Anthea Turner is bothered.
On the set of Dinner Party Wars, a new reality show that premiers on the Food Network on Wednesday, she is sitting in a trailer, wearing a pretty summer frock and espadrilles.
"Why do we do pictures like this?" she wonders to her placating publicist when told that a Globe and Mail photographer is waiting to take a picture of her. She flicks at her blond hair and scowls. "Photos stick around for a long time," she says, rolling her eyes.
"I need to fix myself up," she declares before suggesting that the photographer come back later once she has had her makeup applied.
The interview is not going well.
Britain's self-styled Martha Stewart is in a huffy mood. Her sunny outfit does nothing for her darkening demeanour. We exchange tight smiles.
A BBC veteran who started out presenting traffic reports at a local television station and subsequently rose to become one of the best known faces in British broadcasting, Ms. Turner has had a varied and tumultuous time over the course of her almost 30-year career. One of her early successes was as host of BBC One's award-winning children's program, Blue Peter, in 1992. But by the end of the nineties, she was dubbed "Princess Tippy Toes" by Eamonn Holmes, her former co-host on a morning program for ITV. He ended up giving his bosses an ultimatum: she goes or he would. She did, which led to a number of years of career-rejuvenation efforts, not all of them well received. The British press took to calling her the "former TV golden girl" and in 2003, she was 15th in Channel Four's poll of 100 worst Britons.
In 2006, her comeback found its footing when she revealed herself as a neat freak on BBC Three's Anthea Turner: Perfect Housewife, a reality show of sorts in which she gave tips to disorganized people about how to run their households efficiently with one person crowned "the Best Housewife of the Week." In one episode she instructs a woman on how to fold T-shirts properly. The series ran for two seasons and spawned three advice books. More TV shows are in the works that feature her as an expert housewife - Help Me, Anthea, I'm Infested, about people whose houses are riddled with pests, and My Perfect Ways, about, well, her perfect ways. (Her linen closet is as carefully coded as the control room of a nuclear power station.)
Dinner Party Wars, her first foray into broadcasting outside of Britain, teams her with co-host Corbin Tomaszeski, a Canadian chef who appeared on Restaurant Makeover and, in real life, runs the café at Toronto's flagship Holt Renfrew store. In each episode, three pairs of people compete to see who can throw the best party. Each pair takes turns hosting the others - even though none of the couples knew the others beforehand - and Mr. Tomaszeski and Ms. Turner (who presents herself as a manners maven) judge their food, style and hosting skills from afar (robotic cameras are installed in the dining rooms).
Much sneering from their hidden booth is involved. "I was very surprised to watch one woman who went on the Internet via her BlackBerry to find out where do the knives and forks go," Ms. Turner says with dramatic horror. "This wasn't an unintelligent lady. She had a very good job. Etiquette is about good manners. Get your elbows off the table! Don't talk with your mouth full! I am slightly shocked at table manners, basic table manners, which [should be]learned as a child."
That Ms. Turner has reinvented herself as a Princess of Perfect may come as a delightful irony to some, given that one of her worst media moments - dubbed "Flakegate" in true British tabloid fashion - happened as a result of a perceived absence of good taste. She and her husband, businessman Grant Bovey, had both left their first marriages for each other, and when they wed in 2000, the event was published exclusively in OK! magazine for a reported ). In one of the pictures, she and her husband posed holding a Cadbury chocolate bar, called Snowflake, leading many to suggest that the confection manufacturer was part of the sponsorship of their nuptials a charge they vehemently denied.
"You're loved, you're loathed, you're in, you're out. It makes you who you are," she trumpets when I bring up some of the ups and downs of her career.
"You have to understand that you have to be a chameleon," she says of her survival skills in the broadcasting business. "I'm a grown-up … and the only thing I will say that makes me sound like an old trout is that I got into TV because I enjoyed communication," she continues, growing noticeably more irritated.
"I enjoyed the business. I started at the bottom, and fame was a byproduct of that … And I think that if you get into TV because you want to be a presenter, you want to be famous, and you see that as your golden chalice, then you will end up on the scrap heap or in tears or you'll end up one day at my age just snuggled up to your cat and a few VHSs of your greatest moments of TV."
She shakes her shag and offers her brilliant smile.
"I've been married to my husband for 10 years, which has really pissed off all those detractors in the British press," she avers. "They thought it would never last. I'm very happy to say that I had my 50th birthday at end of May. It was a beautiful Sunday lunch. And I sat with both my husbands. They both stood up and said something. That's what's real."
She smiles again, winningly, at which point our little party a deux comes to a perfectly polite end.