Gosh she's scary. I always thought her Queen of Mean persona was only put on for The Weakest Link , but absolutely not. At home, in her floppy red sweater and Issey Miyake trouser-skirt, she looks much softer and cuddlier than on telly, but in fact she's about as cuddly as a cornered ferret. And yet she's friendly - that's what's so disconcerting - asking if I've brought my cozzy so we can swim in her pool and promising I can smoke as much I like. She even says she loves my interviews - but the next minute she's snorting, 'Call yourself a journalist?' because I missed something in the Daily Mail.

Maybe this mix of friendliness and sarcasm is normal in Liverpool, where she comes from, but it seems weird to me. The chill wind of her contempt is ever present; you can feel it whistling past your ears and dread the moment when it blasts you in the face. She is clearly very disappointed with me as an interviewer - she was expecting much cleverer, sharper questions - the sort of questions she would ask, ratta-tat-tat - and here's this bumbling idiot asking the sort of touchy-feely rubbish you'd expect from a Muswell Hill (pah!) psychotherapist (boo!). 'Is that it?' she asks at the end, with a derisive snort. And then cheerfully says that of course I must stay to supper. It is bewildering.

She lives in a sort of Southyork in the Cotswolds, which started life as a cottage and is now a glossy palazzo with heated swimming pool and garden designed by Rosemary Verey. It is, as she says, pseudo-coun try, Sloane Square with grass, where even the barns have Colefax and Fowler curtains. But it suits her and her husband John Penrose, who says they will stay there 'till we dribble'. Penrose is as comforting as she is alarming - everyone loves Penrose. He drinks and smokes, and goes to the pub, and walks the dogs, and gives the impression of being quite normal and lazy, instead of driven and disciplined like her.

He is touchingly proud of her success on The Weakest Link. While she is having her photo taken, he shows me all the tie-in games coming out for Christmas, and plays me a video of the new Hungarian version - the game has now been sold to 73 countries. He runs the office and says it's quite hard work even though they have a full-time PA - there are phone calls and emails from London all day, and then Los Angeles starts. But now Annie has a manager and an agent 'and we just send her out to make the money'. Isn't there a danger she'll get exhausted, with all this transatlantic commuting? 'No thrives on it. Though I was talking to a friend the other day who said you can get addicted to hard work. I'm not sure,' he muses, 'that that's anything that would ever have occurred to me!'

Annie comes back - this fizzing red firework - and Penrose and I, who have been slumped on sofas gossiping, leap up to look busy. Unfortunately, Harry Borden, the photographer, has upset her. He'd shown her some examples of his work and she'd pointed out that they were all young and beautiful, and asked if he'd ever photographed a woman her age [she's 57]? Oh yes, he said, he'd done Fay Weldon. Fay Weldon! Yikes! You are the weakest link, Harry Borden, goodbye.

So now it's my turn, and I rush to appease her by saying (truthfully) that I enjoyed her book, Memoirs of an Unfit Mother. Has she had many reactions to it yet? 'I don't really mind what people think,' she breezes. 'I just wanted to write it, because it's a bloody good tale.' She signed the contract - reportedly for £2m - before The Weakest Link came along, and then had to write it while launching the show in the States, which was not the ideal time. But it won't have harmed the sales. Actually, Weakest Link fans who buy it for that reason will be disappointed - there's only a brief final chapter on the show. The real story is about Anne's relationship with her mother, who is at least as much the Unfit Mother of the title as Anne herself.

Her mother emerges as one of the great characters of literature - 'part magic, part monster' according to Anne - but she uses exactly the same epithet of Robert Maxwell, which gives you some idea of the proportion of magic to monster involved. Mrs Robinson ran a poultry stall in St John's Market, Liverpool - the third or fourth generation of her family to do so - and knew all the unscrupulous byways of how to bribe chefs, and how to corner the black market in rabbits during the war. She was 'an unyielding, unforgiving taskmaster' who trained her daughter to be up at six to get ahead by five, and to be last in the queue, first on the bus. And to trust no one - especially men, because they were all out to take you for a ride. Anne says almost nothing about her father, a schoolteacher, beyond that he was sociable, outgoing and popular (a bit like Penrose, perhaps). But these qualities did not endear him to her mother, who regarded him as 'an ongoing trial and disappointment'.

The family were socially uncategorisable. On the one hand, they lived in the affluent suburb of Blundellsands, had two cars, a housekeeper, a gardener, holidayed at the Carlton in Cannes and wore expensive clothes. Both children went to Catholic fee-paying schools - Peter, the elder, to Ampleforth, Anne to Farnborough Hill Convent in Hampshire. But, on the other hand, their mother was down the market every day gutting chickens, and often made the children accompany her. They never had a proper Christmas because they were worn out with turkeys - no tree, no presents, just cash. When Anne started in journalism, her mother gave her an MG car and a mink coat for those cold winter mornings doorstepping the bereaved - she never had any inhibitions about seeming flash. On the contrary, being flash was the best revenge.

Anne says she realised when she was seven or eight that her mother drank - that sometimes her speech was slurred, and that it was advisable to snatch the phone before she answered it. And being a good daughter who followed in her mother's footsteps, she duly took to the bottle herself. She says it was inevitable - it wasn't because she worked in Fleet Street or because her husband, Charlie Wilson (later editor of the Times), was a big drinker - even if she'd been a nun, she says, she would have found the sherry. Almost anyone who came across Anne Robinson in the 1970s can recite tales of her drinking. There was one particularly memorable scene in a Manchester pub when she arrived wearing high heels and nothing else, grabbed a pint of beer and poured it over her boyfriend's head, then went outside, climbed on his car and proceeded to attack the windscreen with the heel of her shoe.

She scrambled into journalism via being a secretary and having an affair with Guardian sports writer Frank Keating, and probably thought it was a good career move to marry her boss, Charlie Wilson. But the Daily Mail promptly fired her because there was a rule in those days that you couldn't have married couples in the same newsroom. That was fine by Wilson - he wanted a wife cooking his supper at home, and anyway she was pregnant, with their daughter Emma. She responded by hiring a nanny and getting a job at the Sunday Times. Soon the marriage was fraying and, when Emma was two, they divorced. The divorce was fine - just sign a bit of paper - but then he fought for custody of Emma, which was almost unprecedented in those days.

The 1973 custody case is the centrepiece of the book and, it emerges, the central tragedy of her life. She believes, passionately, that she was unfairly treated, that Charlie Wilson clobbered her with better lawyers and armies of witnesses, that he got his employees to testify against her, that the whole male establishment ganged up on her. The judge accused her of 'grinning' throughout the proceedings as though she found them funny, whereas we know from television that that smirk is her normal expression. And, she complains in her book, 'There was no mention of Charles's constant ridiculing of me. His harshness, his domineering ways, his filthy temper.' But the real problem was that she expected the case to hinge on her drinking, whereas in the event, it hinged on how ambitious she was. Her wisecrack that she would rather cover the Vietnam war than hoover the sitting room was quoted against her. And the fact that Charlie Wilson was at least as ambitious as her was never even mentioned.

She can bang on forever about how the court case was unfair. But what she never seems to address, either in the book or in interviews, is whether the court actually made the wrong decision. After all, there are plenty of cases in which the proceedings are flawed but the result is fine. Why should she have won custody of Emma? She was already a bad drunk, and became a worse one. Wilson, she always agreed, was a good father. So maybe - I feel I'm taking my life in my hands even suggesting it - the court was right?

I expected a blistering comeback, but got something more like a whisper. 'I don't think Emma would ever have been in any danger.' Could she not have asked the court to reconsider, once she became sober? 'Well, you can - but what I had was a situation of a very tender child who was horrified by any thought that she might have to be privy to be making a decision - which I absolutely understand. I couldn't have put her through it.' She and Wilson agreed to say they had joint custody - but it meant Annie was always terrified, when Emma came for her alternate weekends, of people asking where she went to school and discovering that she lived in Glasgow with her father.

Luckily, Penrose was on hand to scoop Annie up after the court case and help look after Emma on her access visits. They first met when they were both cub reporters at the North London News Agency - he was two years younger than her - and she found him 'kind, funny - a wonderful combination of the obsessive and the easygoing'. They became lovers when she was breaking up with Charlie Wilson. But then he offered to testify for Wilson and against her during the custody case - which you might have thought would be terminal, but apparently not.

In any case, Anne wasn't paying much attention because, as soon as she lost the case, she switched from binge drinking to being a full-time soak. In her book, she recalls mornings waiting outside Tesco at 8am to buy the first miniature of the day and evenings 'ending up with my knickers round my neck in a bed I did not recognise, surrounded by vomit'. She was still working at the Sunday Times, but she got the shakes so badly she couldn't type and would have to phone her articles in to the copytakers, pretending she was out in the country. Eventually, the Sunday Times sacked her and she went to stay with Penrose in Rome, where he was correspondent for the Mirror, but even he couldn't cope and packed her back to her mother in Liverpool. At one stage her weight dropped to under six stone - Wilson remembers meeting her once on a railway platform, seeing this old woman shuffling towards him, and thinking she had only weeks to live.

She finally stopped drinking in December 1978. In the book it is a bit obscure how she did it: she mentions a last weekend when she put Emma in the car, drove to the off-licence, bought a bottle of vodka and saw the tears streaming down Emma's face. In fact, it was AA that saved her, but she is reluctant to say so. 'It's the only thing I suppose I did want to gloss over. I wrestled with it. I wrestled because I thought it was shortchanging people not to say I went - on the other hand, I thought, gosh, people really do go there to try and do it anonymously and the last thing they want is to think people are always writing about it.' Does she still attend AA? 'Yes. I don't really want to go into this, but the answer is yes, I have continued to go but I'm reluctant to bang on about it.'

I innocently ask if she'd ever had psychotherapy, and get one of her Exocets back: 'Of course I haven't had psychotherapy! For Chrissake! Why would I go to some woman who used to do flower arranging and now calls herself a psychotherapist? Would you? I always thought one of the serious problems of therapy of any kind is trying to face someone who is not as bright as oneself. I remember a friend of mine going and she said, "Oh Annie, he had grey shoes," and that was it. I quite understand. I've never met an interesting psychotherapist - only women who've done courses because their husbands don't take enough notice of them.'

Ah, she is happy now. She was getting a bit muted with all the questions about the court case and her drinking, but now she is back on fighting form. Another question about whether, when she gave up drinking, she immediately became a workaholic, brings back her happiest sneer. 'Are you deciding I'm a workaholic?' 'People say you are.' 'Another nationwide survey, is it, Lynn?' In fact even her daughter says she's a workaholic, but I suppose Anne is wary of the language of addiction and prefers to call herself a hard worker.

Anyway, this little sparring match puts her in absolute peak condition for my next question, about her attitude to money. I would have thought it was blindingly obvious to anyone who read Robinson's book or who spoke to her for more than two minutes that she is obsessed with money. I didn't even expect her to deny it - I thought she gloried in it. She spent years telling people she was the highest-paid journalist in Britain and on Parky last weekend she couldn't resist telling him she earns more than him. But as soon as I ask - rather tactfully, by my standards - whether she has a great fear of poverty, the bombs start raining down. 'Don't you? I've always found it was so much better to have money than not. What I do think is I that I am quite bored and tired of people coming here to be poncy about me liking money - I think it's a lot of humbug, actually. So please don't get all sniffy about money with me!'

Pulling my flak jacket over my ears, I tell her I was shocked by the dedication of her book to 'My mother, who taught me that the biggest time saver is money. And if you can rack up enough of it, you can spend the time saved shopping.' Now she really explodes. 'Oh God! It was meant to be tongue in cheek. I laugh at your pieces - how can you not find that funny? How can you be shocked by a tongue-in-cheek dedication? I think that says more about you and your attitude to money than it does about me, I really do!'

OK - well, how about this passage from the book? 'Money was our yardstick. We were taught to regard it as the finest form of oneupmanship. It excused everything else, breeding, class, manners, social standing.' It's a sort of Loadsamoney attitude, isn't it - ya boo sucks to you, because I'm richer than you?

'I don't think it's ya boo sucks, it's I have enough that I'm not completely having to put up with the unacceptable behaviour of others. I've always thought that was its greatest freedom. And in a strange way, all these people who claim to despise money somehow treat you better if you have money. So it's a reasonable commercial attitude.' Like her mother's? 'I think she was the same. I think she thought it made for a nicer way of life, you know. I don't want to live in Muswell Hill!'

The marriage went through a rocky patch in the early 1990s and she spent two-and-a-half miserable years on her own, until one day she phoned Penrose in tears, and he said, 'Stay there - I'm coming round.' They keep a clock on the kitchen wall with the date - 22 October 1993 - when they got back together. And now, finally, she admits, 'I think if you've had a very rickety time, as I have had, it inevitably makes you cling to security, and having a very kind of steady base under you that can't be swept away. I've had so much chaos in my life that having some terra firma is pretty important to me.'

Anyway, she now has enough money to satisfy even her hungry soul. The BBC pays her £3m a year, NBC $5m. Although she doesn't actually own any rights to The Weakest Link, she benefits from all the spin-offs. She has enough clothes and glasses - 40 pairs - to last all her life. She doesn't hanker for a house in the south of France - 'I don't think we need that. It's only handy to piss off other journalists really, so they can come and say, "Why are you so obsessed about money?"' All she really wants is another dog - and, oh yes, a Sickert and a Lucian Freud ('How much does a Lucian Freud cost?' she asks me. 'Oh, peanuts,' I tell her, 'under a million'). But basically, she is content, appeased, sated.

And of course it's fun having this belated international fame, seeing her face on billboards across America. When I ask whether she minds being recognised everywhere, she says, 'On the contrary, I regard that as a good thing.' She works three weeks here then two weeks in Los Angeles, where she stays at the Beverly Hills Hotel and knows the inhouse menu off by heart. What does she do for fun? 'What can you do for fun in LA? It's like being at the Ideal Home Exhibition - perfectly dreadful place.'

Her friends worry that she is doing too much, exhausting herself. But she insists she's fine - 'Because you do it at a level of luxury that makes it much easier. I remember going to China with Thatcher and thinking no wonder she looks so bloody good - she never waited at the airport like we did, and she had a bed on the plane. And now I benefit from that. I have a bed on the plane, a suite at the Beverly Hills and a limo to collect me, and everyone's worried that I'm all right. So, there are worse ways of earning a living, frankly.' Such as journalism? 'Oh yes, showbiz is much better. Next thing I'll be doing a summer season, or panto!' But she is still enough of a journalist to find 'the Mafia of the famous' quite funny, the way they all appear on one another's This Is Your Life and greet each other like old friends, even though they've barely met. She went to a BBC dinner the other day and was seated between Rolf Harris and Simon Mayo - 'I mean what is the point? I don't know what to say to these people.'

For someone who only passed four O levels, she's a terrific intellectual snob, always correcting other people's grammar or choice of words. And yet the standing joke is that she couldn't possibly answer any of the questions on The Weakest Link. She says she could if they were on politics or literature or who slept with whom, but naturally she doesn't bother with all that stuff about planets or oceans. What always shocks her, she says, is the number of teachers on the show who don't know the name of the secretary of state for education.

Actually, what she has is a typical journalist's intelligence - quick, shrewd, but shallow. It lets her down badly in her book whenever she tries to enlist some kind of feminist argument, because basically she can't do arguments and can't stand feminists. So, when she says her book is 'meant for all women who have struggled with motherhood, with a career, with trying to do the right thing', I want to smack her. Does she seriously see herself as a role model? She's about as much use as Mrs Thatcher.

I can say what I like about her because it is a point of honour with her not to mind. Minding is for wimps. But if I summon all the nasty things I could say about her, they don't amount to much. She is not as bright she thinks. She is obsessed with money, and overestimates the extent to which other people share her obsession. She is mad to idolise her mother the way she does. She can, I know from a couple of friends who worked for her, be a pretty hellish employer. (On the other hand, people who stay the course become very attached to her.) She doesn't realise how much pain she causes with her sharp tongue. She is exhausting company because she is so quick-witted and combative. On the other hand, she's terrifically good fun and makes you laugh even while she's lambasting you. 'Are you seriously going to transcribe all this?' she asks at the end. 'But Lynn! You could be shopping!'

· Anne Robinson's Memoirs of an Unfit Mother is published by LittleBrown at £16.99.