Judy Finnigan: 'we're not different after the show'

Judy Finnigan: 'we're not different after the show' Last Updated: 12:01am BST 21/09/2008 Page 1 of 3 Judy Finnigan is prone to depression, but she's not an alcoholic. Richard is strangely happy, but not an eccentric.And prised away from her husband, the more introverted half of daytime TV's golden couple is unusually talkative, finds Nigel Farndale It's not so much what Judy Finnigan does with her calf-length boots that intrigues - she arrives holding them under her arm and only when she sits down does she put them on - it is what she does with her leg. She draws it up, hands cupping the knee in a defensive gesture body language experts would (probably) call 'raising the drawbridge'. The 60-year-old presenter is wearing black trousers, I should add, and a black tailored jacket that frames the diamond cross on her tanned chest. Judy Finnigan: 'We had been denying our viewers were morons for years; we knew they weren't' Her eye contact is not great either, but I guess normality for her is looking directly into the lens of a live television camera, as well as being the interviewer rather than the interviewee, so perhaps that is to be expected. Actually we are both finding this experience a little disconcerting because, today, for the first time as far as I can determine, she has agreed to be Judy without Richard. 'It feels odd,' she says. 'We are like Siamese twins. But it's also a refreshing change because when we are together, people always ask us the same question.' Which is? 'How can you stand spending all day at work with the person you live with at home?' This is not a permanent arrangement, by the way. They are still working together; indeed, they are moving the teatime Channel 4 show they have been presenting to Watch, a new digital channel on UKTV, which will go out at 8pm - a move that will make life easier for them because part of it will be pre-recorded. But so unusual is it for one of them to be interviewed without the other, even the publicist for the show got confused: she sent me an email saying what time I would be meeting 'Richard and Judy' at the Kennington studio from which they produce their shows. I have already bumped into Richard Madeley, as it happens, outside in the car park. He is looking tall and lean in jeans, T-shirt and Ray-Bans, and is still in a holiday mood having just got back from France, where they have one of their houses (their others being in Cornwall, Hampstead and Florida). He wandered off clicking his fingers, trying to remember something I had written that amused him. When they are together, Madeley is the dominant one, fielding most of the questions. Finnigan is more reserved and, as we talk, it occurs to me that the reason she doesn't do interviews on her own is that she has a dark side that her producers and husband like to keep quiet about. First things first, though. How can she stand spending all day at work with the person she lives with at home? She has the decency to laugh. 'OK, well, we've always done it. And we worked together for a year before we lived together, so it feels normal.' That was for Granada in 1982. She was eight years older than her future husband, and was assigned to take care of him on his first day. Her first words to him were: 'Hello, I'm your mummy' (and to this day that comment still seems oddly charged with meaning). As they were both married at the time, I ask if each was the reason for the other's break-up. 'No, no, I certainly wasn't the reason for the break-up of Richard's first marriage. Mine wasn't doing brilliantly because there wasn't the same passion that Richard and I have for each other. My first husband was away all the time as a documentary maker and I was at home looking after our twin boys. We didn't see enough of each other and drifted apart. I suppose you could say Richard was the final catalyst.' Does she feel as if she has compromised her marriage by having it on public display? 'It doesn't feel like that. It's hard to explain. We are very much ourselves. We're not different after the show. We don't feel we have compromised our relationship by having it on view.' Speaking of having things on view… No, I can't. In 2000, Finnegan became a television legend for all the wrong reasons when she appeared live at an award ceremony, unaware that her halterneck dress was gaping open. They were picking up an award at the time and Madeley ad-libbed: 'And if we win next year, she'll show you the other one!' She laughs at the memory of this now and tells me that seeing the funny side of it has prevented it from being a humiliating experience. Her husband often makes her laugh, she adds. Which is another reason why her work doesn't feel like work. 'It feels like we are sitting in a front living-room chatting and joking in the way any normal couple would at home. Viewers think they can spot when we have had a row.' I ask her to give me some specific examples of the ordinariness of their domestic life. Who has the remote control? 'Oh him. He's lovely, but he's the boss. He definitely has the remote control. Though I sometime fight to get it off him.' Who empties the bins? 'Him again.' And who is the tidier? 'Richard. He's always putting things away. Used to do it automatically with the kids' toys then forget he had done it. Now I will say: "Did you move my book?" and he will say he didn't, but I know he will have and not remembered where he put it. He likes things to be orderly, whereas I don't care.' Do they watch television in bed? 'No, we both read in bed. Richard won't allow a television in the bedroom. We must be the only people who don't. It can be a source of tension. I find it quite annoying when there is something you want to watch and it is late. There are things you like to watch lying down, preparing for sleep.' advertisement Madeley now pops his head around the door of the green room and waves a copy of The Sunday Telegraph. 'Found it,' he says. 'It was about hoaxes. Very funny.' He disappears again. Finnigan stares at the door, lost in her thoughts. 'Sorry,' she says. 'He distracted me. What were we talking about? Richard, yes. He's always rushing around. Always fizzing with energy. It's in his DNA.' A morning person, I imagine. 'Actually, neither of us are morning people. Richard won't speak until he has had a cup of tea. If any of the kids [three now grown up still live at home] are in the kitchen it will be grunt grunt until he has had his tea.' Finnigan isn't much of an evening person either, it seems. Unlike Madeley. 'He has massive energy. After the show he likes to go to premieres and things, but I can't stand them. Such hard work. All I want to do is go home and watch The Simpsons.' I ask about the snobbery she has encountered about doing a daytime television show. 'This Morning was the first proper daytime TV show in 20 years and people would ask, who watches you apart from the unemployed and bored housewives? They do watch it, but so do a lot of other people. Work patterns have changed. We have had that snobbery right from the start, which is one of the reasons I'm so delighted about the book club. We had been denying our viewers were morons for years; we knew they weren't from their letters. So the fact they went out and bought books in such quantity after watching our show proved they had brains.' Finnigan has a brain, by the way: not only is she a graduate of Bristol University, she is a keen reader. And though it is the show's producer, Amanda Ross, who selects the books for the Richard & Judy Book Club, Finnigan always reads them and has strong opinions about them. The choices are usually of a high literary standard, including authors such as Julian Barnes and David Mitchell. As to the success of the club: its recommendations account for one in four of all books sold in this country. 'When we started the Club our local Waterstone's in Hampstead was so snotty about it. It wouldn't stock the posters and the stickers, but with the second series they were right on board.' Judy with Richard, their son Jack and daughter Chloe in 2001 While the publishing phenomeon that is the Book Club will go with them to the new show, one thing that will be left behind will be the phone-in quizzes. That phenomenon became known as 'phonegate'. Last year it emerged that viewers had been ripped off for several years while trying to take part in their quiz, You Say We Pay. The competition telephone operator employed by Channel 4 was fined £150,000. 'It was upsetting and stressful,' Finnigan says now, 'but because we genuinely knew nothing about it we don't feel guilty about it. We weren't personally implicated so our conscience is clear. I felt cross because clearly the systems weren't working. But as it turned out it was endemic across television, on all shows that run a quiz. It was sheer greed, but not by us. We came down to breakfast one morning to see a headline in the Sunday paper saying, ''Richard and Judy to be interviewed by police". It was complete rubbish.' It wouldn't have been the first time. In 1991, Madeley was acquitted on charges of stealing wine and soap powder from Tesco's in Didsbury, near Manchester. 'It was a terrible, terrible year for us. I was very angry on Richard's behalf. So manifestly unjust and we had to wait a year for the trial. If I was ever asked to do jury service I would be a conscientious objector because I would find it almost impossible to convict. There is so much wrong with the legal system, everything was so rigged and bent for us. It was a real eye-opener. Had no faith in the police after that. Poor Richard was distraught.' That arrest was the cause of one of Madeley's stranger television TV moments. When Bill Clinton came on the show to plug his memoirs, Madeley told him, at some length, how he himself had once been falsely accused of shoplifting, 'so I know how you must have felt' over the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Clinton blinked as he tried to grapple with this moral equivalence. So did Judy. In fact blinking is one of her stock response to 'Richardisms'. Others include looking apologetically to camera, eye rolling, sidelong glances and exclaiming, 'For Goodness' sake, Richard!' Sometimes she will just sit silently, retreating into her head, thinking of a happy place. As well as going off on weird tangents Madeley has an Alan Partridge-like tendency to be argumentative with guests and volunteer too much information: about Finnigan's hysterectomy and menopause, about his vasectomy and taking Viagra, about his daughter's first period, even about his 'going commando' - 'I have to warn the wardrobe lady, and the doctor.' Would it be fair to say her husband is an eccentric? 'I wouldn't say he's eccentric. I'd say he is an original who gives himself permission to let go. He relaxes on television to a degree which some people find a bit odd, because he will go off on whirly bits. He thinks aloud. I would characterise him as having immense curiosity and a lot of confidence and energy. He's just an unusual person; a complete one-off and I love him very much.' Was he born without an embarrassment gene? 'Richard is unembarrassable. But I think a lot of the time he knows he is going a bit far. It's not artless, though. I know some people find him really weird, but I think more people find him intriguing. I think he's partly doing it to see my reaction and that is probably true in my life, too. There are "Oh Richard" moments at home. "Oh Dad" moments, too.' What did her children make of Madeley's notorious Ali G impersonation?' 'Oh, they were mortified. But I thought it was a brilliant impersonation, actually. He won't do it now. He's forgotten how. I'd never have had the nerve to do it.' At this point in the interview a side to the couple emerges that is rather touching. She tells me how he makes her laugh and how he has a 'talent for happiness' whereas she has 'a talent for introspection'. Madeley, it seems, has helped Finnigan through some very long and dark nights of the soul. It all began with postnatal depression after their daughter, Chloe, was born. 'I had it really badly with my last child and I didn't know what it was. Didn't get help for 10 months. I just thought I was going barmy and so did Richard. I was depressed, so depressed; yet I had nothing to be depressed about. It's do with hormones, and shock, and physical tiredness.' Does she get depressed now? 'I have had bad periods, not as bad as that, but I recognise that I am prone to depression. Frankly, I think it's genetic.' Her father, who died in 1984, ran a hat firm in Manchester. 'He was never diagnosed but, looking back, I can see quite clearly he was a depressive. His father had a nervous breakdown and was in a mental asylum. I do watch it. I can get down. Stress and tiredness can bring it on. My mother died last year at the age of 93, so it wasn't unexpected, but when it came it hit me like being punched in the solar plexus. For about three months I felt panic attacks and was brooding on my own mortality.' She sighs. 'Death does bother me; there's no doubt about it. It bothers me.' Does she see a therapist? 'I did get help from my doctor, antidepressants after the baby, but I have a puritanical streak which has always prevented me from having therapy and I think - and this will sound arrogant - but I think it's because I wouldn't believe that the therapist would necessarily be wiser than I was. Even if you do develop mechanisms for dealing with depression it doesn't change the fact that life is nasty, brutish and short. Seeing a psychotherapist would be like putting sticking plaster on a wound that will never heal.' Was she drawn to Madeley as a form of self-preservation, because he could lift her mood? 'Yes, Richard is so good with me when I'm feeling gloomy. He's the opposite of depressive, you see. An extrovert. Always happy. It is a gift. I'm lucky to be in his aura because I am the opposite. Thinking too much. My mother used to say when I was a girl, "Judy, you take your thoughts out of your head and you stick them to the wall with pins. Stop it!" ' It's a delicate subject, but I ask her if there is any truth in the rumours that she finds consolation in the bottle. That was a rumour that began to circulate when there was intense rivalry between This Morning and the BBC's Good Morning, she says. So it was a smear campaign? 'Oh Christ, there were a lot of nasty rumours put about by…' She tells me a name, which I won't repeat for legal reasons. 'He was a really nasty piece of work and he leaked smears about me and Richard, saying Richard beat me up. It was complete rubbish and horrible. That bastard tried to destabilise us.' So she doesn't drink too much? 'Oh no.' Although she wishes she were taller and thinner, she says she is relaxed about how she looks and has never been affected by ageism. 'Once you reach 50, if you let things like that bother you are mad. I don't think about it. I've never been told by an employer that I am too old for the job.' Curiously, she doesn't seem that fussed about 'the job' anyway, and would rather be finishing a novel she has started. 'I could have happily not done any more TV. If I weren't working with Richard, I probably wouldn't still be in it, because it's not a particularly nice world.' Neverthless, it is time for her to go and do a pilot for their new show. Before she does so she takes her boots off and tucks them under her arm. 'Richard & Judy' is on Watch (UKTV) from 7 October Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright