Anne Robinson branded ‘brutal and scary’ by Celebrity Weakest Link star | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV

Anne Robinson was branded “brutal” after she supposedly “traumatised” a chef who’d guested on her game show, jeering that she gave blondes a “bad name”.

Sophie Michell, who has been a private chef to the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claudia Schiffer in her time, is very accustomed to television, after first appearing on the BBC when she was just 12 years old.

However, the now 39-year-old wasn’t prepared for meeting notoriously acid-tongued TV host Anne back in 2008.

“I did the Celebrity Weakest Link with Anne Robinson about 15 years ago and she’s scary,” she frankly revealed to Matt Tebbutt on this morning’s episode of Saturday Kitchen.

“She asked me a question about driving and it was a really basic question, but I don’t drive so I was like, ‘I’ve got no idea’ and then she’s so brutal.

“She just turned round and said, ‘Well, it gives blondes a bad name’. I was, like, clutching my pearls after that!”

The studio burst into laughter, with Matt exclaiming: “I couldn’t say that” and Helen McGill empathising that the quiz show host was “so mean”.

Sophie vociferously agreed, exclaiming the encounter had “traumatised me for ten minutes”.

Fellow guest and Weakest Link host Romesh Ranganathan stepped in to save any embarrassment by discussing previous quiz show answers that had been “much worse”.

“Tony Blackburn came on – obviously a legendary DJ – and his question was ‘What does the B stand for in R&B?’ and he said ‘Soul’, which I think is worse than ‘I don’t know’,” he joked.

At the time Twitter had turned into Titter, as viewers erupted with amused laughter – and one fan exclaimed: “Fair play to Tony Blackburn, he only just got a question wrong about the very thing he’s spent his whole life doing!”

Tony later declared that he felt “ashamed”, confiding to Romesh: “I don’t know what made me say soul, it’s obviously blues.

“When you asked me the question, your mind goes blank and my mind is blank most of the time anyway!”

Referring to another guest, Esme Young from Great British Sewing Bee, Romesh recalled: “I think the question was: ‘What is the com in ‘romcom’ short for?’ and she said ‘Peanut’.”

However, he then defended that the show was designed to “pile on the pressure” and that, in some people’s cases, “It is panic. it just gets to them!”

The conversation then turned to Matt Tebbutt’s own performance on game show Pointless, which he cringed was “not something we need to talk about”.

However, he reluctantly shared: “I answered two questions and got both of them wrong, to the point where Alexander Armstrong asked ‘Have you actually seen this show? Do you know how it works?’ because I kept giving them the obvious answer [instead of the pointless, least guessed one].”

Saturday Kitchen airs every Saturday morning at 10am on BBC One.