VAL Savage is rummaging in the cupboard under the stairs. Eventually she drags out an enormous framed portrait of her son Robbie which he presented to her a while ago.
In it, he is muscle-bound, bare-chested and showing off the black tattoos she so hates while gazing enigmatically into the middle-distance.
“Now what on earth am I supposed to do with this?” she asks. “I put it under the stairs. He does love himself. I can’t be doing with it.”
Now strutting his stuff every Saturday night on Strictly Come Dancing, the former Premier League bad boy has always loved being the centre of attention.
Val recalls one parents’ evening at his school when he was 14, and his dad Colin being told by a maths teacher that she had hauled Robbie to the front of class.
“I’ve had no trouble with him before,” she replied. “But I’ve had to move him.”
Mortified, Colin asked her: “Was he playing up?”
“Not exactly,” she replied. “He’s been sitting at the back, signing autographs.”
It was a first taste of celebrity for the football-mad Robbie, who had just signed as a schoolboy for Manchester United.
Back then, there was no sign of what Val describes as his trademark “wild man of Borneo look”.
He was no shrinking violet in the fashion stakes though and was the first boy in his home town of Wrexham to get a shell-suit – in purple and yellow.
But plans to get his ears pierced were abandoned after Val threatened to personally “rip them out”. She says: “I told him, ‘Not under my roof’. And he knew that I meant it as well.”
His dad Colin was a sales executive at a canning factory while Val was a stay-at-home housewife, waiting at the school gates every day to meet Robbie and older brother Jonathan, with a chocolate treat for each in her pocket.
Summer holidays were spent in a caravan in Prestatyn, pushing pennies in the slot machines – or later building sandcastles on the beach in the south of France.
Growing up, “Our Rob” as Val calls him, could have played tennis for the county (but never did) and won several trophies at snooker.
But football was his big love. For hours he practised keepy-uppy in the three-bed semi where Val and Colin still live. “We never had any tangerines to eat at Christmas,” says Val, now a full-time carer for Colin, who suffers from a form of dementia.
“From the age of eight Rob sat in the lounge and I had to throw them so he could catch them on his foot. He’d do the same with a can in the yard.
“He’d say, ‘Mum, count how many times I can keep it up’. Sometimes I’d get to 199, 200... and then I’d forget. He’d get frustrated. But to be honest it was boring and I had things to do.
"Colin set up a local league and there were times, shovelling snow on the touchline, when I used to think, ‘I’d love now to be in Chester, with a little girl, shopping’. I wouldn’t swap my boys for the world but I would have loved a daughter.
“When Rob was born, we didn’t really know what to call him. We’d already picked a girl’s name – Charlotte Lucy.
“Sometimes, when I look at him now, with his hair and his earrings, I think he’s halfway to being a Charlotte Lucy.”
As a teenager, Robbie played in the same Manchester United youth team as David Beckham and Paul Scholes but was devastated when United manager Alex Ferguson let him go at the age of 19.
Refusing to give up, he joined Crewe Alexandra and earned himself the first of 39 caps for Wales.
He then landed a move to Leicester City – leaving home in a silver Golf and coming back in a pink Porsche.
It was at Leicester where he got his “bad boy” reputation for his vast collection of yellow cards. “If you pinned them all on him, he’d look like a Fyffes banana,” says Val. “But I stopped going to watch him when the booing started. I couldn’t stand it. I felt like they were booing me.
“But Colin still drove to watch every match he played. He followed him everywhere. Never missed a game.”
Later Robbie’s career would take him to Birmingham City, where a broken neck almost cost him his life, to Blackburn Rovers and then to Derby County.
He retired from international football in 2005 and quit playing this year – just in time to start rehearsals for Strictly.
Now Val’s Saturdays involve lots of tea, coffee, 60 cigarettes and a bottle of milk of magnesia. Mrs Sav, as she’s known, can’t eat properly until she’s seen Robbie’s routine with partner Ola Jordan.
“It’s the build-up I can’t stand,” she says. “It’s like watching him at matches.” When he was doing the tango she was so nervous she phoned her neighbour and asked her to watch it instead .
“I told her I was going to flick over when it came to Rob’s bit and I’d ring her later to find out how he got on,” laughs Val, 63. “But Colin’s into it now and he wanted to see it.
"He said, ‘We’ve watched it all this time and Rob’s on now.’ So I ended up peeping round the kitchen door anyway. As soon as it was over my neighbour came running round in her dressing gown, nothing on her feet, and says, ‘Oh, Val he was brilliant’.
“Then another girl, just got out the bath, she came round, nothing on, towel wrapped round her...
“The three of us were hugging and dancing in the street, singing Abba’s Gimme Gimme Gimme A Man After Midnight. I thought ‘What will people think – we must have lost the plot’.”
Val laughs and strikes a dancing pose.
She and Colin, 64, used to jive “in the old days” and she can’t contain her delight over Robbie’s newfound success.
Keeping him down to earth is another matter. “I keep reminding him where he’s come from and encourage him to appreciate what he’s got,” she says. “When Colin and I first got married we only bought what we could afford.
“Our mortgage was £29.99 a month and we only had deckchairs to sit on... sometimes I’d cry myself to sleep worrying about money.”
When she saw Robbie’s first luxury home in Leicester she wept.
“It was so emotional,” she recalls. “I came from a two-up two-down with an outside toilet.”
These days Mirror columnist Robbie, 37, lives with his wife Sarah and their two sons Charlie, eight, and Freddie, five, in leafy Prestbury, Cheshire.
But when he manages to get home to Wrexham he likes nothing better than a game of pool with his dad and brother down the local boozer.
“He’s just Rob to me,” smiles Val. “He’ll never alter and I wouldn’t want him to. I love his very bones.”