A new interview with Davina has been released, read on for the full manuscript.
Not many people have squeezed as much into their first 39 years as Davina McCall. She has been, at various points, a singer, a restaurant manager, a model-agency booker, and a singing waitress. In the last ten years, she’s become one of the highest-profile presenters on British television, as well as becoming a mother to three children.
A new series of Big Brother, Channel 4’s flagship reality show which McCall has ably helmed from the off, is set to start in the coming weeks. She and fellow host Dermot O’Leary are in a North London studio for their BB8 publicity photo shoot and McCall seems as excited as if it were her first ever show. In person, she is every bit as warm and fun as her TV persona, and couldn’t be monosyllabic if she tried. In short, she’s an interviewer’s dream.
Big Brother has made a lot of people famous, for varying lengths of time. But actually, the ultimate person who’s been made famous by Big Brother is you. Did you ever think it would be as huge as it has turned out to be?
No. When I first did it I thought it was just another gig, but as time’s gone by, it’s become bigger and bigger. What I like about it is that it’s about the people in the house, not about the people who host it. But I also think being in the house is no longer a stepping-stone to fame. It’s become less and less about that. I think people have realised that once you’re an ex-Big Brother housemate, you’re tarnished. It’s perfect for someone like Nadia, because Nadia had something she needed to prove to herself. She was never really after a career.
Do you think the fact that you’ve had difficult patches in your life makes you more sympathetic to some of the more complex Big Brother characters?
I suppose I can empathise with different sorts of people, because I’ve been through lots of different things throughout my life. Life experience is very helpful for relating to other people, because it gives me insights I wouldn’t otherwise have. And it made me realise that I’m by no means a perfect person, so I don’t expect others to be perfect.
Which have been your favourite moments in past Big Brothers?
Nadia winning was a very emotional one for me. Brian winning - that was great. The bedsit where the girls were living, the box task, Pete Burns, George Galloway and Rula Lenska. There have been so many amazing, amazing moments. Big Brother is an ongoing joy, and I’m very, very lucky to be hosting it.
If you could have one wish for this Big Brother, what would it be?
I want to laugh, laugh, laugh until I pee my pants.
Do you get to choose your own clothes for Big Brother? You wear some quite ‘out there’ stuff sometimes.
AJ is my stylist, and she’s brilliant! She comes up with outfits that she thinks I might wear, and it’s stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily be brave enough to wear on my own or when I go out. I live in the country, so I’m always in jeans and a t-shirt. So to have someone say ‘Try a hat’ or ‘Try a cape’ is quite fun. It’s like dressing up.
Most of your work has been live TV. Do you prefer it that way?
When you’ve done live TV it’s quite hard to get into studio stuff where they’ll say ‘Take five… take six… take seven…’ The nice thing about live, as a viewer, is the sense that anything could happen. I find live TV more fun. And I don’t get nervous doing it any more.
In your TV career you’ve done some enormously high profile shows, from Big Brother to the BAFTAs, Comic Relief and, obviously, God’s Gift.
God’s Gift - now that was brilliant TV. Bring it back! Bring it back!
What’s been the high point of them all for you?
Funnily enough, because it was my first foray into television, I really enjoyed doing God’s Gift. Let’s not get it confused with anything other than a daft programme where men ended up in their pants in front of an audience of baying women! When I took it on, I thought that it could either be the end of my career or it could be the beginning. And it ended up, for some unknown reason, becoming some sort of cult show. I had no script at all, I wrote everything, it was completely mad, freeform television, that was really good fun… hugely exciting for me.
Congratulations on the birth of number three last September. What’s it like having a boy after two girls?
Well, for the first month I kept saying ‘Good girl’…‘Oh, look at her’, that sort of thing. So it took a bit of getting used to. And the whole changing nappy thing is interesting. But it’s just heaven. And I look at photos of us now. When we had two children we looked quite controlled, but now we’re a gang. I love it!
And all three of them are September babies. Do you essentially save your amorous moments only for Christmas time?
What happens, in all honesty, is that we say ‘We can get pregnant any time after Christmas, because that’ll tie in okay with Big Brother’. So we say, ‘We’ll start thinking about it at Christmas, and see what happens’. And clearly we’re just extremely compatible, Matthew and I, and it just seems that I get pregnant really quickly.
You recently made a programme about sex education for Channel 4. It’s an important issue for you, isn’t it?
Well, I just find it amazing that, with the statistics we’ve got regarding teenage pregnancy, there is still no sex education on the curriculum in this country. How can we not be teaching our children about how to have a healthy emotional life? For me, sexual welfare is part of emotional welfare. I think it would be a nation-changing decision if the government would just introduce proper sex education.
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