“As a journalist, I could be objective about all the coverage,” she remarks. “I could say, ‘Well, this will be tomorrow’s fish and chip papers.’ But there’s the other part that’s the daughter of your mother and the sister of your sisters, and when you judge things from their perspective, you don’t necessarily like what’s happening.”The frenzied press coverage intensifed when she became pregnant with her first child, Oliver, in 1986. The two began an erratic affair, which continued when she moved to BBC’s Nationwide, and then to TV-am. When she joined, the celebrity presenters had recently marched out, leaving “the unknown reporter with the chipmunk face” (as she was commonly dubbed) to take over, alongside Nick Owen (who is now her co-host on Good Morning).Diamond was famous from the start: at first, she admits, because TV-am was already so high profile “It was such a precocious station,” she says. “It had been set up with all the glitz and fireworks, and then it had been such a mega-flop It was perfect tabloid fodder.
And I came in the wake of it – so everything I did got turned into soap opera.”She realised “what a very dangerous business” she was in when her appointment was announced. “The press officer took me to one side and said, ‘Look, you’re going to be asked about boyfriends. Do we need to know about any skeletons in the cupboard?’ I told her about Mike, who was not yet divorced, so there was a potential time bomb.” She was advised to invent an anonymous boyfriend in the army; but when Hollingsworth joined TV-am in 1984, their affair was revealed in the tabloids. Afterwards, the producer asked her if she’d ever considered working in television “I’d never thought of it in a million years,” says Diamond. “But I looked around – and the Bridgewater Mercury had lino floors, and if you were lucky enough to get a coffee, it was in a chipped cup – and this place was quite impressive.” So she “pestered the life out of the producer for nine months”, and was rewarded with a job as a researcher.In 1979, when she was 25, she moved to ATV as a reporter and newsreader; it was there that she met Mike Hollingsworth, who was her boss. There she became a junior reporter, covering weddings and funerals and other minutiae of local life (a good training, one imagines, for daytime television).
When she was 21, she was invited to appear on BBC Bristol, to talk about a story she had written concerning handicapped children. Only one responded with any enthusiasm: the Somerset County Gazette, which passed her on to a tiny sister paper, the Bridgewater Mercury. “He was earning pounds 7 a week, which honest to God was a fortune then!” Inspired, she decided to become a music critic, and wrote to 47 newspapers applying for a job. But after being turned down by music colleges, “I realised that I really wasn’t good enough to ever make money out of music.” After leaving school, she spent the summer working at Butlins in Minehead, where she happened to meet a local journalist. Of course, every celebrity undergoes this pro-cess; yet rarely has one so apparently straightforward taken on so many guises. An interview with Anne Diamond should therefore be approached with some caution: you ask the usual questions, but hope for some different answers.DIAMOND skims over her early life; mainly to protect her family but also, one suspects, because her life as we now know it did not come into existence until she became a television star in the Eighties.
She was born in Worcestershire in 1954, the second of three daughters in a conventional middle-class family. Her father, James, was a radar scientist who had been posted to Malvern during the war; there he had met Anne’s mother, a local girl named Marguerite, and married her. A former nurse, she stayed at home to look after the children until Anne was 11, and then set up a small but successful stationery business “She was very influential,” says Anne. “She made me believe that a woman could have a job of her own, and an income.”Anne did reasonably well at the local grammar school, and hoped to become a concert pianist.
Every so often, newspapers try and pin her down with a new label: “Little Miss Ordinary” when she started out on TV-am; “The Scarlet Woman” when her affair was revealed; “The Queen Bee” as her salary soared and colleagues grumbled; “Britain’s Most Famous Unmarried Mother” when her first child was born; and then, variously, “Tragic Anne”, “Sad Anne” and “Mother Courage”. Yet just as she keeps her own house private, preferring to appear to the world in an approximation of what a home might be, so the real Anne Diamond remains elusive. Ever since she joined TV-am as a presenter in 1982, Anne Diamond has been headline news: on the front page of the Sun almost immediately after starting the job, when she broke her toes by tripping over a briefcase; a little later, for having an affair with a colleague, Mike Hollingsworth (who is now her husband, but was then living with his first wife and child); soon after that, for having a baby with the not-yet-div-orced Hollingsworth; then for Sebastian’s death (tabloid covers the next day, to be followed by harrowing, snatched pictures of his funeral); for her subsequent campaign to prevent cot deaths; and now for any number of things, including alleged rivalry with ITV’s daytime stars, alleged un-happiness with the BBC, and alleged tensions in her marriage.As a result, some people tend to think that they know all about Anne Diamond’s life; also, that they actually know her: the smiling face they see in their living-room every morning (more often, possibly, than some of their own friends and family). He is just with us in a different way.” She gets through the rest of the interview without crying, and she’s very good at it.
