Anne Robinson on living with family in lockdown and how they're closer than ever
The Weakest Link star, 76 , on joy of having daughter Emma her family and the dogs all under one roof during lockdown
Stopping off on the school run to buy her daily fix of vodka, Anne Robinson glanced at her small daughter Emma to see her eyes brimming with tears.
In that moment, the TV presenter knew she had to stop drinking.
Fast-forward more than four decades, and The Weakest Link star, now 76 , says that her family life today couldn’t be more different.
And while lockdown has been harsh for so many people, for Anne it presented an unexpected and wonderful opportunity for her and Emma to spend uninterrupted time together.
In March, after spending decades living in separate homes and even for some years on different continents, broadcast journalist Emma, 49, fled London to her mother’s home in the Cotswolds.
She arrived with her advertising film director husband Liam Kan, 56, and children Hudson, 11, and Parker, 10 – plus two very large English setters – and the family ended up staying for almost six months.
“It was a pretty powerful experience,” Anne says. “Like most mothers of grown-up children it is years since we spent so much time together under the same roof.
“Most interestingly it gave Emma and I a chance to see what went into each other’s day-to-day routines.
“She’s very big on ‘to do’ lists. Her mother generally likes to wing it. And it certainly made me appreciate how much she and Liam put into bringing up my grandchildren.
“I don’t think until we sat back and thought about this summer, did we quite grasp what had happened to us.
“The first few weeks after they arrived at my house, it felt like an invasion. Fortunately, my barn has a separate stable block which is self-contained and has its own kitchen.
“Emma turned part of it into a classroom and put up notices saying, ‘Cello lesson in Progress. Please Be Quiet!’ Often, I felt like the extra child on a play date.
“She is a bit of an organiser. We really did have to readjust to all being under the same roof for the first time for years.
“I live on my own and I don’t expect someone to barge in and say, ‘You’re not having another siesta!’
“She bossed me around in the same way as she does her children and their puppy. But after a while, we adapted enough to tolerate our differences and laugh at them. Soon we got to a stage when it was actually fabulous.
“I had a fairly ropey start to motherhood,” Anne admits. “With a serious drink problem.
“I managed to get sober by the time Emma was eight. But it took quite a few years after that to feel properly normal.”
Anne goes into detail about her struggles in her best-selling 2001 autobiography The Memoirs of an Unfit Mother. But now she only wants to look forward.
After she got sober, her career as a newspaper journalist then a TV personality took off in the UK.
She became the host of quiz show The Weakest Link, which was a very different quiz to anything else that was on television.
She was often shockingly rude to contestants and very soon became known as the Queen of Mean.
Six months after the show was first aired in the UK in 2001, NBC came along and not only bought the rights to the quiz to be shown in America, but kept Anne as its host – something that had never happened with any British show before. And it pushed her earnings into the millions.
After leaving school, Emma had moved to university in New York to study film and remained there for the next two decades.
“It was only meant to be a couple of years, but I never left,” Emma says. “I fell in love with the city – I just ate it up. Work, life, friends… everything.”
In 1990, a year after she started at New York University, Anne and Emma’s father, journalist Charles Wilson, bought their daughter an apartment on Fifth Avenue.
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Anne eventually bought the apartment next door so she and Emma could see each other as often as possible.
And when NBC went all out to promote The Weakest Link, Emma ended up looking at 40-foot billboards of her mother in Times Square. Anne says: “Emma very much likes to keep her life apart from my showbiz image.
“And when The Weakest Link was first shown in America, a friend dropped by her apartment and said, ‘Gosh, why on earth have you got a photograph of that Anne Robinson on your wall?’ In 2006 Anne’s second marriage to journalist John Penrose broke down.
Anne says: “It was a really tough time because, even if you no longer want to be married to someone, it doesn’t mean it is going to be a barrel of laughs living on your own.”
The first thing Anne did was go house-hunting. She bought the major part of a dilapidated barn in Gloucestershire. Eventually she bought the rest of the barn and knocked the two together, making an enormous conversion measuring 8,000sq ft.
But she admits: “I really felt like I was climbing Everest. My ex-husband Johnnie is absolutely brilliant architecturally and a genius at decorating a house.
"While I had no experience of dealing with builders or putting sofas in the right place. I rather worried I’d end up rattling around on my own like a sad, old, fading TV star.
“I wanted it to be a wonderful home and children’s adventure playground.
“Then, slowly but surely, things began to magically fall into place. Emma married. And hey presto had one baby, then another.
“The children adore it here. We hate Sunday nights when they have to pack up and go back to London. But suddenly lockdown came along and there was no packing up. We had weeks and weeks together.”
For Emma’s two young boys, living with Nonni – as the grandchildren call her – was brilliant.
There were no rules to follow and they had a fantastic summer in the countryside.
Now, as long as Boris allows it, they are hoping to spend Christmas together as a family, under the same roof.
“Christmas will be big,” Emma says. “A big tree, big log fires… Mum will be going all out, I am sure.”
Does she feel any animosity towards her mother for those tumultuous early years? “There’s nothing to forgive,” Emma says. “It’s not about perfection, but progress. We are all just muddling through and saying, ‘I love you’.”
Emma adds: “I love her completely. I admire her. I try to emulate her work ethic, her loyalty and her generosity.
“Not a week goes by when I don’t think, if I have done some-thing right, who is it who taught me to do that? It’s monkey see, monkey do.”
And Anne says: “You learn what is worth fighting for, and you learn what you can change and can’t change.
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