When Davina McCall was trying to get into telly, she auditioned for a presenting job on The Word, and they sent her into a studio to interview a then unknown boyband called Take That. It was the early 90s and we were going through “a phase of ‘mean telly’,” she says today. Presenters were expected to sneer at pop stars with an ironic detachment that didn’t come naturally to McCall. “The producers told me to take the piss out of them. They said, ‘I want you to go in there and be a bit edgy.’ But I couldn’t do it!” She returned to her day job as a booker for male models and her night job as a club hostess, bemoaning her “unfashionable” niceness. “But what’s quite funny is, whenever I bump into Robbie or Gary these days, they all remember. They’d been abused by hopefuls interviewing them all day, so they remembered me, the one who’d been kind. Which is, well, quite funny, isn’t it?”
Walking through a member’s club inside the former BBC Television Centre with McCall feels like I’m accompanying the actual sun. Staff, strangers, other celebrities, it’s wild: everybody’s face lights up as we approach, everybody greets her with an outrageous smile, and a compliment, and continues somehow brighter. We find a sofa by a long window. She props a cushion on her lap “so that you don’t have to look at my pants,” and tells me, merrily, the story of her life, a life studded with abandonment, addiction and the relentless pursuit of joy.
