Family: Anne's strongest link

Anne Robinson is sitting in her kitchen in her white cotton nightgown. Her famous red hair is dishevelled. She has no make-up on. She looks rather tiny and almost unrecognisable. When I walk into the room she gets up and kisses me. "Have some breakfast," she says, motioning towards two people stirring pans over the hob. Vivian and Justin, the couple who cook, keep house and drive for her, smile. "It's scrambled egg," says Vivian. Robinson's husband, Penrose, pours me a coffee. Just as I am about to ask if I've come to the right house (where are the scary put-downs, that terrifying superciliousness?) Penrose lights a cigarette. Apparently he smokes all the time. There are even ashtrays in the loo. Suddenly a voice whiplashes through the bonhomie. "Gets a bit soggy when you're swimming, eh Penrose?" says Robinson sharply, motioning towards the indoor pool they have attached to the back of their ever-expanding house in the Cotswolds. "Mmm," says Penrose, chuckling.

Robinson raises her eyebrows as if to say, "Well, that's men for you," but, to be honest, she'd say that about anyone. On The Weakest Link, she is outstandingly rude to everyone. "Where are your children?" she famously asked a single mother (famously because Robinson herself was one once). "At home? Is that your definition of being a good mother?" She often asks fat people if they go to the gym.

"We did a hairdressing special," she says, "and one of them was a barber from somewhere like Telford. He had very buck teeth. At some point I asked, 'Do people mistake you for Colin Firth?' and he said, 'Nah, Colin Firth doesn't come from Telford.' I loved him for that."

But there's a much longer list of people she doesn't like: the Welsh (Robinson consigned them to her Room 101 and it caused an outcry which amused her more than cowed her); female comedians because "they're not funny"; "normal" people who work in IT and wash their cars on Sundays; politically correct people who don't like drinking and smoking; the Government for trying to ban hunting; and her former husband's lawyers and the judge, Sir Neville Faulks, who took her daughter from her.

"This is Paula [Milne]," says Penrose helpfully, motioning to a blonde woman also sitting in the kitchen, as Robinson has now disappeared to get dressed. "She wrote Politician's Wife and Second Sight. She's here to do the screenplay of Annie's book." (Annie! I'd never thought of her as being an Annie.) The book in question is Robinson's autobiography, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother. It covers her life from birth through to her success with The Weakest Link. There's her relationship with her mother, the "Duchess", who was a selfmade woman who always had staff and told Anne she must never do any housework; her rise through the ranks of Fleet Street; her six years of crippling alcoholism, and how she lost custody of her then two-year-old daughter, Emma, to her first husband, Charlie "Gorbals" Wilson, as Private Eye liked to call him when he was editor of The Times.

"I think I first called him that," Robinson says laconically, now wearing tracksuit pants, a jumper and a smidgen of make-up. Milne's screenplay will focus on the court case more than the rest of the story. "Although there's lots of me being drunk," says Robinson gleefully, "and I want Helen Mirren to play my mother."

She doesn't really go into how she managed to dry out 24 years ago. "I went to AA and the anonymity really helped me," she says. "So I wanted to mention them because they were utterly responsible for my stopping drinking, but I didn't want to ruin that anonymity." She says she loves other people drinking - although, when she first gave up, it used to drive her mad that Penrose was sinking so much wine - but that she'll never touch another drop. "I don't miss it at all," she says. "I don't need it any more."

For our interview she lies on a sofa. "Eight hours of standing doing The Weakest Link gives me a terrible back," she says. She happily admits to having an addictive personality - "No one ends up with their knickers around their ankles, unable to remember what has been going on unless they have an addiction problem" - and, of course, one addiction often gets transmuted into another.

For example, she works very hard. There's The Weakest Link and Test the Nation and recently the Great Britons programme. And she took the Link to America, getting high viewing figures and recording as many shows as four years'-worth of Friends. She tells everyone this, perhaps because her stint in America was not regarded here as an unadulterated success; the show was dropped after a year. "I always knew it wasn't going to last,î she insists. "I said to everyone involved, 'Enjoy it while you can.' That's why I asked for first-class flights there and back for me and Penrose. And a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel and a trainer and a stylist and full-time use of a car and driver. And they said yes to it all. My mother always said if you don't ask, you don't get. The worst thing someone can say is no. What they get in return is a professional. I'm never late. I'm never tongue-tied. Not many people could do what I do, so that's why I get paid so much.î

She believes in treating herself properly. She has a masseur. She has Botox. (When she appeared on Parkinson I thought she looked as if she'd had a stroke.) She does 50 lengths in the pool in the morning and watches what she eats. "That's the downside," she says, "the weight problem." But that hasn't

stopped body-obsessed America taking to her. She's recently been asked to do a weekend chat show in New York and a travel extravaganza across the States with Emma, 32, who now lives in New York, called Travels With My Unfit Mother. She also says she thinks she works so hard because, at 58, she wants enough money put aside to carry on shopping (her favourite hobby) and living in the style to which she and Penrose are accustomed. I imagine her past adversity has propelled her towards success. If she had won custody of Emma, would she have been able to devote so much time to her career? Maybe, like many single mothers, she'd have had to juggle the guilt, the lack of money and the work-versus-the-stayathome dilemma.

She'd have been begging favours off the Duchess rather than editing the Daily Mirror (she was dropped from the editing rota after she revealed Princess Diana's bulimia. "It was true and I had that story nine years before it came out ... that's male-dominated toadying newspaper editors for you.") "Yes, well you have a point," says Robinson. "Would my life have been different? Yes, but I don't know how and, even though things were dreadful, I have such a good relationship with Emma that I can't imagine the past being changed."

But the main axis of Robinson's life was and is Penrose, her second husband since 1980, former Daily Mirror journalist and good cop to her bad. She met him when she was 21 and he was 19 but it took her a while - one engagement to Guardian sports journalist Frank Keating, her marriage, a couple of affairs and a runner done by Penrose to Rome when the drinking got too much - for her to realise he was her soulmate.

"Still is," she says. He is, according to his wife, "Funny, laid-back, hopeless with money and good in bed." He charmed the Duchess, whereas Wilson didn't. "She always said he didn't love me enough," says Robinson.

In her relationship with Penrose she's the star, the moneywinner, the more difficult of the two. She is, at times, tough, but also amusing and warm. She has known her best friend, Pam, since school. Pam and her husband, the Wonderful Cosmetic Surgeon, as he is known, live minutes down the road. They pop in during the interview, clutching a small child and a small dog. "I made them buy the house nearby so I could see them more," says Robinson.

"She's a pussy cat really," says Pam. And she is. She likes to be liked, but sometimes she just can't help herself. "Penrose told me to stop intimidating interviewers," she says. "But one man came down here with nothing but a copy of Metro. I said to him, 'Surely you haven't read just that the whole way here from London?' I mean, really. And The Guardian got a vicar to ring and ask me my favourite colour!"

She doesn't suffer fools and she still has the immense focus she had as a journalist, yet she still needs reassurance from Penrose. "What do you do all week?" she asks him. "I'm very busy," he says, looking over the top of his specs. "Plays tennis," snorts Robinson. "Swims. Oh, and he has a siesta." But, unlike other couples who look worn down by years of work and children and arguments, they seem to be free of all that. They are very tactile. Part of it is that they haven't had a child (Robinson would have liked more children but miscarried) and they have enough money to buy luxury.

"I've always said to Penrose that if you have money, you get staff," says Robinson. "You treat them well, mind, but you just stop doing the things you don't want to, which leaves you free to enjoy yourself. I don't care about being a celebrity. I just want to be able to be driven hither and thither by other people and buy what I like."

In many ways she's a good role model for women because she's broken so many moulds. "Charlie married me because he'd never met anyone like me," she says. "Then he wanted me to be his mother and cook and clean and I didn't even know how to do that." There was always a dilemma in her life. The Duchess told Annie she was better than anyone else and she should never demean herself by using that ferocious intellect and ambition to Mr Sheening; but she also expected her daughter to marry a titled barrister. Robinson has never been alone. As soon as she met a man, she got engaged to him.

"Well, I was a good Catholic girl and - I really want to stress this - it was such a different time. It may not seem that long ago but women weren't lawyers and managing directors then. We still wore gloves! I was the first woman at The Sunday Times to get maternity leave. If you were pregnant, you got married. If you wanted to sleep with someone, you got married.

"When I was denied custody of Emma it wasn't because of my drunkenness, it was because of my ambition. It was okay for Charlie to go out and work and employ a nanny or whatever, but not for me. A woman's place was in the home." Yet Robinson was never a burnyourbra feminist. She did once march on El Vino's, a well-frequented haunt of male hacks, to demand they let women in but that was it. "Oh, Charlie was furious about that!"

She's thinking of writing a book for her daughter's generation. "I mean, where has this got you all? Germaine Greer's stuck up the M11 with a roost of chickens and the rest of you don't have it all, do you? Why didn't any of those feminists write the truth? Everyone wants a partner, a playmate. Penrose and I split up for two-and-a-half years and it was awful because I missed him. I even asked Lynne Franks for the name of one of her endless gurus and found myself talking to a woman clad in purple with crystals hanging down from the ceiling.

"Can you imagine how desperate I was to do that! Who wants to be alone? Women who say, 'I feel so good on my own,' are lying. They're papering over the fact that they cannot have the decent relationship they long for.'"

Ooh, Anne Robinson. She's nice, but not that nice. Thank goodness for that.

Anne Robinson presents Test the Nation: The National 2002 Test, on 23 December, BBC1 at 8.30pm. The Weakest Link (hairdressers' special) is on Boxing Day, BBC2 at 5.15pm.