Davina McCall has revealed all on her “table of death” in her bathroom, filled with the photos of loved ones who have died. The TV presenter and fitness guru has recently revealed how – despite having had a very complicated relationship with her mother, Florence – she’s finally added a picture of her to the table's line-up.
"I can now, in hindsight, appreciate that she was a pretty f*****g exciting person," she told The Observer magazine. "She just wasn't a brilliant mother.”
Davina recalls how, when she was a child, she’d see her mum exposing herself to strangers in the street – dressed in nothing but shoes and a coat she’d “flash” passers-by. Davina was 12 when she first took drugs with her mother, which set her off on a dangerous path that led her to abusing cocaine and, later, heroin.
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Davina – now on TV with My Mum, Your Dad – fell out with Florence more than once. They reconciled just before Davina married second husband Matthew Robertson in June 2000. But after her French-born mum went to newspapers with a story that her daughter had been attending Narcotics Anonymous meetings and was on the brink relapsing into addiction, Davina never spoke to her again.
But after Florence’s death, Davina was describing her mum to new boyfriend, Michael Douglas: “I said to Michael, ‘You would have loved her,’ and he said, ‘I've met her.’
"He went, 'She's in here,’ and he put his hand on my heart. I thought ‘F***. It was like I'd been denying my mum's existence in me for all those years’.
"He said, ‘All the bits that I like about you, your naughty bits, your party bits, I feel like that's your mum’."
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Not long after that, Davina met up with her mum’s third husband and asked him for a photo of Florence. She was finally ready to hear about her mum’s “good side”.
After that meeting, she put a photo of Florence on her "table of death”.
She says that the Table of Death might sound morbid, but in fact, it’s a “lovely” thing to have. She continued: “Every time we get out of the shower, we can see the people we've loved and lost smiling at us. And she's on there now, rolling a joint, wearing a belt buckle that says, `I'm the boss:"
Michael tracked down an identical belt buckle and gave it to Davina for her 56th birthday last year. She was wearing the belt a few weeks ago when she went to collect her first French passport.
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