Anne Robinson has revealed she struggled with “heavy” shame after she lost custody of her daughter Emma while battling “an appalling drink problem”.
The TV presenter, 81, divorced her husband Charles Wilson in 1973 and he won full custody of Emma, who was two years old at the time.
The former Weakest Link star gave up drinking a few years later and worked to rebuild a relationship with her daughter.
Speaking to Lorraine Kelly on Saga’s Experience Is Everything podcast, she said: “My mother was amazing, but she was also a very bad drinker.
“And if you grow up with someone with a drink problem, the one thing you’re absolutely determined is that you won’t do the same.
“And of course I did. I developed the most appalling drink problem in my 20s.
“It was so bad that when I was divorcing my husband, he fought and won custody of Emma, which was the most shameful, and remains the most shameful thing, in my life.
“I really had to pick myself up from that and somehow start again from quite a low rate.”
Robinson described her relationship with Emma, who is now a television and radio producer, as “untouchable”.
She said: “I think the shame is quite heavy. And I realised I had to stop drinking, which I did in the next couple of years.
“Slowly she was mine again, but it was quite a tough start… we had to start again when she was five or six, to really build a relationship which is untouchable now and has been for years and years and years.”
Robinson added that she has a good relationship with her grandsons too, feeling boys are “uncomplicated” compared to girls.
She said: “Girls are tricky, don’t you find? I see my grandsons now and they seem very uncomplicated at 16 and 17 compared to girls at 16 and 17. Quite sort of naive really, in a way.”
Robinson revealed in July that she has moved out of her home in the Cotswolds to an apartment in London just a few streets away from Emma and her family.
Robinson began her career as a journalist and began appearing on TV as a panellist on Question Time in 1982.
She became well known as the host of The Weakest Link from 2000 to 2012 and she also hosted Watchdog from 1993 to 2001 and again from 2019 to 2015.
More recently, Robinson presented Countdown for a year between July 2021 and July 2022.
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