Anne Robinson: Most women my age are size 18 with double chins

dailymail.co.uk :    Anne Robinson may like dogs — Ellie, her working cocker, lies curled in a basket, unbothered by the publicist, housekeeper, stylist, photographer and interviewer traipsing through the Kensington kitchen — but she is much more like a cat.

After an hour or so of photographs, she submits to being interviewed, throwing herself on her sofa, feet up, can of Diet Coke in hand. Seemingly relaxed, but waiting to pounce. You can almost see a tail twitching.

Not that this cat doesn’t need an occasional stroke. There’s a revealing moment when she appeals to Barbara, her housekeeper of ten years, with a playful ‘I’m not horrible, am I?’ (All I suggested was that she might be a little controlling). ‘She’s just looking for compliments,’ Barbara says fondly.

There is a level, of course, on which Robinson, 67, is playing up to expectations: the woman who, as a journalist on Fleet Street in the Seventies and Eighties, was known as Mrs Awkward; who graduated, nearly 12 years ago, to terrorising contestants on The Weakest Link, earning herself the sobriquets ‘rudest woman on television’ and ‘the queen of mean’, as well as millions of viewers, a hit show in the U.S. and many millions of pounds.