She’s clearly not Essexy, like Denise Van Outen or the new (literally)
faux-celebrity, Celebrity Big Brother winner, Chantelle; although she does
have something of their cheeky charm. Her vowels are a bit all over the
place – “moind” for “mind”, for instance – and she’s much given to using
phrases which are generally employed by young teenagers regardless of their
background: “Ah, bless”, “Hell-o-oh” (swooping up and down), “bodacious”,
along with some unequivocal East-Enderisms, such as “God love ’im”.
Boris Johnson is probably the only broadcasting personality who can get away
with making a virtue of his poshness. Elsewhere, for a successful television
career, a populist approach and an accessible manner are essential – and
it’s Davina’s common-touch watchability as Big Brother’s Big Mother (or,
perhaps, big sister) that has landed her a new primetime role as mid-week
talk-show host on BBC One. Now although this is clearly something of a big
deal – the last pre-watershed King of Chat on the Beeb was Terry Wogan back
in 1992 – reports of a million-pound contract or, in fact, any contract at
all are apparently overstated. As McCall, in ladette mode, put it to me:
“I’ve never signed a contract with any TV channel because I like being a
slut and working for anybody who wants me.”
For her fans, who obviously include the BBC chiefs, what is engaging about
McCall’s personality is that although she works at the tacky end of
television, she manages to retain a niceness while still delivering on the
pushy, tasteless questions: “But did the train go into the tunnel’’ (to
establish whether two former Big Brother contestants, Stuart and Michelle,
had sexual intercourse). Indeed, McCall’s USP may be that while she is
undeniably naughty she is also oddly wholesome. For her detractors, of
course, she is the epitome of Moronic Britain; representing everything that
is wrong with declining standards and cultural dumbing-down.
On telly, she is an odd mixture. As a guest on other people’s chat shows
(hosted by the likes of Jonathan Ross, Graham Norton, Paul O’Grady – all of
whom will probably end up on her show in today’s circular
light-entertainment loop), she often goes in for that very English, very
middle-class self-deprecation (think Emma Thompson). When she’s in charge as
Big Mother – which is her main claim to fame – McCall is more obviously
confident and excitable; shouty and motormouthy, talking ten-to-the-dozen in
an Anneka Rice verbal gallop. Her own drink and drugs hell, and the long
years of recovery, as well as her chequered childhood, may help to explain
the genuine empathy she seems to have with the oddball contestants. But what
makes her special, I think – which was certainly the strongest impression I
had when we met – is that she is kind.
Our interview takes place in a photographers’ studio in Fulham where McCall is
doing a shoot, under duress, for the BBC’s Radio Times. I assume “under
duress” because it wasn’t until the 11th hour that our meeting was actually
confirmed, which seemed rather more Hollywood hauteur than cosy little
Britain. It later transpired that McCall hates being interviewed (which is
why it took her so long to commit), and that she has the absolute
heebie-jeebies about the new show partly because everyone insists on calling
her the new Parky: “It strikes fear into my heart that people keep saying
‘Parky’ because it’s very hard to step into somebody else’s shoes and it’s
just a nightmare because I want to be me. Even though I do partly want to be
like Parky [although it’s hard to imagine him asking the train into tunnel
question] because he’s bloody brilliant, but if I try to be like Parky it’s
just going to seem weird, and I don’t really know how I’m going to be but it
will be me.”
Unfortunately I cannot report on what sort of “me” this new “Davina” will be
because – despite numerous requests – the BBC failed to send a DVD of the
pilot. This much we know: the guests were Peter Kay, Paul O’Grady
(presumably talking about his unorthodox new slot, alternating with the
wonderful Richard and Judy), an actor from EastEnders and Charlotte Church.
There will be stairs: “Shall I leap down them? Oh no, I’ll be wearing heels
so I’d go arse over tit, wouldn’t I?” Peals of laughter. Has she got a nice
sofa? “I’m not sure… I was under the impression it’ll be two chairs but I
want them close enough for touching. I need touching.” There are to be no
gimmicks, just talk and music, and she’s very happy with it, although, “in a
funny kind of way I don’t want to push it because I don’t want people to
have great expectations – I just want it to grow in a natural way.”
She is softer-looking and more delicate in person, oddly more reminiscent of
the actress Dervla Kirwan than McCall’s own high-octane TV self. Glossy hair
that flops in her eyes, good teeth and cheekbones, no make-up. There is
something endearing about her open quality. Her gaze is so steady and
attentive that I comment on it – and her explanation is that perhaps it is
because she has a slightly lazy eye. Although she is 38, there is a
childlike aspect to her which belies her streetwise past, and still clings
to her without any suggestion that she is simple-minded.
An image remains of her sitting schoolgirlishly on her hands, although I’m
pretty sure she did no such thing. This is much of a piece with other Davina
conundrums – her aforementioned wholesomeness in a distinctly unwholesome
show; her surprisingly old- fashioned values despite such modern packaging;
the feeling she gives of offering new-best-friend intimacy while actually
guarding her privacy more fiercely than the starriest A-list celebrity.
I thought of her as being a natty dresser until a number of friends tried to
disabuse me of that notion, and it seems that Davina’s husband, Matthew
Robertson, may also be of their persuasion judging by his comments to his
wife that morning. Apparently his very words were: ‘You can’t seriously be
thinking of going out like that! Your trousers are far too short and your
jacket looks two sizes too small.” Davina and I agree that this is a little
harsh. Granted it is quite an unusual look; a sort of Hobbit meets homage to
Jackie O. A forest-green retro jacket with a belt that ties under the
breasts (Betty Jackson) and not quite three-quarter-length cuffs, over a
mutton-sleeved black T-shirt (Jigsaw), denim gaucho culottes (French street
market) and square-toed pixie boots. I am slightly startled when she shows
me her devil’s horns tattoos on each hip pointing down – as she says,
raising that well-exercised eyebrow – “to you know where!”
Her first attempts at experimenting with clothes and burying her Home Counties
accent was at the age of 13, when she left her paternal grandmother’s house
in Surrey to live with her father, Andrew, and stepmother, Gaby, in the wild
streets of West London. She turned up on her first day at Godolphin &
Latymer in long white socks and a proper uniform, “but Godolphin’s quite
relaxed and everybody had their skirts taken in and so on, and I’m stood at
the door with a pudding-bowl haircut, very, very nerdy and very square, with
my doctor’s bag, and to go in at the second year of secondary school is
difficult anyway because everybody’s already made their friends…”
So she abandoned the knee-length socks and went out and bought a bag from
Millets with her stepmum. “I told her they were going to kill me if I
didn’t”, and pretty soon she’d copied the names of bands she’d seen on other
girls’ bags “because I just wanted to fit in. It was a survival technique,
really.” By the same token, McCall changed the way she spoke when she got “a
bit of hassle” from some kids in Shepherds Bush, on her way to school, “So I
started talking ‘loik vat’ for survival because I thought I was going to be
beaten up.” By this time, McCall’s survival skills were already pretty
well-honed. Her French mother, Florence, and her English father – who comes
from a long line of Wykehamists (which makes Davina’s background upper
middle class, according to one of my Winchester- educated friends) and was a
Debs’ Delight – had come to the decision to make their three-year-old
daughter a ward of court since neither parent felt equipped to bring her up
themselves.
She now knows that her parents did the best they could at the time by handing
her over to her grandmother, but it has still left her with a lifelong fear
of abandonment. “Being a mother myself [she has two little girls with
Matthew, Holly and Tilly] has made me realise that all the things that make
me want to be a great mum are all the things I missed when I was a kid,” she
says. “Having got older and having been in recovery and going to meetings
makes me realise that I can’t blame anybody else necessarily for all the
things I’ve done in my life, but that my core insecurity is definitely going
to have come from my mum not being around. “With time, I’ve come to realise
that it wasn’t because my mum didn’t want me but when I was a teenager, I
thought it was because my mum just had, you know, better things to do and
that’s a horrible way to feel.”
Her feelings about her father seem to be less complicated than those towards
her mother; in part because of the latter’s alcoholism, which certainly made
its impact on Davina’s childhood, but also because her father was simply
around more.
McCall would stay with her mother in Paris during the school holidays, in the
chic eighth arrondissement off the Champs Elysées. At first, she says: “My
mum was a very exciting woman to be around, an electric personality. There
was always a drama happening but she was always funny. She’d do the really
embarrassing thing that you would never dare to do. I used to watch
Absolutely Fabulous and I sometimes used to think, ‘Gosh, that’s like me –
I’m Saffy and my mum’s Edina.’ Not the same kind of fashion preciousness,
but that kind of relationship where she made me more square because I was
constantly trying to look after my mum and keep her under control.” How
embarrassing was her mother? “Well, I’m thinking of an electric-blue
floorlength fake fur that made her look like Cruella De Vil which she’d waft
around in, and she’d go to a café and have a double Ricard before she went
to work [as manager of the Yves St Laurent boutique], and she’d be flirting
with somebody, you know, inappropriate, and you’d be thinking, ‘Oh my God’,
and she’d do citizen’s arrests when someone pinched her bottom. Just mad
stuff but funny and fantastic… if you’re not the daughter. My friends would
say, ‘Oh my GOD, she’s so cool.’ But I didn’t tell people a lot of the stuff
that happened in France and I especially didn’t tell my English family
because I didn’t want to upset them or for them to stop me going over there
because I loved my mother. And I still love my mother and I’ll always love
her, and she’s not drinking now and she’s doing really, really well.”
When did she realise that her mother had a drink problem? “Quite early on,
really. Four or five. You’d walk into a room and you’d have to read the
atmosphere and try to fit in. There are sort of survival techniques that
kids use to deal with it. Like if somebody’s in a bad mood, you just sit
quietly and know not to ask for anything or be too demanding. Or if they’re
in a really good mood then you’ve got to join in and be silly. Or if they’re
really crying, you’ve got to go and take care of them.”
In her teens, back home in London, the young Davina – no longer a nerdy square
– started hanging out with an older set and becoming a fixture on the
clubbing scene. She was a regular at Taboo and the Camden Palace and
Beetroot and knew Steve Strange and the late Leigh Bowery and Pete Burns,
most recently seen being nasty on Big Brother. “I’d always quite cherished
his kind of brutal honesty but I have to say that Pete Burns should not
drink because when he has a drink inside him, he becomes vicious and he was
drunk that night,” she says, apropos of his bullying attack on Baywatch’s
Traci Bingham. A couple of interesting things emerge when McCall talks about
her own relationship with drugs. She says that the reason she couldn’t allow
herself to have even one glass of wine – although her husband is a “wine nut
who spends a lot of time doing that lovely ritual of decanting and sniffing
and swooshing and sometimes, you think, you know, it looks fun” – is that
she knows that she’s not the sort of person who can do “one” of anything.
“And I can’t tell you, hand on heart, that if I got drunk at a party and
someone said, ‘Would you like a line of coke?’ that I wouldn’t think about
doing it, and that is too frightening… I’ve got two children, and I’ve got a
life. Just how bad was it? “If I started on New Year’s Eve, I would be
taking drugs nonstop for three days because when I start I just can’t stop.
And when I was an addict, I just let everybody down and maybe because I did
have strong morals and good manners and stuff, that made me hate myself.
With a passion. And that’s eventually why I stopped.”
