Little Miss Ordinary

ANNE Diamond sat on the edge of her bed with her hair in a towelling turban and forced herself to look in the make-up mirror. It was not a pretty sight.

Days earlier her husband had left her for another woman, her father had recently died and so had her career. The newspapers had published intimate details about her sex life with her husband and were asking what had happened to the "elfin Queen of Breakfast Television"?

"I looked like a bad day at the Betty Ford clinic," she says. "My eyes were all puffed up, I had spotty, sallow skin and grey showing at the roots of my hair.

"I felt my world had just come to an end. Someone had just trodden on all my dreams."

With her porcelain skin, eighties flicked hair and "Mrs Ordinary" persona, TVam's Anne Diamond was the perfect antidote to her slightly stuffy rivals on the BBC's breakfast show. She and co-host Nick Owen became the faces of morning television with their pioneering format of hard news and light celebrity interviews.

The pair had met as the anchors of Central News East, and struck up a life-long friendship and a career which saw them as the Richard and Judy of their day.

Anne had grown up in Malvern in the Midlands and started her career as a trainee reporter on the Bridgwater Mercury in Somerset. When the bosses of TVam were looking for a new face to breathe life into the ailing programme, co-presenter Nick Owen suggested his former colleague.

"Mr and Mrs Ordinary and their disarming personalities worked well at TVam," she says. "We got up early, we did our homework, we read our briefs, we asked sensible questions without showing off and we listened to the guests on our sofa, instead of trying to outshine them.

'FROM day one I loved it at TVam. It was a wonderful, golden era in my life and I don't regret a single minute of it."

Although the programme was initially trounced in the Press, the tide soon began to turn. The perpetually perky Anne went on to interview an array of celebrities, politicians and royalty. They included Oliver Reed who "was a nightmare to interview"; Arnold Schwarzenegger who was "rude and surly" at a first interview and apologetic and "sweet-tempered" on a return visit to the sofa; and Barry Manilow, who was a "good talker".

She also started a "sizzling" affair with former Tory MP and then chairman at TVam, Jonathan Aitken, describing them as "soul mates, who'd never been single at the same time". The affair fizzled out after a year or so and in the meantime, the girl next door found that she was garnering as much fame as her well-known interviewees. Even Princess Diana was tuning in. She began to realise just how famous she had become when she fell pregnant with her first child.

Anne had met TV executive Mike Hollingsworth in her days at ATV, when he was still married. The pair had had a heady affair and split for a while before getting back together after Mike had left his wife. Suddenly, Anne found that instead of reporting on the news, she was making the news.

"The Daily Express had dubbed me "Britain's most famous unmarried mother", and the rest of Fleet Street had picked up their trail," she says.

"Everything I wore, did and ate was suddenly big news."

The couple finally married after the birth of their second child, Jamie, a brother for Oliver. But this time, tabloid pressure came from an indiscreet nanny.

"That afternoon when my nanny went to the Sun, I felt my world was crumbling around me," she says. "I had come to terms with my fame, by creating an almost obsessively private world behind my own front door. Now, I felt I'd been burgled. What had been taken? My privacy, my secrets. The little things that made me me."

ANNE went on to present Diamond on Sunday, which was in the TVam stable, and left with a hefty pay-off after a row over contracts with David Frost. But her world fell apart on Friday July 12, 1991, when she went into third son Sebastian's bedroom to find his lifeless body lying cold and rigid.

"There were no tears straightaway, and no fainting," she says. "I read later that I had gone hysterical and passed out - but real life isn't like that at all. I just moaned, over and over again,'oh no, oh no, oh no,' as I tried to take it in.

"I felt as though some murderous stranger had infiltrated our beautiful, happy home in the middle of the night, and taken our precious son."

Burning with grief and anger at four-month-old Sebastian's cot death, she and Mike fought to get the Government to launch a £2m Back to Sleep public health campaign to lay babies on their backs, and not their tummies - considered to be a cause of cot death. The campaign was hugely successful and reduced the cot death rate by 80 per cent in its first six months.

Later, Anne was wooed back to presenting Good Morning with Anne and Nick, with her old TVam co-presenter Nick Owen (she insists in the book that the pair's relationship was always platonic) and a new set of rivals - Richard and Judy. Sofa wars were on. The "dirty tricks" included guests mysteriously disappearing en route to the studio and ending up on Richard and Judy's sofa. Most of the crew ended up being kept in the dark about the main guest in case there were studio spies, she says.

The show grew in ratings and sealed Anne's reputation as a face of morning television only for the programme to be unceremoniously axed. Shortly afterwards, she discovered her husband had been having an affair with a young television reporter called Harriet Scott.

Anne had had a series of disastrous relationships with men. Her first love had left her to go back to his neurotic girlfriend and another boyfriend, a film editor, had walked out after taking a call from an ex-girlfriend one day. But she was plunged into the depths of despair by her husband's betrayal.

She became tabloid fodder once more. Her weight ballooned and her contract with LBC Radio was not renewed. Afraid of the public reaction to her bulging figure, she turned down TV offers and shied away from public appearances.

"I didn't know I was suffering from depression until I found myself unable to get out of bed one morning - and I couldn't figure out why," she says. "Without my children I dread to think what would have happened."

BUT she eventually did get out of bed and began writing for newspapers and magazines, even agreeing to a stint in the Celebrity Big Brother house. She went on the programme, she says, because her agent said it would remind people she was still alive, and her kids said it would be cool - but mainly because she needed to pay the mortgage.

"I needed to kick-start my professional life - and I knew that appearing on Big Brother would help. It's as simple as that."

She maintains that she doesn't regret going on the show - even though she was vilified in the Press for her weight gain, it did give her career a boost. She also compares herself to Posh Spice when she was at the height of her fame, admitting that she was a "bit of a madam". "It's difficult to be anything else when you're living under a giant microscope," she reasons.

Today, she is back in the studio, presenting a breakfast news show for Radio Oxford. She's also writing an agony column for The Daily Mail and is penning a children's novel. You sense that she will never be truly content, unless she has the love of a man, but she insists that she has found happiness at last with her life in Oxfordshire with her children.

"I have learned to put the past, at least the negative bits of it, in the past where it belongs," she says. "The rest is context - it's where I have come from, and what has made me the confident and optimistic person I am today."

* Girl Next Door by Anne Diamond is out on Thursday (Portrait, £17.99).