Davina McCall shares heartbreaking admission about mum after yearning for unlikely star

As she prepares to launch new BBC dating show, Stranded on Honeymoon Island, Davina McCall has revealed that when she was growing up, she had an unlikely TV heroine.

Davina has previously said that she found her mother, Florence, a difficult person to grow up with, saying: “She was an exotic, mad risk-taker, exciting to be around, chaotic, but I just wanted Angela Lansbury.”

The Masked Singer judge was devoted to Angela Lansbury’s cosy mystery series Murder She Wrote, reports BritBrief: "She was the epitome of grace, intelligence, and strength," Davina said. "Watching her as Jessica Fletcher showed me that women could be both brilliant and relatable."

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Davina’s own mum may have been brilliant in her own way, but she was hard for a teenage girl to relate to: “The woman was a flasher. She used to wear coats and flash people in the street. She used to do citizens arrests. It was madness.”

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Davina recalled one bizarre occasion when her mum drove across a cricket pitch in the middle of a match.

By contrast to her mother’s wild antics, Davina saw Angela Lansbury as a steady and reliable presence. She told Woman & Home Magazine: ”My birth mum was an alcoholic and we had a difficult relationship, I never lived with her.

“You'd think she was amazing because she's mad and really fun and kind of outrageous looking," Davina added. "But she wasn't brilliant at mothering. I always kind of wanted a cardigan-wearing Angela Lansbury to give me some food and just sit down and ask me out or to just be proud of me, I guess. But she just wasn't that person.”

"I can now, in hindsight, appreciate that she was a pretty f*****g exciting person," she previously told The Observer magazine. "She just wasn't a brilliant mother.”

Davina 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.

However, after Florence’s death in 2008, 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’."