Why are they famous? Anthea Turner
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Your support makes all the difference.MAIN CLAIM: TV's golden girl with a grin. The Goody Two Shoes, all-the-family presenter with a rictus sufficiently vice-like to give male viewers nightmares of the Freudian variety has suddenly come over all scarlet womanly with her open affair with a married man. Her romance with tycoon father of three, Grant Bovey, 36, a pal of Turner's husband and manager Peter Powell, has had all the elements of a large print classic. Now thought to be in hiding, Turner has irrevocably soiled - indeed somewhat razzed up - her simpering, fun-free image.
APPEARANCE: Female raptor just out of the hair salon. Low-budget Princess Di lookalike (fetes and Welsh shopping centres). Meg Ryan with grin wrapped twice round the face and knotted. Studio-girl Barbie. Wallpaper.
GOLDEN GIRL: Turner, 37, the most over-exposed, over-paid, over-pasteurised presenter in recent TV history, is of the traditional school headed by Miss Judith Chalmers: blonde, permatanned, gently bouffant lovelies - see Anneka Rice, Carole Barnes, Julia Somerville - who have now been replaced stylistically by the paler, spikier charms of the Zoe Ball, Denise Van Outen brigade. Bimboid, or ruthless careerist? The latter, cunningly disguised as the former, one strongly suspects. Turner made her name with GMTV, then presented the Lottery, and now hosts Turner Round the World (clever, that) and Wish You Were Here.
FAMILY VALUES: Turner was brought up in Stoke, and went from comp to convent to traffic reports via the AA switchboard. She enjoyed a ten-year affair with DJ Bruno Brookes, before embarking on an eight-year marriage with boyishly good-looking DJ-turned-manager Peter Powell. "Somewhere along the way, work became our passion," explains Turner of the marriage, conducted in a pounds 1m mansion in Twickenham.
ON THE COUCH: Turner appeared the innocent victim in a famous brawl involving her chubby TV breakfast couch mate, Eamonn Holmes, who accused her of tantrums and dubbed her "Princess Tippy Toes". Since resigning, she has been replaced by the giggling, line-fluffing Fiona Phillips.
FAME PROSPECTS: Miss Turner was once a Blue Peter presenter, and cheerfully models for Littlewoods catalogue. Despite her racing green MG and wraparound shades, she somehow belongs firmly in the cosy-yet-over-lit-studio-with- couches environment. Even her latest misdemeanour only makes her minutely more interesting. One predicts Judith Chalmers-style faintly fading prospects. Our heroine could, however, become a God Squad fund-raiser, mother of triplets, or gently-does-it exercise guru.
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