Davina McCall is having 'one of the greatest decades' of her life

Davina McCall is relishing her 50s – fulfilling lifelong career ambitions, scooping up an MBE and finding happiness with hair stylist Michael Douglas.

The pair fell in love after being friends for years, having first met when Michael worked on Big Brother, which Davina presented from 200 to 2010.

And on stage at London’s O2 last week Davina, 57, told him: “I love being on this journey with you. You make me a better person and you make me so happy.”

It’s been quite a year for Davina McCall. She kicked off in January with an MBE for services to broadcasting, is about to fulfil a lifelong ambition with a podcast version of an Oprah-style chatshow and has just won a special recognition gong at the National Television Awards.

Not bad for a TV presenter who thought she’d be all washed up by the time she was 50.

So how on earth has Davina, a former alcoholic and heroin addict, got it all so right in midlife?

Well, she’s putting it down to the contentment she’s found in her fifties through her relationship with partner Michael Douglas. “I feel like I’m having one of the greatest decades of my life. It’s so fun,” she gushes, when I meet her.

On stage at London’s O2 last week, her love for the hair-stylist - not to be confused with the Hollywood star - was obvious as she gushed: “Michael Douglas, the young one, I love being on this journey with you. You make me a better person and you make me so happy.”

Speaking afterwards Davina, 57, explained. “I honestly felt that I might be retired by the public by the time I was about 50. Then I got to 51 and thought ‘don’t tell anyone, no one’s noticed, I can just carry on quietly’.

“I put it down to feeling really happy, inside out. I feel like a different person. Like, new beginnings. I feel in a really good place. I’m really enjoying myself.”

Tonight the second series of My Mum, Your Dad launches on ITV in which grown-up kids try to help their parent find love from among a batch of fellow single mid-lifers, all holed up in a luxury retreat.

Davina is living proof that it’s possible to find lasting contentment second time around, but she admits there was absolutely no dating on the agenda when she first split up with her ex-husband, Matthew Robertson, back in 2017.

The couple are parents to Holly, 22, Tilly, 20 and 17-year-old Chester and back then, when they were aged between 10 and 15, they had no interest in seeing her get together with someone else.

“No. I mean, it was all raw,” she says now. “Often when parents split up, at the beginning of the breakup the kids are like, ‘Don’t go out with anybody. It’s too weird. I miss my dad, or my mum.’ They don’t want their parents to meet someone. But then, actually, after a period of time, they’re like ‘God, I actually want to leave home…’”

Davina, romance blossomed with Michael from a friendship spanning many years, having first met him while working on Big Brother.

“I was lucky that Michael is someone I already knew. When you know someone, you can trust them and you know that they know you. It’s a solid, nice feeling.”

She says what they have now is so special she is keen to keep it away from the public gaze as much as possible. “I mean, it’s too precious,” she says. “I also think that second time around, especially if you are famous and in the public eye, you’ve both got exes, you’ve got kids, it’s a bit more respectful to everybody involved. Also, I don’t want everybody to know what Michael has for breakfast!”

Now her children are older they are delighted she is settled with her fella in her £3.4milllion home in Kent, where she says there are so many kids coming and going they are like “the Brady Bunch”.

But she isn’t sure how good they’d be at actually picking her a partner, as happens in My Mum, Your Dad. “My son would be kind of, ‘No, I can’t choose anybody for her, it’s just too weird,’” she laughs. “He just wouldn’t go there. My oldest daughter, I think, would be forensic about it. And she and my middle daughter would agree on certain points, and possibly disagree on others. It would be quite funny to ask them - but, of course, I’m not single now.”

Davina says the kids in the series have the maturity to know their parent will benefit from finding a partner. “Because otherwise it’s all on them. It’s a big responsibility, and they want to go off and live their lives, but they feel guilty about leaving their parents alone. And loneliness was quite a big theme in this series.”

This time around there will be more ways to help them all interact and really find out if there are connections to be made. “There are twice as many workshops and dates than there were last year, so lots more opportunities for people to bring out their true personalities.

She thinks it’s a golden opportunity for all of them. “Imagine walking into a house and seeing eight people, and they’re all your people, and they’re all single. F***, it’s like Christmas Day.”

Davina reckons the key to success as a mid-lifer is not basing choices on looks alone as happens far more on Love Island.

“That’s all youth,” she says dismissively. “Our generation want to find somebody to grow old with, and to share the next part of their life with. It’s almost nothing about what they look like. Humour’s really important but I’d say, more than anything, it’s on personality. Because, if you love someone’s personality, you’ll love how they look.”

As well as the new series, Davina also has Saturday night entertainment show The Masked Singer and award-winning factual series Long Lost Family, which she fronts alongside Nicky Campbell and is now in its 14th series.

As mid-life showbiz careers go, she’s not doing badly at all. “When Big Brother finished, I was a bit like, ‘Oh my God, who am I? Where am I going?’” she confesses. “Now Long Lost Family is such a mainstay of television and I love The Masked Singer, it’s so funny. And now this, which we call a relationship show rather than a dating show because it’s so much more than that. I’m very happy. It’s a nice balance.”

There’s no chance she’ll get too big for her boots though. Despite having presented on TV for more than three decades, there are still people who can’t tell her apart from Claudia Winkleman. “I don’t even watch Strictly but people think I present it all the time,” Davina laughs. “In May I went to a club and when I walked in, the guy went, ‘Claudia!’ and I went, ‘I’ve got to leave.’

While Davina will always perhaps be best remembered for her decade on Big Brother from 2000, she actually reserves the most professional pride for the two menopause documentaries she made for Channel 4.

“I really feel like it has made a difference for some women, because people tell me, and that feels really nice. I love doing entertainment, but I feel like this has given me a purpose.”

Next up is a podcast, launching soon, which sits nicely alongside My Mum, Your Dad as she chats to experts about issues including sex, relationships, health and exercise. “I’ve always wanted to do a sort of Oprah-style show, but the time’s gone for that, that was an old-style of format,” she reasons. “Instead I’m doing a podcast which is launching in the autumn, and I’ve made that my Oprah. It’s called Begin Again and it’s about people that, at this time of life, want to just turn from a chrysalis into a butterfly, they want to start over, do something, change the way they are, improve themselves.

“I’m so excited because Michael has heard me talking about wanting to do this for the past 20 years.”

Davina’s theory is that her generation of mid-lifers are different to those who have gone before. “We’re the rave generation! I feel like this is a really big thing, and it only really dawned on me in the last couple of years that we are a brand new generation of women and men who had such a good time in our youth. And we want it back again!

“Because we’ve got enough energy, where previous generations were all calming down and getting a pipe and retiring. Not us, we’re a different breed.’”

She even has advice to those in their twenties and thirties thinking of putting off having kids til later. “It’s like - no! if you start now, you can you get it back again. But if you start at 40, you are not going to get it back till you’re 60.”

- My Mum, Your Dad, Monday 16th September, 9pm on ITV1