It all starts with the coil. Of course it does. This is Davina, and Davina McCall doesn’t do personal by halves. “I loved the coil, but people always used to go, ‘I’m not getting the coil, ugh.’ I always wondered why it wasn’t more popular.” So, it was June 2023 and McCall was getting her preferred method of contraception replaced – on TV, naturally, for a documentary. “I asked my children’s permission. ‘Can Mummy get her coil refitted on television?’ They all rolled their eyes, like: ‘God! Here she goes again.’”
Post-fitting, her friend Dame Lesley Regan, a gynaecologist, suggested that McCall have a health screening at the state-of-the-art women’s health clinic where she worked, in exchange for a talk she would give on menopause. To be honest, McCall says, she thought the idea ridiculous. “I was like: ‘Honestly, I don’t need that. I’m the healthiest woman you’ve ever met. I don’t go to the doctor, I have a good immune system, I eat well.’”
It’s 10 months now since McCall had her brain tumour removed. Although benign, the colloid cyst was huge. If left untreated, it could have eventually killed her. The TV presenter says she’s still trying to process everything: how fluky it was that it was spotted; what could have happened if it hadn’t been, or if she had refused the op (she almost did); and how her brain has been changed.
We meet at a studio in London where she’s having her photo taken. She arrives wearing a candy floss-coloured shirt, black skort and Ibiza tan. She looks ludicrously fit, like she could knock off a triathlon before breakfast. Today, at 57, McCall’s addiction is health and fitness. It used to be booze and heroin.
I’ve never met McCall before, but within seconds I feel I’ve known her for life. And in a way I have. McCall is one of the few celebrities whose public persona is pretty much the same as their private one. She grabs my hand, and leads me to the sofa where we’re going to talk. I feel like a contestant on Big Brother, which she presented for 10 years and 16 series (including the celebrity version). I half expect her to tell me that we’re live on Channel 4, so please don’t swear. In fact, this is probably the biggest difference between TV and real versions. The real McCall swears like a drunken nun.
She stares at my bag disbelievingly, as I pull out a second recorder. “Fucking hell, you taping me in stereo?” McCall is a great talker. You can turn your two recorders on and pop out for a couple of hours and she’s sure to have filled them with spellbinding if scatological stories. Her tales (of which there are many) invariably have tangents. And the tangents usually have their own tangents. So, somehow, she segues from the coil to The Lowdown (“It’s this amazing website, like a TripAdvisor for your vagina”), to the respect she has for her children’s privacy (“I’ve never posted any pictures of my son. He didn’t choose to be famous; I did”), her desire to shock as a teenage girl, Donny Osmond, her years at MTV, before getting back to the coil (around an hour later) to explain how it led to her diagnosis.
McCall was working as a judge on the TV series The Masked Singer when she got her diagnosis. She was told only about three people in a million get a colloid cyst, a non-cancerous fluid-filled sac that typically develops in the brain’s third ventricle. She was shocked, but the word she heard loudest was “benign”. In that case, she told herself, she didn’t have to do anything about it. She agreed to speak to a couple of brain surgeons, but her starting point was that they wouldn’t be operating on her. “I spoke to an amazing surgeon in America and said I need an honest opinion on whether I should have this operation. She said, ‘Are you sure you’re not symptomatic?’, and I said yes. And she said: ‘Well, I’m really surprised because looking at your scans it looks like you should be.’” Because it was so big? “Yeah! D’you want me to show you?” Before I’ve got time to answer, she’s got her smartphone out and I’m staring at a white, jelly-like blob on her brain. “A big colloid cyst is 10mm or more, and mine was 14mm,” she says proudly. “This is Jeffrey.”
“Eh?” I say.
“Jeffrey is what I call it.” Why? “Because I don’t know anyone called Jeffrey, so I could say ‘Fuck Jeffrey’ without hurting anyone’s feelings.”
How did she react when she was told she should have surgery? “I burst into tears.” She had left the studio to take the call and was pacing around the courtyard. “I was relieved and frightened. So the fear of it being a dead cert that I’m going to get it taken out, and then the relief of ‘Thank fuck, I’m going to get it taken out’ came at the same time. Nobody at The Masked Singer knew. I pull myself together, walk back in to go towards my dressing room and see this guy called Joe from ITV. And he goes: ‘Hey, hi, how are you doing?’ And I burst into tears, and he gives me a hug and asks what’s going on. I said: ‘I’ve just found out I’ve got a brain tumour and I need to get it operated on and I feel good and terrible all at the same time.’”
This was last October. A month later, she had the operation. McCall didn’t tell anybody on the show itself what was happening. “I pretended to everybody on the judging panel I was sick. And then I actually put on a costume and performed.” (She sang Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas and This Christmas on The Masked Singer Christmas Special.) Why? “It was quite weird. I wasn’t thinking this in a dramatic way, but I did think: if I don’t make it, this will be amazing for my kids to watch. I know that sounds a bit dark …” She comes to a stop.
Just as her emotions are about to get the better of her, she cheers herself up by telling me exactly what the operating team did to her brain. “They cut like a hairband into my head, peeled the front of my head down, then went through the two halves of my brain, so it looked like that.” She shows me a photo of the hairband scar. Is the scar still there? “My partner, Michael, very sweetly said, ‘You’ve just got a little white patch’, so we sprayed some root spray, but this is all new hair growing back.” Her hair is a magnificent auburn. Is it her natural colour? She laughs. “No, I’m grey. I coloured my hair two nights ago. I’m not ready to go grey yet.”
McCall feels she has emerged from her experience transformed. “The best thing to come out of it is not being frightened of death any more.” How scared was she? “I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to die. I love life, love living, and definitely wanted to be around for my kids while they were young. I think if I’d got ill when my kids were little it would have been very different, but I looked at my three kids and, although I didn’t want to leave them, I did think: you’d all be OK if I did. That’s a nice feeling. Then I looked at my life and thought: have I done everything I want to do? And I thought: yeah, I have. I’ve lived a really good life. I’ve really enjoyed my life. I’ve loved, and I’ve been loved.”
After the diagnosis, she started a podcast called Begin Again. “The whole idea behind it is helping people get to a point in their lives where they feel they can die happy. It’s about doing everything in your life you want to do, and how do you begin again to do that, so that you can die happy; so you can go, I’ve lived a life I’m proud of, or that I wanted to live.”
What was she totting up when she did the inventory of her life? “My kids. Would they be OK without me? I always thought my job is to teach them to fly away and never look back, even though you want them to look back sometimes. I don’t want to have kids who are too afraid to leave me. I guess the fact that one lives in Manchester, one lives in Australia, and the other one didn’t come on holiday with us because he was in Split means I’ve done a good job. They’re independent, happy kids.”
They had a very different childhood from your own? “Definitely. They had a solid childhood. I was with their dad for 18 years. We were together, they were under one roof, they had food on the table.” McCall split up from her second husband and the father of her children, Matthew Robertson, in 2017. She got together with the hairdresser Michael Douglas two years later. Douglas has done McCall’s hair for more than 20 years, and the two families were friends. Often he would bring his two children around to her house when he was doing her hair.
She was as surprised as anybody when they got together. I assumed it evolved into a relationship, but she says not. “It was more of a coup de foudre. A lightning bolt. I probably don’t want to talk about this because I have to think about Matthew. Michael and I were really good friends because we were hairdresser and client. I told him all of my secrets, about how I was feeling, and he was a brilliant sounding board. He would share his experiences; I would share my experiences. We would help each other navigate things. And he was in love with his wife and I was in love with my husband, so it was us trying to help each other through our lives. That’s what’s so mad about it. And then coup de foudre. Mad. Like I’d put on a different pair of glasses.”
She says she had to make sure she was over Robertson before thinking about a new relationship. “If I’m with somebody I’m with them. I don’t look at other people. I like being monogamous.”
McCall’s childhood was famously unsolid – at least on her maternal side. Her French mother, Florence, was a chaotic alcoholic who also dabbled in drugs, a glamorous socialite who never quite grew up and who died in 2008. When McCall was 13, Florence took her clubbing in Île de Ré along with her 19-year-old sister. “I remember my mum left me and my sis to go and get some weed or something, and being a bit frightened then. I was like: ‘Oh I’m so coool.’ Then when my mum left, I’m: ‘Oh my God, I’m so young, what am I doing in this place?’”
Her parents split up when she was three. Florence returned to France, and young Davina went to live with her paternal grandparents in Surrey. At 13 she moved in with her father, Andrew, a marketing and advertising executive who died in 2022, and her stepmother, Gaby, in London. She adored them (and is still exceptionally close to Gaby) but it was the absent Florence who was the defining influence of her childhood. “I was very loved. My dad and my granny and my stepmum loved me a lot. But it was my mother’s love that I spent my childhood seeking. I had it all there, and the thing I wanted was the thing I couldn’t have. I was just trying to fill this hole.”
By her mid-teens, she had become a rock chick – cool, loud, impossible to ignore. She was having a great time of it. “When I got to 18 or 19 I was an extreme extrovert. Outrageous outfits, always with people, dancing, chat, loved it.” She was running her own club nights, frequently on the lash, and developed a serious drug problem. “I was going down a muddy route of heroin and cocaine, and I was a mess.” How muddy a mess was she? “I don’t want to underplay me taking heroin. The fact I wasn’t injecting doesn’t mean it’s safe to take heroin. It really fucked up my life. My life was falling apart. I left my boyfriend because I thought it was his fault I was taking drugs. It wasn’t. I got worse when I left him. Maybe it was my fault he was taking them.”
She says she was such a contradictory shambles – conscientious and wasted, ecstatic and miserable, life of the party and lonely as hell, permissive and puritanical. “I was half nun, half wild child. I was half really good girl: so compliant, swotty, good morals and manners, and full of love. And then half maniac.” She didn’t have a clue what she wanted to do with her life. Then, when she was 19, MTV got in touch with a bunch of notable clubbers, including her, to see if they could help with the launch of MTV Europe. Their job was to entertain celebrities attending the launch on the journey from London to Amsterdam, where the party was held, and throughout the night. “At the end of that night I was like: ‘Oh my God. I’ve found my calling. I have to work for MTV!’”
She’s screaming with enthusiasm, Davina-style. What was so good about it? “It was just so mad. Everyone who worked at MTV was under 25. All the biggest bands of the era were on this plane – Duran Duran, Sigue Sigue Sputnik. I think Donny Osmond was on the plane, too. I love Donny.” I tell her how much I liked him when I met him. “Oh my God, isn’t he the loveliest man?! I sat next to him on The Masked Singer, and he was my poster boy.” She points to her legs. Eh? I say. “I’ve got goose bumps.” And the goose bumps really are visible.
She comes to a stop. And she’s gone from hyper to a brief unexpected low. “Nobody really understood what it meant to me sitting next to Donny. All the people in my life who would have really got what that meant to me had died – my sister, my dad, my granny.” Seconds later, she has refuelled. The energy’s back. “And when I came back from that MTV trip I thought: I want to work there.”
Was access to celebrity part of what attracted her to MTV? “No, it was the vibe, the energy. It felt like if you had an idea and you went to somebody at MTV, they’d go: let’s do it. I remember turning up there and Robbie [Williams] had just left Take That and they said they were going to do a two-hour special in an hour! It was so exciting to be around.”
But there were two problems. MTV wanted to hire presenters from the continent, and McCall was too much of a wreck to hold down a proper job. At 25, she got clean. She says she had to give up alcohol before she could contemplate giving up drugs. What had been the attraction of heroin? “You take heroin because you’re deeply insecure and part of your extrovertism is to cover up your deep insecurity. Heroin is like a hug and it tells you that you don’t need anyone or anything, and everything’s all right.”
Sobriety soon paid off. “Amazingly, six months clean, I get a call off MTV, who I had been trying to get a screen test off. If I’d have got a screen test off them when I was still using I would have messed it up.” She has never drunk alcohol or taken drugs since then. Nor has she been without work.
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McCall quickly became the queen of reality TV. She had something different. She was fun without being OTT, sincere without being cloying, funny without dominating and, most importantly, she seemed to love what she was doing and care about the people on the shows. You felt she would have just as happily been a contestant as the presenter.
There has been a consistency to all the work she has done over the past 30 years. Today, she’s promoting Stranded on Honeymoon Island, a new dating show that’s a melange of other dating shows – contestants have to marry (though it’s not legally binding) then spend time together on a desert island. The first show she presented, Streetmate, was one of the earliest of the genre. It involved McCall rolling up to strangers in different places, asking them if they were single and were up for her finding them a date (which involved the contestant telling McCall who they fancied on the street and her then playing matchmaker). It was simple, audacious and had infinitely more energy than most of today’s shows (including the first episode of Stranded).
I tell her I watched an episode of Streetmate earlier today. “Ohmygodwhichonewhichone?” she replies in turbo-drive Davina. I tell her it was a show in which the woman calls the man a laddish loser, says he has no chance, and they end up together. “Oh my God! So good.” She’s panting with excitement. And laughing. Pant-laughing. “Oh my God, you know I nearly did Streetmate again when it came back [in 2017], then they changed their minds and went for Scarlett [Moffatt]. I loved that show. It was amazing.”
But it was on Big Brother, the groundbreaking C4 show in which a bunch of strangers were locked inside a house together under constant observation, that McCall really made her mark, and for which she remains best known. The first few series were compelling. As was McCall, particularly when collecting newly evicted contestants from the house, with the catchphrase: “Big Brother house, this is Davina. You are live on Channel 4; please do not swear. You have been evicted. I’m coming to get you.”
McCall adored Big Brother. And still does. “The first series was mega. I remember thinking: oh my God, the broadsheets are talking about us. I’d never been on a show where the broadsheets talked about it, and here was a serious TV show that people were unpicking. It was a psychological experiment. It was so good.”
She talks about some of her favourite contestants – Anna Nolan, the Irish woman who had trained as a nun and with whom she’s still friendly (“We share the same birthday!”); Pete Bennett, who has Tourette syndrome; Helen “I like blinking, I do” Adams, who fell in love with Paul Clarke on the show; Nikki Grahame (“She was fucking great – so brilliant and funny and full of life”) and Jade Goody, who both died tragically young; Chantelle Houghton, who had to pretend she was famous in the Celebrity Big Brother house. She’d still be going, if I hadn’t stopped her.
I tell her that when I interviewed Pete we were both in bed (no, I can’t remember why) and show her the photo. She howls with delight. “Awwww, that’s so fucking great. Oh my God! That is so iconic. Oh. My. God. Sweeeet!”
Big Brother had controversies by the bucket-load – rowdiness, fights, a racist row after Goody referred to the Indian contestant Shilpa Shetty as “Shilpa Poppadom” and two other contestants used racist language. In Big Brother series five, fake evictions led to a huge scrap involving most of the contestants. “Fight Night was quite frightening when we had to get security to go in,” she says. “Nobody thought it would kick off like that. We learned more as they went on. Now they don’t allow alcohol like they used to. You used to be able to get booze whenever you wanted.” Was it booze that led to the problems? “That’s what they learned in the end. That’s why they locked the alcohol away.”
How did she deal with the racist incident? “I owed it to them to give them an opportunity to know we knew what had happened, to not trip them up. So, off-camera, we said we saw the racist slurs, and this is an opportunity for you to make it OK. That was us trying to safeguard them.” She admits safeguarding was primitive back then. “They were greeted by boos on their way out. It was scary for them. Most of the time, when people came out and were booed it was panto. But that night it felt different. We’d asked those girls to go on that show. I felt the weight of that.”
I tell her that my younger daughter, Maya, who was a huge fan of reality shows such as Big Brother, feels they are unreality shows these days – full of artifice and set pieces, and contested by indistinguishable, surgically enhanced influencers. We decide to ring Maya so she can say her piece.
“I agree completely,” McCall shouts into the phone. “Completely. I think reality TV’s been going so long it’s no longer reality. People know what’s coming and they are so used to the format that they know how to prepare themselves, and it no longer feels real. I think it’s also because of safeguarding. The OG versions were where we’d get really real, with people from all walks of life who weren’t used to being on television. They wanted to be on Big Brother for an experience. But things happened that made the producers so nervous for people’s safety that they ended up going for people who maybe would be a bit more used to being on television.” Maya and McCall swap notes on favourite contestants. “Lovely to meet you! Byeeeeeeeee!”
McCall insists it’s still impossible to fake it on Big Brother because the camera will eventually find you out. “To do eight weeks in a house with no contact with the outside world is really fucking difficult. After a week, even celebrities forget they’re on camera.”
McCall mentions My Mum, Your Dad, the dating TV series she presented for older people looking for new love. She says that’s an example of a show where there’s still a high degree of reality. Yes, I say, but all the contestants were ridiculously gorgeous. “They had normal bodies, though. They weren’t people with loads of plastic surgery, and they had baggage. But we stopped after two series because nobody watched it.” Why? “I don’t know. I don’t know if they’re not young enough, if there wasn’t enough sex.”
Did it upset her that nobody watched it? “What was nice was that those people who did watch it became obsessed with it and it was critically acclaimed. I’ve been in this game for so long that you know sometimes you do things you love and people don’t come to it.”
In recent years, McCall has become something of an educator, starting with books on fitness and diet. In 2022, she published the bestselling Menopausing. “I hit menopause when I was 43 and then started talking about it when I was 45, 46. And I was so surprised that it was something all women were going to go through and yet none of us seemed to know anything about it.” Menopausing was named Book of the Year at the British Book awards in 2023.
She says she no longer sees herself primarily as a presenter. So what would she call herself? “Now I’d say I’m an amplifier.” Wow, what’s one of them, I ask. “I take good news and spread it everywhere. Or I’m an information highway.” How long has she been an information highway? “Since menopause.”
The book she had wanted to write for two decades was about childbirth. But publishers didn’t see McCall and pregnancy as marketable bedfellows. Ironically, in her late 50s, they gave her the go-ahead. “I wanted to do this book 18 years ago when my son was born, but they thought this was a weird, left-field thing. But after I’d done the menopause book, people were like: ‘What would you like to do next?’. And I was like: ‘Yes! Now I can’t give birth any more, but I can write about it!’”
I’m staring at a squiggle on her wrist as she talks. What is it? “Oh, this is a tattoo for my sister who died, Caroline. And this one is for my other sister, Milly.” Has she got any other notable tattoos? She lifts her skort to reveal an alien on her bottom. “I went to America for MTV and they wanted to film me getting a tattoo, so I was like: OK, I’m going to get HR Giger’s Alien.” Was that her first tattoo? “No.” She shows me her left wrist. “It’s supposed to be a rose, but I think it looks like a vagina with a pair of bollocks. So that’s why I got that stalk put on to make it look like a flower.”
We’ve been chatting for over two hours. As I prepare to leave, I tell her that I had encephalitis as a child and I felt I came out of it a totally different person. “Yes!” She nods vigorously. “I think I’m just learning who I am without Jeffrey.” What’s changed? “When I came out of the operation, I didn’t know what country I was in, or that I’d had the operation done. I didn’t know anything. But I do remember waking up and going, ‘Oh my God, the noise. The noise in my brain,’ and I realised later they were thoughts.”
What does she mean? She says she used to be so full of questions about how and why things worked. Often they were daft or inconsequential (What are the ideal-sized heels for women to wear comfortably? What is the perfect way to describe the colour of her shirt?), but they were still thoughts. “I said to Michael twice in the year-and-a-half of me leading up to finding out about the tumour: ‘Do you always think?’ And he said: ‘Yeah, I’m always thinking.’ And I remember saying to myself: ‘I used to be like that.’”
About five years ago, she says, she stopped asking herself questions. “I’d stopped thinking, and I’m sure that was a symptom of the tumour.” Now, McCall couldn’t be more aware of the noise in her head, of those thoughts banging around, and she couldn’t be happier with them. “I feel I’ve got myself back,” she says.