel Riley. Anne seemingly has no regrets. “It was very great fun,” she says. “[But] Channel 4 said I had to go on the payroll. I came from this Irish alcoholic tribe. I told them ‘We didn’t go on payrolls. We nicked them’.”
Looking back, Anne is glad she had her day in the sun when she did. For she believes the new Weakest Link host Romesh Ranganathan would never get away with what she used to say in her wicked heyday. “You’d never be able to say all that now,” she says. “It would be stamped out. I always thought the contestants would feel short-changed if I were nice. When we had a rehearsal with real-life people for the first time, I realised how competitive they were. I’d say, “Why are you voting off Janet?” And they’d say, ‘Because she has Jesus sandals and bad BO’. And I thought, ‘Great, we can all be ourselves’!”
- The new October edition of The Oldie magazine is out tomorrow (Friday September 13).