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Tucking into a fishcake in a hotel in Tunbridge Wells, a few miles from her home, Davina McCall is reflecting on her life, aged 44. Lightly made up, she looks the picture of health, relaxed in skinny black jeans, ankle boots, and a grey T-shirt.

‘I am literally the dullest celebrity you are ever likely to meet,’ she says chirpily. ‘I may potentially have a blindfold from Agent Provocateur in the bottom of a drawer somewhere that I got for Christmas, but that’s about it. So I’m not that exciting at the moment. It’s quite nice in a sense.’

It’s classic Davina McCall – disarmingly honest, ungrandiose and just a little bit naughty.

It’s also not true. McCall may no longer be the brassy face of Big Brother, but a glance at what she’s up to reveals she’s busier than ever. Tonight she’s back on our screens hosting the second series of Got to Dance, and the day we meet she’s about to film an episode of Long Lost Family with Nicky Campbell. She’s also fronting another series of The Million Pound Drop and another series of the fat-loss-bootcamp knockout show, The Biggest Loser. She’s the face of Garnier Ultralift cream, has designed a fitness range

for Next and is releasing her second fitness DVD, the first one having been a massive, and surprise hit.

From drug-addicted ladette to fitness guru, McCall has travelled an unlikely road. ‘By stealth I have quietly muscled my way into the fitness arena,’ she says, laughing. ‘Up until 25 the only fitness I did was nightclubbing.’ McCall is not, she’s the first to admit, naturally sylph-like. ‘I’m a yo-yo sort of person. It’s a constant thing I have to think about. It’s really a pain in the a—.’ Never one to do things by halves, McCall has become evangelical about health and fitness. I tell her, trying to suck in my gut, that I cycle to work.

‘How far? she immediately counters.‘About three miles.’ ‘Not far enough. Sorry, mate. Not good enough,’

she says, a twinkle in her eye. ‘You are a prime candidate for a workout DVD.’

McCall has been clean from drugs for nearly two decades, and doesn’t drink or smoke anymore. One of her little indulgences used to be a chocolate bar or two, but no longer. As we both launch into our second Diet Coke, she tells me, ‘I’ve tried to

Davina McCall doesn’t do things by half measures, which is why she nearly destroyed herself with drugs, and why she’s become the undisputed queen of reality TV. She talks to TIM AULD about fighting her demons and her unlikely new addiction: get-fit DVDs

PHOTOGRAPH BY SPENCER MURPHY

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really, really cut down on sugar. It’s a toxin. Sugar feeds tumours. I read that somewhere.’

I’d wondered before meeting her if McCall’s down-to-earth, I’m-your-mate, hell-I’m-everyone’s-mate persona was just that: a cleverly confected persona. But it’s not. The warm, bordering-on-rash openness she exudes on screen is all there in the flesh. Where most celebrities put their private lives out of bounds, McCall is access all areas: her thoughts on plastic surgery (‘I’m talking about when I’m 70’); her recovery from addiction; her bouts of therapy; her relationship with her mother. She shies away from none of it.

She’s feisty, too, though, when challenged about controversy. She rejects accusations that Big Brother – which was applauded in its opening season for being a daring experiment, but increasingly derided by the broadsheet press – became a freak show.

‘I think that’s terribly judgmental. I really do. I remember people calling it a freak show because it had gay people on it or people with Tourette’s and I’m, like, “Hello, these are people from society.” Calling it a freak show is the most inhumane and worst thing you can possibly do. But you’re talking to me. You know, I love everybody.’

One of the people she particularly took to heart was Jade Goody, who went from loveable anti-hero to public enemy number one during the racist bullying incident with Shilpa Shetty. By the time the row broke McCall and Goody shared the same agent, and McCall was criticised for the ‘soft’ interview she gave Goody on her exit from the house. Seeing as the production company Endemol had asked Goody back on the programme knowing she was a loose cannon, was McCall damned as a hypocrite if she gave her a hard time, and damned as complicit if she didn’t?

‘I didn’t feel damned either way,’ she says. ‘I felt as if I owed it to Jade because we got her on the programme and this was the programme that for a while ruined her career. So we got her on, we begged her; well, we didn’t have to beg her because she was really keen, but we got her back on. So we did have a certain level of responsibility to make sure she wasn’t thrown to the wolves. But,’ she gets serious, ‘God, she had to answer some questions because she behaved appallingly. I was horrified. I was so upset. I thought, “This is my Jade. I love Jade, what’s she doing? This is so un-Jade,” but it was like the girls all got together and it was all bitchy and then it was bullying and it was excluding and it was horrible to watch.’

But shouldn’t someone, McCall even, have stepped in to stop it? ‘Do you know what should have happened – and in subsequent years it happened off the bat without thinking – [is] that

at the moment anyone heard [contestants saying] anything mildly racist they should have all been chucked off the show. It was not nice for somebody who loves laughing and loves entertainment, and though Jade was my all-time favourite housemate, it was really an unpleasant time.’

I don’t doubt McCall’s regret, but it is hard to credit that the Big Brother team, overseen by sophisticated outfits like Channel 4 and Endemol, who knew that controversy was the fuel that fed

the ratings for a show like Big Brother, were so totally ambushed by the Shilpa Shetty saga. However, who better to have on hand than McCall, the turbo-charged patron saint of second chances, whose own life story made her the perfect foil for such public demonstrations of flawed humanity?

McCall’s life started to go wrong at three years old when her flamboyant French mother, Florence, walked out and went to live in Paris. Her father sent her to be brought up by his parents in Surrey until the age of 13, when she moved back to live with him and his second wife. She attended Godolphin & Latymer (a private school in west London where she earned good grades) and spent school holidays in France visiting her mother, who was by this point an alcoholic. For a gregarious teenager like McCall it was a total disaster. ‘At that point I thought my mum was pretty cool because she let me do whatever I wanted,’ she says. ‘So for a lot of the time I was, like, “I wish I lived in France.” But actually, I look back in retrospect and I think, “Thank the Lord I didn’t or I’d probably be dead.” Because nobody kept an eye on me out there. I’d be clubbing at 14. It was a mad, mad existence.’ Her drug taking – which by the end included cocaine and heroin – started while she was still at school (‘I was the only one, I just have to say, for Godolphin’s sake. I was the only one in my class’).

Her ambition back then was to be a singer, but that didn’t happen, so instead she worked from the

From top: McCall with the controversial Big Brother contestant Jade Goody in 2002; with Cheryl Tweedy (now Cole) on Popstars: The Rivals in 2002

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I N T E R V I E W

Got to Dance returns at 6pm tonight on Sky 1. The fitness DVDDavina: Ultimate Target is out now

age of 18 to 24 as a booker at a model agency and running nightclubs. She had an alien tattooed on her bottom and a pair of devil’s horns on her haunches; she wore rubber dresses when she went out dancing. Despite her addictions she managed to keep turning up to work. Did her family know about her problems?

‘I was very good at hiding all of it, and my father never knew I was taking drugs, until the end when it was pretty obvious. It was all about front for me, and my big thing was I must never let anyone know.’ Through a 12-step fellowship, and also with the help of Eric Clapton (a family friend whom she had also briefly dated), she cleaned up her act. She admits that addiction remains a daily

battle. A friend once said of her, ‘[She was] like a lot of those middle-class girls who went on to make something of themselves, [and] you never really worried

about the fact that she would eventually be all right.’ But did McCall share that certainty?

She pauses. ‘Well, I never got to the stage where I thought the world was so bleak that there was no light. There’s always light. And that’s the cup-half-full thing. That optimism is the thing that keeps you going; I always thought at some point I’d be all right. One of the things about being an addict is that you’ve got to take responsibility.’

It was Clapton who suggested she try for a job in television and in 1992 she landed a slot on MTV. This led to the late-night ITV game show God’s Gift (a brasher version of Blind Date) and the programme that really set her career on its upward trajectory, Streetmate, in which she careered around provincial towns setting up dates between single boys and girls. Her up-and-at-’em spirit eventually won her the Big Brother gig in 2000.

Meantime there were boyfriends, among them the former Liverpool footballer Stan Collymore and a marriage to the actor Andrew Leggett in 1997. The marriage is one of the few things McCall prefers not to talk about, but on the basis that it

lasted three months one can assume it wasn’t an unqualified success.

But McCall’s luck changed with a chance meeting, while walking her dog on Clapham Common, with Matthew Robertson, then the hunky presenter of the television show Pet Rescue,now head of an adventure-holiday company. They married in 2000 and have three children – Holly, 10, Tilly, eight, and Chester, five.

Throughout all this McCall’s troubled relationship with her mother bubbled away. It boiled over, however, when in the aftermath of McCall and Robertson’s wedding her mother gave an interview to a tabloid describing how McCall nearly fell off the wagon a week before the ceremony. McCall was furious.

Three years ago her mother died and, though they never resolved their differences, McCall does seem to have achieved a kind of peace: ‘For about a year before she died I was seeing a cognitive

behavioural therapist and we were trying to get to the bottom of the fact that I had a mother who was alive but was not mothering me, and how sad that made me feel. I was cataclysmic with grief about it. But when my mum died I went to the therapist the week after and I said, “I don’t need to come again.” And she was, like, “Why don’t you make an appointment for a month?” And I said, “OK, I’ll make an appointment for a month but I will cancel it, I’m just letting you know, because I feel completely freed, because there’s no longer this person who is not being [my mother].” It’s the weirdest thing. Because now I’m allowed to remember her fondly, even for the alcoholic moments that were… they were funny, and she was a brilliant woman.’

As to what comes next, well, daytime television may beckon. Meantime, as McCall’s done all her life, fair weather or foul, she’s determined to keep on trucking: ‘I’m lucky because I get to do a job that I really enjoy. If I just quit tomorrow I’d be a bit, like, “Who am I?” I think that I’m a really good mum, but I feel as if I am quite defined by what I do, and that’s quite an interesting thing, because if I did stop, would I be all right? Would I be OK? I dunno. I’m not putting it to the test for a while.’

Right: with Matthew Robertson on their wedding day in 2000. Below: as a toddler with her grandmother. Bottom: aged 19 in Hong Kong with her half-sister, Millie

‘I had a mother who was alive but was not motheringme. I was cataclysmic withgrief about it… But I can remember her fondly now’