‘I’m a complete slapper –
I work for any channel that’ll pay me.’
Davina McCall
‘For me, biography has always been a personal adventure of exploration and pursuit, a tracking. Like love, in passionate curiosity.’
– Richard Holmes, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer
To my son Adam and his girlfriend Miya,
my daughter Kim; and for giving me a whole
new world, my grandson Harvey.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
1. A Cry For Help
2. Dangerous Addictions
3. God’s Gift
4. Snakes & Ladders
5. Love At First Sight
6. Mrs Robertson
7. A Bigger Picture
8. Merely An Actress
9. Time Out
10. One More Time
11. Reality Bites
12. Sex, Lies & Big Brother
13. Sitting Pretty
14. To Be Continued
15. Walk This Way
Davina McCall’s Television
Davina McCall’s Awards & Nominations
Also by Nigel Goodall
About the Author
Copyright
This book is also dedicated to the memory of Kate King, one of the most caring and kindest people you could ever wish to meet. Her untimely death from cancer, in 2002 when she was only 40, is a loss to all that knew her. During my early writing career, Kate transcribed many an interview for me, simply and unselfishly to help me out. I will always cherish her friendship, love and care.
A big thanks to everybody who helped and encouraged me as this book took shape: my son and daughter, Adam and Kim who are more excited about this book than any other I have done. Davina is one of their favourites after Eastenders Phil and Grant Mitchell (sorry Davina); everybody at John Blake Publishing, especially my editors Vicky McGeown and Mark Hanks; my copy editor Jane Donovan; my research team Keith Hayward, Kerry Peddar and Mark Barker, who all did me proud with the information they dug up; Neil Rees for his recollection of God’s Gift and for guiding me to information on Kylie Minogue’s Word Is Out music video; Melanie Beadon at 2 entertain for the Davina 30 Minute Workouts DVD; Elkie Brooks for sharing her thoughts with me about Reborn In The USA; Sean Delaney at the British Film Institute for his help with the television listing; Elizabeth Cunningham for the Top Gear tape and the title of this book; Charlotte Rasmussen for your eagle eye, critique and being such huge fan of my previous works. Thanks too, to Carol for my website, and Anne and Jan for suggesting Davina would make a good book; and Mike and Caroline for you know why. I would also like to mention the many excellent websites dedicated to all things Big Brother, particularly the Celebrity Big Brother UK Website (bigbrotherwebsite.net), which I consulted during my research. And last but not least, thanks to the Royal Literary Fund for their support. Without them this book would simply not have been possible.
Davina McCall was 15 years old when she turned up at school wearing black leather trousers and a T-shirt ripped across the waist. She had dyed her hair aubergine and was wearing Gothic make-up. It was ‘mufti day’ at Godolphin and Latymer School in Hammersmith, West London, and, while most girls came dressed like Bananarama wannabes in ra-ra skirts and legwarmers, Davina went punk.
Although in the spring of 1983 – the year Karen Carpenter died of anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder about to plague Davina – punk was probably no longer embraced by the mainstream. Punk dress and music were now considered wild, weird and antisocial, and the people who liked it weren’t much better, but, for Davina, it was essential for the attention she craved. During the same year, she remembers she shaved her head because she was sick of people constantly saying she dyed her hair blonde to make herself look like Princess Diana: ‘I was mortified because I was trying to be trendy and tough.’
It wasn’t the first time that Davina had reinvented herself. Three years earlier, when punk was still in vogue, she was simply horrified when she arrived for her first day at school. ‘I was this prim and proper little thing who turned up on her first day wearing white socks pulled up to her knees, a little A-line skirt, a Pringle haircut and was carrying a briefcase from WH Smith that pulled out like a doctor’s case. And I walked in and saw everybody – there were all these punks and trendy types, it was a nightmare. They all had streaked hair and their socks were round their ankles, and they all had Millets bags with “The Sex Pistols” and “The Clash” written on them. I had never heard of those bands and I just thought, “I am going to die. Ground, eat me up, please!”
‘But actually kids are brilliantly resilient and within three days I too had streaked my hair. And I went and got my bag from Millets – and wrote the names of bands I never heard of before on it – because I wanted desperately to fit in.’ During this time she also recalls that she even 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.
‘It was like Sandra Dee from Grease turning into a wild Pink Lady! I never looked back really; it was like a rebirth. When my granny next saw me, she was most perturbed. An old school friend came round for dinner recently and we had such a laugh recalling my third day at school. She says she’ll never forget it because I’d changed so dramatically. And since then I’ve been many people, and I like to play different parts of myself – sometimes a foxy minx, sometimes quiet and sensitive, sometimes loud and gregarious – and they’re all me.’ Basically, though, she continues, ‘I am two people and they are incredibly different. There is the little girl who was brought up by my grandmother and who was taught very good morals and manners, and right from wrong. And then there is my French side, which I get from my mum and Paris – and going out and wild parties, and madness and excitement.’
It was after that third day at the school that she started experimenting with her looks – she had to. The easiest way to reinvent yourself, she says, ‘is with your hair. It’s immediate and it’s shocking. I’ve had black hair, orange hair, blonde hair, and you get a lot of attention as a blonde. When I went dark again, I had to suddenly develop a sense of humour to get noticed – I had to work harder for it.’
Having learned from an early age that ‘to get on you have to fit in’ has probably helped Davina become one of Britain’s most loved television presenters without the need for the kind of fame to be found from being crowned ‘Queen of the Celebrity Jungle’. Or being an ex-Atomic Kitten, a member of Girls Aloud or a Sugababe. And fit in she still does, even with the way she talks. She has a sort of middle-class cockney twang to her accent that, according to journalist Paul Bracchi, places her somewhere roughly 30 miles up any motorway heading out of London. But, if the secret of success is an unsettled childhood, Davina was destined for greatness when she was just