Anne Robinson's weakest link?

Wasn't she letting the feminist side down? After all, she is the first woman to regularly edit a national newspaper (the Mirror); the first at The Sunday Times to demand maternity leave.

"I had spent five years in LA, remember, where admitting you've had plastic surgery is like saying you have a fridge," she says. "I turned up at the Edward VII hospital and the surgeon offered to draw a diagram but I said, just get on with it, you're the best. Give me lots of painkillers. Women are fascinated, they all want to peer behind my ears."

She has a younger, blonder hairdo and has lost two stone since the operation 18 months ago. "I never looked after myself when I was younger," she says. "I smoked and drank all through my pregnancy. Now I don't drink, I don't smoke, and I run three miles every other day. I lift weights. I've become really boring."

I venture that men don't have to be so concerned with their appearance. Look at David Dimbleby, who has the teeth of a homeless wino. "I find him quite attractive," she says perversely. "I can't get worked up about the fact that there are ugly men in jobs. Sometimes pretty women get the jobs the guys can't get."

She does believe, though, that women are afraid to ask for what they are worth. "At the BBC I am surrounded by these wonderfully clever female producers who say, 'I've got the job.' And I say, 'Have you got a good deal?' and they say, 'Oh, we haven't talked money yet.'

"Jilly Cooper came on The Weakest Link and I cornered her enough to say she had a million-pound book contract, and she later rang to ask for it not to be transmitted. Women still think talking about money is like talking about going to the lavatory."

The best part about her new show, she says, has been the chance to work with her daughter, Emma, who has lived in the Village since graduating from NYU, and presents a segment from New York. Anne and her husband, John Penrose, whom she married in 1980, are selling their Cotswold home and planning to buy a house in America. A last-ditch attempt to keep her daughter close?

"We're already very close," she says. "Our relationship is very touching but at other times it is volatile. Sometimes we press each other's buttons. But she's very funny; it's hard to be cross with her for long."

Is she married? "No, and she doesn't have any children - yet. The important word is yet. That is all I want, really, to have grandchildren. I think I'd make a really good granny."

In a bitter custody battle with her then husband, Charles Wilson, then at the Daily Mail and later editor of the Times, Anne Robinson lost custody of her daughter when she was two years old. She says the real reason wasn't because she was an alcoholic, but because she was at work all the time. Wilson married her because he had never met anyone like her, but then expected her to be his mother.

She and Emma have always had what Robinson calls their "Saturday morning routine", from the time Emma was at Millfield, when mother would phone daughter and they would "scratch the surface of everythingî for an hour or so. Until Emma turned 18, her mother was allowed access only once a fortnight. I ask if Emma might bear some scars. "She would say it has wounded me far more than her. My guilt and my shame have stayed with me longer than they needed to.

"When you have been through the experience of losing your child it takes a long time to have the confidence to walk into a room, never mind go back and ask for custody. It took me 10 years to rejoin the human race. What she is at 34 is kind and clever and happy."

Is she worried her daughter might develop a drink problem; after all, Anne's mother, a Liverpool-Irish wealthy poultry dealer was a drunk.

"No, I don't think you can blame genetics." Does she blame Fleet Street? "Never let anyone persuade you that a job or circumstance causes people to drink. From an early age I didn't like how I felt and drink was a way of dealing with that hole in my stomach."

She quit, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, in 1978. Penrose is careful to "drink moderately around me". He is the one who makes sure everything runs smoothly at home. I remind her she said once she didn't know where the washing machine was.

"That wasn't strictly true," she says. "I know where it is, I just don't know how to use it."

She bemoans the fact that women of her daughter's generation are still finding "having it all" so hard. "Even today, there is so much anxiousness among women at work. I am always saying, This isn't what I marched for. And Emma will say, Mum, you only marched so that El Vino would serve you.

"I think the reason women are still struggling is that you are all clever girls and you get these guys whose mothers have never said, 'When you grow up you are going to fall in love with a girl who earns more than you do and I've got to teach you how not to feel as if your balls have been cut off.'"

Despite her dreams of becoming a grandmother, Anne Robinson isn't thinking of taking it easy; this year, her contract stipulates 150 episodes of The Weakest Link. "I remember going to China and India and Hong Kong with Mrs Thatcher and everyone saying she must be exhausted, and I remember thinking, she has a bed in first-class and a car to pick her up, how hard can it be?

"And now there is a car to pick me up, someone to do my hair... Life hasn't been that hard. We are all standing up, we are all mates now. Charlie was quite ill at Christmas because he got kicked by a horse and broke his pelvis and it was quite dramatic, we were all at his bedside. I think it is at times like that you realise you are all family. It would be difficult for me to say, 'Isn't it terrible?', because what has ended up is terrific, really."

What's the Problem? With Anne Robinson is on Fridays on BBC1 at 9pm.