Danielle Lineker: 'No one chooses to be in a stepfamily'
At first glance, air hostess and lingerie model Danielle Lineker must seem like an archetypal WAG, even if the playing days of her husband, England legend turned Match of the Day host Gary Lineker, are long behind him. There's the lavish wedding (£250,000 was the reported cost) on the Amalfi Coast, the Surrey mansion and the designer frocks. "The press love the rags to riches thing," she says. "I was doing property before I met Gary and was actually doing okay, but the story is that I came from Wales and I was a single mum. Some of these newspapers just love getting their claws out."
And the second Mrs Lineker has a rueful distrust of a Fourth Estate seemingly fixated on the 19-year age gap between herself and her husband, as well as a somewhat partisan attitude towards Gary's first wife, "childhood sweetheart" Michelle – a wariness that has made it somewhat difficult for her to promote her BBC3 programme about stepfamilies (The Independent was the only newspaper she agreed to talk to). For Lineker is herself the product of a stepfamily, as is her daughter Ella (whose father is the former Coventry City footballer Adam Willis) – while the 31-year-old is now a stepmother to Gary and Michelle's four teenage boys, George, Harry, Tobias and Angus.
"When I met Gary I thought that there was not really much around to help ... hardly any books or websites," she says of her motivation for making Danielle Lineker – My New Stepfamily. "And we don't talk about it in stepfamilies – we just get on with it – and we do need to talk about it, because so many people now – even Prince William and Harry – are in one. Ideally, nobody wants to be part of a stepfamily. You'd have to be a fool to think you're going to walk into a family and it's all going to work. Life isn't like that."
And Lineker (née Bux) should know. Her parents, shop workers Kim and Roy, separated when she was a baby. When she was seven, her mother remarried factory worker Alex Mohammed, with whom she had three children. In her BBC3 film Lineker revisits her old homes on the tough Ely estate in Cardiff – homes, plural, because like most stepchildren, Lineker was forever commuting between her divorced parents.
"When I was at school, if a teacher said 'draw your family', I would draw my mum, my stepdad, brothers and sisters, my dad and his children as well," she says. "I would need a big double page. Everyone else had one sheet of paper. But it didn't bother me. I never saw it as weird or different."
Indeed being in a stepfamily today is anything but weird and different – it's the fastest-growing domestic arrangement in Britain, and statistics vary between the official estimate (that between one in eight and one in 10 of us are now so defined), and the figure used in Lineker's film, of one in three. "It's a far more widespread situation than official figures show," says Suzie Hayman, the author of books on the subject. "What tend to get counted are families where children are resident, but what you should be saying is that one in three families in this country is affected by stepfamily issues."
drive from www.independent.co.uk