Читать книгу Lorraine - Neil Simpson - Страница 11

‘Big shoulder pads, big buttons, earrings like plates! And my hair – it looked like a giant helmet had been lowered on to my head by a crane.’

By the end of the 1980s, the best seat in the broadcasting house was on the main sofa at TV-am. Viewing figures had soared from a low of just 100,000 in 1983 to more than 1.8 million at the end of the decade. The flagship show, Good Morning Britain, was becoming a national institution and had made huge stars out of co-hosts Anne Diamond and Nick Owen. But by the time Lorraine arrived in London things were changing fast.

Nick had left to join ITV Sport in 1986 and Anne had since shared the sofa with the likes of Mike Morris, Richard Keys, Geoff Meade and David Foster. She was still the nation’s favourite presenter, but the easy chemistry she had enjoyed with Nick was hard to recover and it was hard to ignore the rumours that she too was ready for a change.

Lorraine was back with Steve in Glasgow when the news broke that Anne was indeed quitting the sofa and creating the most sought-after vacancy in television. Looking back it is hard to remember quite why this story was deemed to be so important, or just how big a deal the TV-am job was. But as Lorraine and her colleagues digested the information, the newspapers were moving into overdrive. Acres of newsprint were devoted to the departure and to the question of Anne’s replacement. ‘It is the quest for a flawless diamond’, was how one paper put it. ‘In that twentieth-century religion called television, the quest is being compared to the search for the Holy Grail: Just who can replace Anne Diamond at TV-am?’

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Despite never thinking of herself as a full-time, studio-based presenter rather than an on-the-road reporter Lorraine was suddenly being tipped for the top. But she wasn’t alone. A battalion of ambitious presenters was also lining up in the wings. Existing TV-am players including Ulrika Jonsson, Caroline Righton, Jayne Irving, Kathy Tayler, Kay Burley, Trish Williamson and Kathy Rochford, were all in the frame for promotion. But by the autumn of 1989, the field had been narrowed down to just two key players. And as Lorraine was invited back down south for her own test run on the Good Morning Britain sofa, the Welsh reporter Linda Mitchell was heading east. TV-am bosses had decided to put the pair together for a breakfast-time Pop Idol-style face-off. Lorraine and Linda both had the chance to sit alongside Mike Morris and Richard Keys as guest presenters on the show and viewers were asked to vote on the one they liked the most.

At first Lorraine’s odds of winning looked long. The TV-am switchboard was deluged with complaints about her accent and dozens of viewers wrote in saying they couldn’t understand a word the new presenter was saying. Broadcasting insiders sapped her confidence still further by saying she simply didn’t have the look that channel bosses Bruce Gyngell and Greg Dyke were hoping for. ‘Officially speaking, what Bruce Gyngell wants is an experienced journalist who is relaxed and informal in front of the camera, bright and cheerful first thing in the morning, and who can get the news across while still doing all the showbiz interviews,’ said a fellow executive. ‘Unofficially we all know that to be one of Gyngell’s girls you also have to be young, stunning, suntanned and look pretty in pink.’

Lorraine knew her journalistic training meant she could meet the first half of the criteria. But did she really want to win a job by virtue of looking pretty in pink? The Daily Mail inadvertently raised her old insecurities as the selection process dragged on. In its analysis of the two key candidates for the job it said Lorraine had the looks ‘of a classic forties film star’ – not a description that fitted the modern, youthful image that TV-am was trying to project.

But for all the doubts and internal criticisms Lorraine turned out to be the viewers’ choice – something that wouldn’t change for the next twenty years. She won the full-time slot next to Mike Morris. And while she is proud to say she hardly ever wore pink, she admits that the clothes she did choose have hardly stood the test of time. In 2006, for example, she was a guest on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross when he flashed a huge photo on to the screen showing her on her first day in the big new role. She shrieked with embarrassment. ‘Look at me! It’s all big shoulder pads, big buttons, earrings like plates. And my hair! It looks like a giant helmet had been lowered on to my head by a crane! Get that off the screen!’

Looks apart, Lorraine fell in love with the whole Good Morning Britain routine. From Monday to Friday she lived in the TV-am flat in Notting Hill, rising just after 3.30am every morning and arriving at the north London studios just before 5. It was a gruelling schedule, but she says it was far less stressful than her on-call days in Scotland when she could be paged at any hour of the day or night and told to cross Scotland for a story at a moment’s notice.

The sheer variety of the magazine-style show was also perfect for her skills and her personality. ‘I’m a terrible gab – with me I go from: “What’s going on in Yugoslavia?” to “Did you see Coronation Street last night?” in a heartbeat, and I’m passionate about them both,’ she told reporters who asked how she was getting on after she passed her six-month anniversary. ‘Good Morning Britain helps me keep in touch with absolutely everything that’s going on, from hard news to some really fun features.’

She and Mike were equally happy with each other, bouncing ideas and comments around before, during and after their shows and making many viewers forget that Anne and Nick had ever existed. For Lorraine, it was all just like a totally unexpected dream come true.

‘I was quite happy in Scotland and just toddled down to London to do a few reporting shifts and all of a sudden I ended up doing the main programme,’ is how she describes it, with typical modesty. ‘I’ve never had a career plan or sat down and said to myself: “Where will I be in five years’ time?” and I certainly didn’t do that when I started at TV-am. My big worry about goals like that is what you do if you are disappointed? Anyway, five-year plans and the like remind me of Stalin and that’s not how I want my life to be. If everything stopped tomorrow it wouldn’t worry me. There are more important things than your work.’

If pressed, Lorraine admits that the most important element of her life back then was Steve. But for all her smiles on camera she told friends that her move to London had put their relationship under severe pressure. ‘Our relationship had begun with us seeing each other 24 hours a day, seven days a week for about a year and a half. We then went from living in each other’s pockets to hardly seeing one another. We speak every day and he sees me on television so he knows I’m OK, but it’s obviously not the same. Anyone who has had a long-distance relationship knows how difficult this can be.’

Fortunately, the big pay rise Lorraine had earned when she got the Good Morning Britain contract meant she could afford to fly back to Dundee to see Steve every weekend. But even this didn’t always seem to smooth out the new wrinkles in their relationship. ‘I would get home on Friday evening and it would take a few hours to get back to normal. We would dance around each other not wanting to argue about anything because our time together was so precious. Then, by the time we got back to normal it was Sunday and time for me to come back down to London. It was hard and the commuting was exhausting but it never crossed my mind to do anything differently because the relationship was so important to me,’ she says.

She also says it never crossed her mind to worry if Steve was being faithful to her in Scotland – and when one of her TV-am colleagues once asked her if she trusted him she offered just one word in reply: Implicitly.

As it turned out, Steve wasn’t the only person north of the border to be worrying about how Lorraine was coping on her own. Her mother, Anne, was equally concerned. ‘I used to ring her at night to check she had locked her front door,’ she says with a smile. ‘I’d worry terribly that she was walking home at night on her own or that she wasn’t looking after herself properly.’

Anne would also do what she had done from the very start of her daughter’s television career: She got up early to watch every moment of Lorraine’s screen time. In the process she spotted just how quickly her daughter had got to grips with what the industry calls ‘sofa-style’. ‘We speak on the phone almost every day and I tell her sometimes: “You were butting in” or “You let that man ramble on too long,” but that’s very rare because she is great at her job.’ Viewers agreed. Lorraine turned out to be just the kind of person the country wanted to wake up to. She could inform and explain when required. She could laugh and talk away when technical hitches off screen meant airtime had to be filled. Most importantly, she was entirely in tune with the vast majority of her viewers.

‘At the start, TV-am had gone wrong by assuming that we all wanted to watch intellectuals or glamorous people at breakfast. The reality was that we wanted the equivalent of a chat over the garden fence with a neighbour,’ says television critic Gordon Wood. And Lorraine was exactly the kind of unthreatening person you could imagine living next door. There was a sense that she might know a bit more than you did about current affairs but that wasn’t very intimidating because she also seemed to know just as much about soap and pop stars. ‘She was the kind of person you could gossip and share your problems with. Her accent might have put a few people off at first but when we got used to that we decided we liked her. And likeability is an incredibly valuable currency in television.’

Other critics said there were other reasons why Lorraine’s everywoman appeal found its ideal home on breakfast television. ‘Most people watch Lorraine Kelly while they are doing something else,’ pointed out the Daily Mail’s Jeremy Hodges. ‘You’re feeding the kids and getting them ready for school, you’re looking for your house keys, packing your bags for work. It’s the most stressful time of the day and throughout it all Lorraine offers a voice of normality that you would miss if it wasn’t there.’

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As 1991 got underway, and Lorraine quietly celebrated the end of her first year as a mainstream national television presenter, she faced good and bad news at home and at work. Both events would help shape the rest of her life. The good news came when she won her first major broadcasting award. At a ceremony at the Grosvenor House Hotel on London’s Park Lane the Television and Radio Industries Club named her New Talent of the Year, for her roles on Good Morning Britain, on TV-am’s early-morning shows the previous year, and for her in-the-field reporting role in Scotland. The Tric awards are only just acquiring a high profile among the general public but for more than thirty years they have been hugely prestigious to industry insiders. The list of past winners includes almost every big name presenter and entertainer you can name. So Lorraine was thrilled to be recognised in such fantastic company at what was still only the start of her studio-based career. It gave her the confidence to feel that she did indeed deserve her place on the TV-am sofa. The cub reporter from East Kilbride had come a long way, and she was still loving every minute of the ride.

Lorraine and Steve celebrated with a long weekend away – they headed to one of their favourite spots in the whole world: Barra in the Outer Hebrides. Here they walked along the white beaches, chatted to the locals, had a glass of whisky and watched the sun go down over the ocean. It was the perfect place to reflect on how fast their lives were changing and to try and chill out away from the pressures of work. Lorraine says a few days away in Scotland always give her a new sense of perspective about the world and her role in it. She says that she doesn’t spend her breaks planning ahead, plotting her next move or setting up some new long-term challenge. Instead, she tries to relax and be grateful for where she is right now.

Heading back south after this latest break she was about to get some bad news, however. Her much-loved grandmother, Margaret McMahon, had been given a late diagnosis of breast cancer. The news had come too late for much to be done. And on Margaret’s death, Lorraine found a cause she would support personally and professionally for the rest of her life. Over the coming decades she would help raise hundreds of thousands of pounds for breast cancer charities. Equally importantly, she has tried to raise the profile of the disease and to make sure women know just how important early diagnosis can be. Her grandmother’s death changed her in one other way too. Margaret McMahon had always been an extraordinary role model to her granddaughter. She had had a zest for life, and a desire to focus on all that was positive in the world and to make the most of every opportunity that came her way. ‘Seize the day,’ had been Margaret’s motto. It would now be Lorraine’s. She would no longer take anything for granted, she would enjoy every moment as if it was her last.