So Has The Queen Of Mean​​​​​​​ Mellowed?

Journalist, author and TV presenter Anne Robinson is heading back to our TV screens. Marianne Sweet visited her Costwold home to find out more - and to hear about her support for local libraries.

- Marianne Sweet

Forget about climate change melting the polar ice caps. There is an even greater thawing here in the Cotswolds with our own Queen of Mean.

And the reason for Anne Robinson’s mellowing? Two little lads called Hudson and Parker - her grandsons. Their paintings take pride of place, surrounded by a stunning collection of art, in her spacious and welcoming Cotswold barn conversion.

Anne admits she is in possession of many more pieces by these yet-to-be-discovered artists, aged seven and five. “My bedroom is full of their pictures. I’ve had them all framed. They were with me all summer, either here or in France I couldn’t get rid of them,” she says with a hint of a smile.

On a shelf near the door of her home, where she moved just over a decade ago following the divorce of her second husband, is a large handbell, reminiscent of the ones you find in school.

Its purpose is practical. “The children are always outside, miles away. This is six acres around here. I got the bell quite recently because they don’t come to the whistle like the dogs and I can’t shout and ruin my voice.”

Her grandsons offer those simple pleasures of family life which Anne didn’t completely have with her daughter Emma. In 1973 a judge ruled that “he did not find her unfit mother” but decided her “undoubted ambition” - not to mention Anne’s alcoholism at the time – meant that Emma’s dad was awarded full custody. Though Anne had access rights, that separation, when Emma was just two and a half, left a deep impression. “The drinking and the career that helped me lose my daughter have never made up for the pain and shame of that loss,” Anne movingly wrote in her autobiography Memoirs of an Unfit Mother.