Anne Robinson will take softer route as she accepts role to present Countdown

Anne Robinson can’t believe her luck. At the age of 76, when most journalists have long been put out to pasture, she is not only returning to daily TV, but to the much-loved institution Countdown.

It didn’t take long to say yes when the call came through asking if she would pick up where Nick Hewer left off.

“I gave it a few minutes and I thought, ‘That’s a really good idea. It’s a cerebral programme… and if I can cheer up the contestants a bit, we can have some fun’.”

She was also glad of the chance to sit down, having spent 11 years on her feet as host of BBC gameshow The Weakest Link, where she quickly built up her reputation as the Queen of Mean.

So, is Anne going to be kinder to this set of contestants as they try to weave vowels and consonants together and do sums against the clock?

She says: “You have to judge how far you can go – some are quite shy.

“I don’t want the contestants to have to have a box of Kleenex next to them.

“But it’s exactly the same as the Weakest Link. If there was a 19-year-old undergraduate, I wouldn’t treat her as I would a not-very-attractive old man, to whom I would ask, ‘Have you always been so devastatingly handsome?’.”

Generally speaking Anne, a crossword fan, says she’ll be taking a softer route.

“With the Weakest Link I never spoke to contestants before the show – I was on the podium, with a stern face, to create the atmosphere. With Countdown, I have a chat with them, to stop them thinking it’s going to be very cruel.”

She enjoys having the likes of Julian Clary or Richard Coles as Dictionary Corner guests, who join in with her chats. “You’re aiming to have the show as warm and funny as you can, while retaining the integrity of it.”

Anne reckons she is different to her five predecessors because her newspaper background means she will get more information out of the contestants.

She adds: “Some [viewers] will loathe me, because they’ll feel I’ve ruined their show.”

This doesn’t faze her. She says: “Any editor will tell you, if you take over a magazine and change something, the readers go berserk, and then a year later, they’ll have got used to it.

“I purposely don’t do Twitter or Facebook, or whatever… I can go on thinking everybody loves me.”

Stepping into this amount of work – she calls Countdown a “hungry horse” because of the number of episodes – is quite a shock after spending 13 months in her beautiful Cotswolds home along with her daughter Emma, son-in-law Liam and grandsons Hudson and Parker, who decamped from their London pad.

Anne’s outfits for the Weakest Link were always black, but it won’t be like that on jolly old Countdown. Having seen the wardrobe rail, she says laughing: “That line of clothes, it does slightly look as if God’s made another rainbow.”

Becoming part of an all-female presenting team, alongside Susie Dent, 56, and Rachel Riley, 35, was another plus when it came to joining the show.

“They’re fantastic, both top of their game,” Anne says. “I urged them to get more female contestants and we’ve had one or two shows where the entire studio is female.

“I’m not asking for that every day but it was a punch the air moment when it first happened.”

That said, she groaned when they pointed out she was the first female host in the show’s 39-year history. “We should be past all that,” she says.

With Anne’s years of experience on shows such as Watchdog, not to mention decades in tough newspaper newsrooms, you would think she would escape first day nerves.

Not so, she admits. “Actually, I felt very nervous. I don’t care if people think I’m ugly but I do care if they don’t think I’m any good at what I do.”

After she landed the job this year, radio host Vanessa Feltz said Anne made a racist comment to her during the recording of a celebrity episode of The Weakest Link in 2006.

Anne scoffs: “It took her 15 years to discover she was upset about it. I’d just been announced as the host of Countdown, and she thought, ‘This will make a few headlines’. And it did.

“This was Vanessa Feltz, who at the time never stopped telling everybody that she had gorgeous black boyfriends. What I actually said to her was, ‘How can someone like you get so many gorgeous black boyfriends?’. It wasn’t derogatory, except to her.”

Anne knows her role in The Weakest Link would be problematic now because she poked fun at people’s intellect, waistlines and personalities. “It’s true that in today’s woke climate, you couldn’t say half of those things.”

During her journalism career, she rose to become assistant editor of the Mirror in the 80s. She went on to write columns for several papers.

Anne, who grew up in Blundellsands near Liverpool, says: “Newspaper journalism taught me everything I needed to know. You had to think on your feet, work quickly and you couldn’t cry. All of that I’m very grateful for.” It may explain why she found giving up the writing harder than the far more lucrative TV jobs she left over the years.

She says doing newspaper columns is “much more difficult than TV”, adding: “You’re paddling in quite a shallow pond in television.”

Twice-divorced Anne, who is single but laughingly tells me to “mind your own business” when I ask, was the youngest reporter in the Sunday Times newsroom, and the only female.

Later, she became the first British gameshow host to break the US, when The Weakest Link shifted Stateside. What’s the secret of her success?

“Being a bit clever, a bit funny, a bit fearless. And disobeying the rules.

“Academically, I never achieved anything because I couldn’t be bothered. Then you find that, once you leave school, it’s a great advantage not to have conformed. No one has… made you the same as everybody else.”

Despite multiple requests to appear on shows such as I’m a Celebrity, she has no plans to embrace reality TV, sniffing: “I think the people who do all those are probably a bit short of airtime otherwise, aren’t they?”

Hailing her Countdown role, she says: “It’s brilliant because all through my newspaper and television life, I’ve had more work than is sensible.

“This is the first time I’ve been able to do just one gig, and it’s every other week for three days. It’s lovely.”

Anne Robinson hosts Countdown on Channel 4 from Monday June 28.

Originally from https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/anne-robinson-take-softer-route-24368154