Davina McCall at 50: 'Why I've chosen to pose make-up free'

Davina McCall turns  50 on October 15, and to celebrate this milestone she approached Stella about doing a ‘barefaced’ photo shoot to show ‘that getting older isn’t the end’.

In an age when celebrities typically have half a dozen assorted stylists, hairdressers and make-up people in tow to ensure that they look their glamorous best, this is a highly unusual step.  Dressed in 1970s-style high-waisted cord flared trousers, and a high-neck ruffle blouse, both by her favourite designer (‘I am obsessed with Vanessa Bruno’) she looks wonderful and radiates youthful energy.

She has newly revealed cheekbones, partly because of her age – ‘The fat is all going from my face’ – but also because she’s lost weight and replaced it with muscle. At 50, she has a six-pack and an ab-crack – the vertical dent that runs down the middle of the stomach, only evident in extremely toned bodies.

Tanned from a holiday in the south of France, she always takes six weeks off in the summer to be with her husband, Matthew Robertson, the former Pet Rescue presenter who runs his own adventure travel company, and their three children, Holly, 16, Tilly, 14, and Chester, 11. 

It’s more than 20 years since Davina first got her break as a presenter on MTV – prior to this she’d been working as a booker at Models 1 and in nightclubs to make ends meet. She went on to present the Brit Awards and Streetmate, a reality dating TV show. But it was her role as host of Big Brother, of which she was the face for 10 years from 2000, that really made her a household name.

Perhaps it is her friendly enthusiasm – ‘I do love a chit-chat,’ she says – or her ease with physical intimacy – ‘a hug can heal a million woes’, she writes in her memoir, Lessons I’ve Learned – but Davina has built her career on being someone we can all relate to. Even when she was reportedly earning ￡2m a series on Big Brother, she still seemed to be one of us. 

As she puts it, ‘I’ve made a career out of making a bit of a plonker out of myself… and people seem to like it.’

She’s someone who has never hidden her flaws, and has always been open about her teenage drug-taking, her recovery and her alcoholic mother.  And when she admitted she got all tongue-tied interviewing celebrities on Davina, her BBC chat show (2006), it made it even easier for us to imagine she was one of us.

Physically, I feel better than I’ve felt – like, for ever! No cellulite at 50, it’s ace!

BBC executives pulled the series after its first run and Davina went on to do what she’s best at: establish a rapport with everyday people on such shows as Long Lost Family where missing family members are tracked down, and Davina radiates so much empathy she’s regularly on the verge of tears. 

In person, she’s such good company – warm, candid and self-reflective; she’s good at talking about herself, thanks to years of therapy.

She still goes to a 12-step programme, despite being clean for 25 years – ‘one day at a time’ – and admits she used to drive people mad with the self-empowering jargon: ‘recovery steps’, ‘the joy plan’, and the concept that recovery is a lifelong process.

Her conversation is peppered with motivational and instructional messages (her book includes chapter headings such as Five Ways to Get an ‘Attitude of Gratitude’). And she has recently drafted a new list, ‘five free ways to make yourself look younger’, such as keep bra straps super-tight (‘hitch the puppies up!’); keep smiling (‘My resting bitch face is really scary, and when I smile you don’t see the holes in my cheeks’); never make an ‘ooouf’ sound when leaning over to put on socks; and walk with purpose.

‘The fifth one, without a doubt, is exercise,’ she says. Davina is evangelical about exercise. She has a lucrative sideline in workout DVDs (they’ve sold around two million); goes on  a 100km charity bike ride once a year with a gang of girlfriends; and when we meet she is ‘really upping the ante’ by training for the Great North Run (13 miles), which means her weekly fitness routine includes two spin classes, a weight-training session and four runs (the longest up to two hours). 

In 2014, she completed a Sport Relief challenge,Beyond Breaking Point, filmed for the BBC, where she had to cycle, swim and run the 500 miles from Edinburgh to London. The documentary’s title turned out to be particularly apt – at one point she became hypothermic and had to be pulled barely conscious from Lake Windermere. But she made it to London, and raised ￡2.3 million.

‘I quite like doing something when people think I might not be able to,’ she says. Anyway, it’s paying off, she says. ‘Physically, I feel better than I’ve felt – like, for ever!’ She is slimmer, has more energy, is happier. ‘And it’s amazing what it’s done for my legs.’ She leaps to her feet, pulls down her trousers, does a pirouette, and says, ‘Look, no cellulite, it’s ace!’

She says she even wore shorts recently in London, ‘At 50!’  I wonder if exercise is her new drug. ‘I’m not addicted to exercise at all,’ she insists, explaining it only seems that way because she’s training. She normally just does the spin classes and weight training. ‘I wish  I could become addicted. If I wasn’t working so much, I’d try to train every day. I love training.’

She recently posted a video on Facebook responding to criticism she’s received on social media for being obsessed with fitness. ‘I’m nearly 50 and when I was  in my 20s I thought 50 was it, the end of life, and it’s not.’ she says in the video. ‘I want to show people that no matter how old you are, you can still get fit and enjoy being fit.’

I feel it’s almost more attractive that I can’t have children. There’s a friskiness about that

She says her most recent addiction was sugar. ‘I could eat 10 packets of Haribo a night.’

After her older half-sister Caroline was diagnosed with cancer (she died in 2012) and advised by a nutritionist to give up sugar, Davina made it her mission to cut it out of her diet too, and has written two cookbooks on the subject – 5 Weeks to Sugar-Free and Davina’s Sugar-Free in a Hurry.

She admits she is lucky and has wrinkle-free olive skin (inherited from her paternal grandmother) requiring a ‘very low-maintenance’ beauty routine of cleansing and moisturising. She also has her teeth whitened once a year, dyes her own hair every three weeks – ‘I am not ready to go grey’ – and has occasional facials. 

Turning 50, she claims, has given her a new confidence, which is why she wanted to expose the ‘truth’ behind Instagram ‘perfection’ by recently sharing a photo of herself standing with her arms in the air.

‘OK, so take note of how many girls take bikini shots with their arms in the air,’ she writes, ‘(It’s to make our tummies look better)!!!!!’ She also posted a picture of her ‘mummy tummy’ from a less flattering angle, which she described as looking like ‘a Shar Pei puppy’ – as in, having a dangle of loose flesh.

‘I had three massive babies and I think it is really important to say that and to say my children love it. They squidge it and hold it and that has helped  me love it myself,’ she says. 

She talks a lot about role models and how important it is to find older people who are ‘happy in their own skin’.

‘I love those 60- and 70-year-old fashionistas with outsized sunglasses and red hair,’ she says. ‘I’m not posting something because I think it will get a lot of likes, it has to be from the heart.’

Davina’s top five beauty products

She goes on, ‘There are not many TV presenters older than me that do entertainment and I feel responsible for the youngees coming up.’  But she hasn’t always been so comfortable with getting older; her mid-40s was a difficult period.

In particular, the build- up to the menopause. ‘The first time I noticed something was happening was when I got terrible night sweats. For me as an ex-junkie, the night sweats were really uncomfortable because it reminded me of going through cold turkey at night and waking up in a pool of sweat. It was so bad.’

There were other symptoms: insomnia, ‘libido through the floor’ and brain fog.   

‘It was affecting my ability to read the autocue,’ she continues, ‘A producer said, “Are you OK?” Because I was cocking up quite a bit. My keys were in the fridge and my phone was in the bin. And I was just in a really bad bloody mood.’

She looked into HRT, which was quite a shift in her self-image, as she’d always seen herself as being quite alternative. ‘I treat the kids homoeopathically, I had my babies at home. But I thought this f—g menopause is finishing me off.’

After researching, she decided to take it. ‘All my symptoms stopped overnight. I’m not endorsing it, it was a personal decision.’ She says it helped with the psychological aspects, too.

‘I feel, in a funny way, it’s almost more attractive that I can’t have children, because now I don’t need to take contraception. There’s a certain friskiness about that. There is a confidence that comes with age.’

Davina was born in Wimbledon, south-west London, after a whirlwind romance between her mother, Florence, a French model, and her father, Andrew, a graphic designer. The relationship was short-lived.

‘Mum was incapable of monogamy until much later in life,’ she writes in her memoir.  Her mother walked out when Davina was three, leaving her in the care of Pippy, her paternal grandmother. (Her father, a much more stable character, would visit every weekend but he had a full-time job in London and couldn’t afford a nanny.)

She’d join her mother in the holidays. A typical visit would consist of her mother flirting with men and getting intoxicated. Once, when Davina was in her early teens, her mum turned up at a bar wearing an electric-blue fur coat, a pair of shoes and nothing else. ‘She kept flashing people and thought it was really funny.’

On another occasion she took her to a sex shop and bought a vibrator. To her friends, her mother seemed fun. But Davina knew her neediness, drunkenness, broken promises – and she last saw her at her wedding 17 years ago. Florence met her fourth and final husband in her 50s and died in 2008.  ‘Before I had children I was worried that  I would repeat the same mistakes,’ Davina says.

In fact, she is very much a hands-on mother, and takes pride in doing things differently. She is never late picking her children up, has clear boundaries, never borrows her daughters’ clothes and makes a big fuss at Christmas, Easter and birthdays (her mother never sent as much as a card).

‘We go to Disney every other year. There is something about the magic and childhood of Disney that makes me cry. And I think it’s because I didn’t have that.’ And she is clearly proud of her own girls, who, she says, at 14 and 16, are wonderfully level-headed.

‘At 14, I’d already tried cocaine, I was clubbing, smoking, drinking. I had sex at 15, and not because I was in control and in love with someone, it was under duress and in a horrible situation. And at 16, I’d taken heroin. I was a mess. So I look at my girls and I’m like, you’re amazing!’ 

Future projects include a new series of Long Lost Family, and she recently returned to our screens with The Davina Hour, for  W Channel, where she leads a discussion on topics such as parenting and body issues.

She had anticipated winding down at 50, ‘but actually, workwise I’m doing better than ever. There is a new-found respect for women, it’s no longer, “You’re 50? What do you know?” It’s actually, “You’ve got a wealth of wisdom, what can you tell me?”’