Davina McCall shares how patience will pay off for audiences of This Time Next Year

SHE was the figure departing Big Brother contestants couldn’t wait to get their arms round.

In the tear-fest that is Long Lost Family she is forever the shoulder to cry on.

And if emotions get the better of the participants in Davina McCall’s new ITV series This Time Next Year, they can be sure she’ll always be on hand.

Let’s face it. Davina’s the queen of the screen hug.

“Oh, I love a hug!” she tells iN10 with a hearty laugh. “It’s a very reciprocal thing, a hug. It makes me feel good too.

“I love meeting people. I’ll give them a kiss or a hug. I spend most of my supermarket shopping trips just walking from aisle to aisle hugging people.

“I really don’t mind that at all.

“And I’d always rather that people came and said hello and asked for a photo, rather than pretending they’re texting when I can tell they’re taking a picture.”

This Time Next Year is Davina’s latest prime-time entertainment series.

The set-up seems simple. She meets people from all over the UK who are looking to change something major in their life – and don’t mind the nation seeing whether they succeed or fail.

There is a twist, though.

“I interviewed the people last year, asked them what they wanted to achieve, then waved them goodbye out of the studio,” explains Davina, 48.

“Along with the studio audience – who are very ticked off – I then have to wait a year. By the magic of TV, though, you the viewer get instant gratification as I walk across the screen and you see the person walk through the other door and tell their story.”

As we spoke, Davina hadn’t yet been back to the studio to film the big reveal.

So, she didn’t yet know whether the morbidly obese man had managed to lose the weight needed to make life fun and active again.

Or whether the man who’d had a leg amputated had been able to fulfil his dream of walking his new wife down the aisle at their wedding.

It was obvious though, that just like viewers Davina was desperate to know the outcomes.

“Oh, I’ve wondered all the time in the past year,” she insists. “There was a young boy who hadn’t been able to speak for years and was having an operation to let him talk again.

“And there was a lady who’d been devastated by her weight gain and wanted to shed the pounds to meet a man. It had killed her confidence but she was a gorgeous woman with a warm personality whom any man would want to go out with.

“She just couldn’t see it and you could feel the goodwill from the audience.”

As she’s presenting a programme about how your life could be transformed in the space of a year, it was too tempting not to ask Davina what she might fancy changing.

With loving husband Matthew Robertson, three kids, Holly, 15, Tilly, 13, and Chester, 10, and a seemingly endless succession of popular TV shows, Davina says she’s “really happy” and in no hurry to alter anything.

She concedes, though, that hasn’t always been the case.

“When I was younger, before I met Matthew, I was always attracted to naughty boys.

“They were really exciting and devastating in equal measure. It would always end in heartbreak and I’d think, ‘I’ve just got to find a nice guy’.

“But then I’d go and find myself another naughty boy.

“I met my husband and I remember saying to my sister, ‘He’s just sort of normal and kind’.

“And she said, ‘Oh just please try kind for a change!’

“I loved the naughty ones but I thought I’d give it a go – and it’s been brilliant.

“The length of our relationship is testament to that.

“So finding myself a nice guy was a real change in my life.”

We’ve just finished seeing Davina host Channel 4 series Make My Body Better and ITV’s hugely popular Long Lost Families.

But she reckons there’s no risk of over-exposure, recalling how in the midst of several series she still has people wondering why they never see her on the box.

“People ask on Twitter and I think, ‘I’ve just been on for eight weeks, did you miss it!’”

Next year will be a bit of a broadcasting milestone for Davina, who made her screen debut on MTV away back in 1992.

“It’ll be 25 years since I started on TV. It’s epic,” she smiles. “I think maybe there must be some sort of lifetime in television something or other.

“I’ve got no idea what the secret is. I’m just lucky with TV programmes I guess.

“I think it’s about trying to find the right show. As I’ve got older I’ve got better at choosing because I know myself a bit better.

“The ones that you love aren’t necessarily always the ones you’ll be good at.”

Funnily enough, there is one place where Davina isn’t a household name as a TV presenter – the McCall household.

“The kids just see me as mum really. Me being on TV is a bit of a weird concept for them.

“They’re not really bothered about watching me.

“Mind you, I quite often don’t watch myself and if I’m not watching then no one else is.

“As I’m sometimes not around in the evenings, when I am I’m just hanging out with the kids, reading or putting them to bed.

“And my baths are VERY important to me. I love them. That’s my special time when I can properly luxuriate and do nothing.”

If there is one show of all the ones she does that Davina will make an appointment to view, it’s Long Lost Families.

The series, where kids are reunited with the parents they believed they’d never see again and mums and dads once again set eyes on the youngsters they gave away, is one of ITV’s surest hits.

There’s barely a dry eye in homes across the country as the emotional floodgates open at the meetings.

Davina resolutely holds things together on screen but she says it’s just that she’s already shed her tears.

“I’ll have a good old cry when I’m sat at the computer reading the notes that the production company send over,” she confides.

“That’s when it hits me first.”

She enlists Matthew’s help in going over the story time and again until she knows it inside out and can keep her emotions under control.

“Even though I know the story you’re never quite prepared for how people are going to react. You can never properly brace yourself for that.

“So sometimes afterwards I might be just a bit quiet for a bit as you have to process it all.”

Just a couple of years shy of 50, Davina, who also hosted Channel 4’s Stand Up To Cancer this month, has never looked in better shape.

Her fitness books and DVD’s have been massive sellers.

So, surely she must be in the gym daily?

“Like most people with jobs you can’t work out every day – though I’d quite like to,” she adds before heading off for another appointment in her super-busy life.

“I try to do a minimum of three times a week.

“I’ve put my next sessions in my diary already so I’ll definitely do it.

“Because I know that at the end of it, it always makes me feel better.”

This Time Next Year, ITV,  Wed, 8pm.

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