Kim Woodburn’s Shove and Harsh Words to Aggie MacKenzie: Fallout from How Clean Is Your House

Kim Woodburn didn’t hold back. Her scouring judgments on just about everyone who dared cross her were caustic enough to strip the skin – ‘verbal Vim’, as one critic described them.

This is Kim unleashing a tirade in the jungle on I’m A Celebrity in 2009, her victim the former glamour girl Katie Price: ‘You’re what I thought you’d be. You’re a publicity-seeker. You live and die for publicity. You know full well you’ve got ten to 12 million people watching every night and you know, madam, you’ll be all over the papers every day. Now stop it. Stop your nonsense.’

Price, a motormouth usually well able to defend herself, was momentarily speechless. So, too, was Phillip Schofield when she accused him and his co-host at the time, Holly Willoughby, of ganging up on her during an appearance, in 2017, on the This Morning sofa.

‘Don’t think that you’re going to bully me, I’ve been around too long,’ she warned. ‘Don’t mess with me.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ protested La Willoughby. ‘I’m terrified.’

Kim folded her arms and glowered. ‘You big phoney,’ she hissed at Schofield.

Kim Woodburn, famed for hosting How Clean Is Your House, has died aged 83

More than 6ft tall in her heels, and with her blonde hair plaited back in a Germanic dirndl bun, she looked like a dominatrix in charge of a Munich bierkeller. When fans, especially her large cohort of gay admirers, nicknamed her Miss Whiplash, she declared herself flattered.

But Woodburn, who died on Monday aged 83 after a short illness, was far from the armour-plated bulldozer of a woman she pretended to be. Until her sudden ascent to fame two decades ago, fronting a show called How Clean Is Your House?, she had endured poverty, beatings, homelessness and appalling traumas.

The brutality of her upbringing at the hands of an alcoholic mother who openly hated her was so horrific that for the rest of her life she bore deep psychological scars.

Her explosive furies and semi-coherent outbursts on shows such as Celebrity Big Brother can only be explained by the underlying rage she nursed against her parents, her sister and her mother’s abusive lover.

Some people who worked with her and incurred her wrath, such as the Loose Women presenter Coleen Nolan, could never fathom it. ‘She’s a horrible person,’ Kim blazed at her, in front of a live audience. ‘I wouldn’t want to sit and talk to lying trash like you,’ she added, before marching off the set.

Coleen was left gaping. ‘I think that’s sad,’ she said.

Others strived to make allowances. Journalist Aggie MacKenzie, who was Kim’s co-presenter when How Clean Is Your House? launched in 2003, found it impossible to maintain a friendship with her, but did her best not to be condemnatory.

‘Kim was a tormented soul, but now she’s finally at peace,’ she said yesterday.

‘We clashed often. Behind the fierce persona was deep pain and incredible strength. She survived because she had to. She was an unforgettable woman.’

Kim was 60 when, earning £12,000 a year as a freelance cleaner for a domestic agency in London, she was invited to meet a TV executive from the production company Talkback.

‘How long have you been cleaning,’ the woman asked.

‘Too bloody long!’ Kim shot back. ‘I’ve worked for some dirty beggars in my time.’

Some of them were famous, particularly during the 11 years she spent working as a cleaner in the US. One big-name film director, she claimed, was ‘just unbearable… and a very well-known chap in fashion I worked for in New York had some pretty vile toilet habits.’

In 2009, Kim braved the Australian jungle for I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! Here, she takes on some rather gruesome grub with Katie Price

And, as the producer burst out laughing, she added: ‘I don’t think I’m in the least bit funny. But I’ll tell you something – I do like cleaning. Always have.’

When she first met Aggie, she wrote in her autobiography: ‘I do remember thinking: ‘Who’s that funny little woman? She looks like Harry Potter.’ Aggie later told me I made her think of Hagrid in drag, which makes us even.’

How Clean Is Your House? offered her £2,000 an episode, cleaning indescribably filthy homes. Kim threw herself into the shooting schedule with gusto, venting gales of disgust at the squalor she uncovered in every place they visited.

In one Kensington flat, they discovered gangrene bacteria in the fridge. The apartment was home to an American art dealer called Phyllis who had allowed years of grease and muck to accumulate on every surface.

In a terraced house in Northampton, they discovered bin bags piled high – brought back from the local tip by the occupant, Bob, who would sift through other people’s rubbish in search of valuables.

But the most shocking house never made it to the screen. A woman named Jo shared it with her menagerie – 16 cats, ten dogs, ducks, rabbits and a lamb in a disposable nappy. Hay and newspapers covered the floor, to soak up the ordure.

Even Jo’s bedsheets were smeared in animal droppings.

During filming, police arrived to arrest Jo on charges of cheque fraud. Shortly afterward, the RSPCA came to take her animals away. Filming was abandoned.

How Clean Is Your House? proved an international hit, sparking an American series. Oprah Winfrey was a fan. Spin-off shows followed, such as Too Posh To Wash, about people with personal hygiene problems.

Kim and Aggie had a column in the Daily Mail, as the Queens Of Clean, offering tips such as: ‘Make your toilet sparkle by dropping a couple of denture-cleaning tablets into the bowl and leaving overnight. Or pour a can of cola in, leave for an hour, and flush. Stains will vanish.’

But the pair fell out in spectacular fashion during panto season at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, in January 2008, playing the Ugly Sisters in Cinderella. After missing a cue, Kim shoved Aggie backstage, so hard that she almost fell over. Words were exchanged – and for the final two series of How Clean Is Your House?, they did not speak to each other.

Kim with her How Clean Is Your House co-host Aggie MacKenzie, who claimed to be ‘frightened’ of the former. ‘Everyone was,’ Ms MacKenzie added in 2019

‘I was frightened of her,’ Aggie admitted in 2019. ‘Everyone was. There were no boundaries, no limitations. It was as if Kim felt more entitled to the job, status and money than me. She was the ‘main man’ and the show could not go on without her.’

But the tension between them helped make their partnership work on screen, she added. ‘It created this energy and so we knew how to be in front of the camera. But I used to dream a lot about her – bad dreams.

‘If my phone rang and it was Kim, my stomach would turn over. I’d think: ‘What am I in for now?’ It would always be abuse.’

Abuse was all Kim knew for the first 15 years of her life, when her name was Patricia Mary McKenzie – she changed it as an adult, borrowing from fellow blonde Kim Novak, in a bid to distance herself from her childhood.

Born in 1942, she barely knew her father Ronald, who was away serving with the Royal Marines throughout the war and for a decade after. Her mother Pat was 16 when she married him, and already pregnant with her first child, Gloria. The family lived in Portsmouth, surviving the Blitz, in a terraced house with no bathroom and an outside toilet.

The marriage didn’t last. ‘I’m convinced,’ Kim said, ‘my mother thought she could have hung on to my father if I hadn’t turned out to be a girl. My crime was that I wasn’t a boy. My mother would often look at me and say: ‘If I could send you back, I would, you ugly little bitch.’

‘My looks were my other crime. I was blonde and blue-eyed, but to my mother all that meant was that I’d committed the unforgivable sin of looking like my father.’

Five more children followed, several of them fathered by Pat’s lover, a man named James McGinley. Gloria, the eldest,

was her mother’s favourite. ‘She had a habit of getting me into trouble, telling tales on me so I’d get a beating.’ Kim said. ‘My mother beat me repeatedly with anything that came to hand – clothes brushes, wooden coathangers, brooms.’

The abuse was worse when Pat was drinking. The girls would be sent out to the off-licence for bottles of cheap port: ‘You could have bleached the toilet with it. Sometimes we couldn’t afford to eat, but she was never without her drink or her cigarettes.’

When Kim (still called Patricia Mary at the time) was 15, McGinley brought home two mates from the shipyard where he worked.

One of them commented on her looks: ‘When that girl becomes a woman, she’s going to be very good-looking.’ ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ Kim retorted, ‘because all my life my mother’s told me I’m an ugly little cow.’

For a split second, she later said, the world seemed to stop turning. And then a seismic row erupted.

The two men left hurriedly, as Pat unleashed a torrent of abuse at her daughter, before starting to hit her, ‘on any part of my body where she could land a punch or a slap’.

Angry at being humiliated in front of his friends, McGinley joined in, slamming her against a wall and punching her until she feared he was going to kill her. When she managed to escape the house, she ran and never returned.

Landing up in Liverpool with a female friend of her father’s, she began a series of jobs, from working behind the counter at Woolworth’s to ironing the clothes for window displays at a fashion store.

Kim does not hold back as she sits on the This Morning sofa in 2017 straight after her Celebrity Big Brother stint

At 23, she became pregnant on a holiday to Spain with her boyfriend, John. A few weeks after she broke the news, he left her – and two months later she suffered a miscarriage, alone.

Instead of going to hospital, she wrapped the stillborn foetus in a cloth before going to a nearby park. In darkness, digging with a kitchen spoon, she scraped out a shallow grave and covered the body over.

Four decades later, when she revealed the story in her memoir, Unbeaten, Merseyside police announced they were ‘examining her account’. No charges were brought.

A brief marriage followed to a police constable named Ken Davies, who wooed her with poems but soon began beating her. She put up with the violence, divorcing him only when his infidelities became too flagrant to ignore.

In 1979, she married another policeman, Peter Woodburn.

They met when she reported a burglary at the shop where she worked as manageress.

They were together nearly half a century. Kim’s great regret was that she had no children, saying she never stopped mourning the son who was stillborn.

She also never stopped trying to understand why her mother had been so cruel to her.

In 1982, when Pat was nearly 60, Kim decided to offer an olive branch. Proudly, she paid a visit with Peter, eager to show him off. Pat barely spoke a word to either of them.

‘There’s something I want to ask you,’ Kim said. ‘Why did you hate me so much?’

‘Because you’re too like your f***ing father,’ Pat snapped back. ‘I always hated you.’

Kim Woodburn was not an easy woman. But the reason is not difficult to understand.