WITH a smear of toothpaste on her cheek and dressed in a crop top and leggings, Trinny Woodall is performing squats in her bathroom.
“I usually do this naked,” she tells viewers of her vlogs, before performing hula-hoop-style hip swivels while swilling mouthwash.
There’s a kind of manic energy to the instalment, broadcast from a mirrored bathroom that seems too modest for someone once half of one of the most popular double acts on TV.
But while this might seem like odd behaviour, it is far from uncommon in Trinny’s weird world these days.
Just this week, the former What Not To Wear host made two public boobs — one literally, when she inadvertently flashed a breast during one of her social media videos.
The other was a bizarre section on her regular ITV1 This Morning slot in which she talked about spitting on the studio floor to get rid of phlegm.
“Is Trinny drunk?”, “Has Trinny been drinking?” asked Twitter users.
Those who haven’t seen her for a while could be forgiven for thinking the former drug and drink addict, 53, had fallen back under her demons’ spell after 27 years’ sobriety.
In fact, she hadn’t. It was just Trinny being Trinny.
Her video blog, and accompanying Instagram feed — which has 228,000 followers — feature Trinny in her bathroom in various states of dress, delivering frenzied musings on fashion and beauty.
But friends insist her over-excited ravings are fuelled by nothing more sinister than her natural quirkiness.
And she is deeply hurt by suggestions she is anything but sober.
One told us: “Her behaviour may seem odd to people who don’t know her but that’s just Trinny being Trinny.
“She isn’t back on the booze, she’s completely tee-total. She’s just eccentric.”
Trinny has spent over a decade in the showbiz wilderness since her show Trinny and Susannah Undress The Nation was dumped from ITV in 2008.
During this time she has had to cut back drastically on the lavish lifestyle enjoyed at the height of her fame.
While she has been dating advertising millionaire Charles Saatchi, 73, since 2013, she refuses to move in with him or ask for a handout from his £100million fortune.
Instead, she recently downsized from her plush house in London’s Notting Hill to a small rented cottage in Chelsea and sold off much of her designer wardrobe while she struggles to pay the boarding school fees of her 13-year-old daughter Lyla.
It all started when Trinny and long-time collaborator Susannah Constantine were tempted to ITV from the BBC in 2006 with a £1.2million deal.
Their new show failed to match the viewing figures of hit series What Not To Wear and they were ditched two series in.
To pay the bills, the duo resorted to touting their show around Europe and designing a range for QVC.
Trinny’s marriage to Lyla’s father Johnny Elichaoff, a former rock drummer turned life insurance adviser, also broke down in 2008.
I used to drink a bottle of vodka a night, with cocaine and pills
Trinny said. “It was quite an emotional time for me.”
Six years later, 55-year-old Johnny, addicted to painkillers and bankrupt, committed suicide by jumping from the rooftop carpark of a shopping centre.
Trinny was “grief-stricken” and left a handmade card in the car park that read: “Miss you always, T.”
He had borrowed £1.4million from Trinny, which was never repaid, and the £24,000-a-year he promised to pay in maintenance and Lyla’s school fees never surfaced either.
Fortunately for Trinny, a legal bid to force her to pay Johnny’s £285,000 debts was quashed.
Trinny has since reinvented herself as a wannabe social media influencer for the middle-aged.
But she’s not bitter about her fall from grace.
She said: “When you have had really accelerated growth in your career and after ten years it’s gone it makes you appreciate what is right here today.”
While she is attempting to get a make-up line off the ground, Trinny explained why she refuses to ask for for help from super-rich boyfriend Charles.
She stressed: “Being a kept woman is so not me.”
The pair are often snapped at Saatchi’s favourite London restaurant, Scott’s, where he was caught grabbing ex-wife Nigella Lawson by the throat in 2013 and given a police caution.
They started dating just six weeks after Saatchi’s quickie divorce.
And she gushed recently: “Charles will tape every This Morning and text me, ‘You were great today’.
He’ll look at every post online and say, ‘That was really good’. It’s very nice when someone is your champion.”
Trinny is also deeply loyal to Saatchi. While on holiday with him in Madrid to celebrate her 50th birthday, she took a snide dig at his ex wife, writing online: “It’s great that, at 50, life can still grab you by the throat and shake you up.”
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Nigella responded on Twitter with her recipe of the day, slut’s spaghetti.
There is no denying Trinny looks amazing considering her age and past.
Where, in 2007, she covered her then-32A assets with fake silicon breasts for an episode of her TV series, now mother nature has helped.
Trinny puts her slightly enlarged chest down to a menopause side-effect, which has also seen her 9st skinny frame that attracted criticism turn to 10st 3lb.
Her extensive beauty regime, which she details on her blog Trinny London, includes “oestrogen morning and night, progesterone five days a month, testosterone every morning”, hair supplements, a huge amount of vitamin C, Botox, vampire facelifts and having her hair dyed every three weeks. All at the eye-watering cost of £10,000 a year.
But it is a healthier use of money than the thousands she splashed on cocaine and alcohol in a decade-long binge.
Speaking candidly about her past, she admitted: “I drank a bottle of vodka a night, with cocaine and pills.
Every night I’d tell myself, ‘This is my last time’, and the next day I’d end up using again.”
Her addiction grew from a desperate desire to “fit in” after the shy youngster transferred from her “cruel” boarding school at 16 to a day school in London.
Yet she was also mischievous. Born Sarah-Jane, the youngest of six children — including three step-siblings from her banker dad’s first marriage — she earned the nickname Trinny after the fictional St Trinians’ girls when she cut off a friend’s plait.
In the midst of her addictions, in her early 20s, she worked as a secretary in a commodities firm, a job she hated. Outside work she partied to excess and racked up credit card debt on clothes.
At 21 came her first rehab — though the rebellious streak that had once seen her stand naked in a school corridor for a water fight saw her ejected.
“I was thrown out after a month because I’d shown a sort of porn movie on April Fool’s Day,” she said.
“It was that thing of wanting everyone to love you, so you try to be funny.”
The wake-up call came when she was 26, with one final blow-out at a house in a posh area of London.
“Emotionally I was bankrupt,” she said.
“I felt I had nothing. All my ambition and drive had gone, my connection with people had gone.”
She made a pact with three friends to get sober and entered rehab.
All of them have since tragically died — two from accidental overdoses, the other HIV-related pneumonia.
She said: “I’d done all the drinking and using that I ever wanted to do.”
In 1994 Trinny, whose only vice now is smoking, teamed up with Susannah.
What started as makeover advice in a newspaper turned into TV slots and before long What Not To Wear.
Their plummy tones and habit of manhandling women’s boobs proved a hit, and from 2001 to 2005 they earned around £10million along with a Royal Television Award, a couple of Bafta nods and several best-selling books.
That fairytale is long dead.
But Trinny may still get her happy ending — if she can only remember what not to bare.
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