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‘I was probably Glasgow’s first yuppie, a real pioneer.’

Finding any job was a real problem in the depressing, strike-torn days of the late 1970s. But finding one in the media was about as tough as you could get. Newspapers are notorious as closed shops, jealously guarding rare vacancies and rejecting the vast majority of applicants. But Lorraine vowed that if a door opened even an inch she would push her way through it. She fired off dozens of letters to editors and applied for journalism courses. She made phone calls, turned up for interviews, wrote endless speculative articles – and with her eighteenth birthday approaching she cracked it. She was offered an internship on the East Kilbride News – one of the most sought-after posts in the area. Combining the job with a block release journalism course in Edinburgh meant she worked ridiculously long hours, just as she would for the next five tough years. She would learn her lessons, pay her dues – and she loved it.

Her first beat was typically broad. If it was local, it was hers. So Lorraine sat through council meetings, wrote up local political scandals, and built up contacts with the fire, police and ambulance services. She reported on local businesses, schools and sports teams; she did the light and frothy stories about charity runs and church fêtes. And she also learned to cope with the grim tasks. While still a teenager herself, she made her first visits to grieving parents of hit-and-run victims; she sat with the families of missing children; in short, she wrote up the seemingly endless series of human tragedies that only local papers ever turn into news.

As the years passed, Lorraine certainly never regretted her decision to go to work rather than stay a student – though she loved hearing the stories of all her old school friends who were living it up in student halls across the country. But she was also in a hurry to leave East Kilbride and buy her own home in Glasgow. She had her eye on a flat right in the city centre long before urban living had come back into vogue. ‘I was probably Glasgow’s first yuppie, a real pioneer,’ she says. The flat was part of one of the city’s first regeneration zones, in a development called Hanover Court just behind Queen Street station.

‘It was just a wee hutch. When I went to find out more about it the place hadn’t even been built so I had to choose it from the plans. I went for one on the third floor and the wee man, in his wee office, pointed upwards and said: “And that’ll be your bit of sky,” which was so lovely it sold me on it straight away.’

Lorraine was twenty by the time she moved in – and as the brand new property came with everything from carpets to a fitted kitchen she had little else to worry about. ‘All I had to do was bring something to sit on, something to watch and something to sleep on. My dad got me a television, of course, I took my bed from my room in East Kilbride and I got myself a £15 sofa.’

Having been able to save only the smallest of deposits, she soon felt the crunch financially. She had spent £20,000 on the flat – a decent amount in 1980 and especially hard to pay for with an almost 100 per cent mortgage. The girl who says she was brought up to fear debt, and never uses a credit card unless she is able to pay off the bill by the end of the month, was watching the pennies from the start. She spent £30 on four chairs and a table from MFI – they were on special offer as they had been dented in the showroom. The one room she didn’t pay much attention to was the kitchen – because she took a long time to get to grips with cooking. ‘I would occasionally call my mum up and say things like: “I’ve bought a cabbage, what do I do with it?” My culinary skills consisted of a really good spag bol – and that was it.’

What she remembers most about this time was how much fun it all was. Her neighbours were all young, often hard-up professionals, and Hanover Court was soon nicknamed ‘Hangover Court’ after a few communal parties too many. ‘I remember a group of us being down to our last few pence one night and my best pal, Joyce, taking the money we had clubbed together to buy a bottle of wine, and coming back with something that was non-alcoholic. Twenty years later I still remind her of that,’ Lorraine laughs. The lapse was all the more unusual because Joyce was by then building a strong career of her own in pub and club management. One of her jobs was in the John Street Jam pub, as it was called then, where Lorraine would rush for a stiff drink after a tough day at the paper. On the East Kilbride News Lorraine had been impressing her editors for several years. She is remembered as one of the keenest and hardest working of the cub reporters they took on in that era – and was the only one to be offered the chance to write regular comment pieces as well as news stories. Ultimately, she ended up being given her own page for hard-hitting opinion pieces – one of her first being about drink-driving after yet another local tragedy had hit the headlines. ‘I don’t like the fuzziness around the law and I feel very strongly about it,’ she argued, making her comments both personal and controversial. ‘Don’t allow one or two drinks. Ban it completely. If I’m driving I won’t even have half a glass of wine.’

The promotion to columnist was great for her career, but it was lousy for her social life. ‘When I did go out I used to go to gay clubs in Glasgow because the music was brilliant and the dancing was fantastic, but I wasn’t a big clubber. I couldn’t be, because I always worked. I always had an early morning to be ready for the next day.’

And she had other challenges as well. She was relentlessly self-improving, and joined the Junior Chamber of Commerce to try and learn new skills and meet inspiring new people. On top of this, Lorraine was finding herself affected by many of the stories she covered at the paper. Her parents had given her a profound social conscience and a sense that you should always do what you can to help others and so she would squeeze extra hours out of her days to try and do just that.

‘One day I was doing a story about some work that the British Heart Foundation had done locally and I was so moved by it that I decided to do some fund-raising after hours. I organised discos and jumble sales, took some pensioners on a day out to the seaside and even roller-skated from East Kilbride to Edinburgh to raise sponsorship money.’

In the process, Lorraine earned an unexpected reward – the charity was offering a prize draw for the person who raised money in the most ridiculous ways. That person turned out to be Lorraine. She was given tickets for two to Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, and she took her mum Anne with her. While there, she learned another lesson about life that would never leave her. ‘It was a great trip,’ she says, ‘but I was uneasy about the fact that from one side of our hotel you could see the Copacabana beach where the girls were stunning and there was a huge amount of money. On the other side there were poor folk living under corrugated iron. I couldn’t really get my head around that.’

* * * * *

Back in Scotland again, Lorraine began to wonder if she had been at the East Kilbride News for too long. Always a girl with a plan – and a girl in a hurry – she was getting itchy feet and had a new challenge in mind. She felt she had proved herself as a print journalist, but could she do as well researching and writing for a television station? The BBC seemed the obvious place to find out and its staff soon started to get used to Lorraine’s calls. ‘I used to pester them and phone them all the time,’ she says. ‘I started by putting myself up for the role of farming correspondent, which I didn’t get, and then applied for absolutely every job there I ever saw advertised.’ She also called up constantly to see if there might be any other jobs on offer just to those in the know. Fortunately, when something did come up, they remembered her name.

The job in question was as a lowly researcher at BBC Scotland – and while Lorraine’s wage at the newspaper had been pretty lousy, this one was even worse. She accepted the job and took a £2,000-a-year pay cut, and could no longer afford her mortgage repayments. But, as ever, she had a plan.

Just around the corner from ‘Hangover Court’ was a diner called Charlie Parkers. Waitresses there earned a basic wage of £1 an hour and otherwise depended on tips. Lorraine thought she could defy expectations and balance her books by working there. ‘It was really quite a glamorous place and I am not at all glamorous,’ she remembers, with a sigh. ‘But I was the comedy turn. I used to get great tips because I would make people laugh. And I think the manager only kept me on because I made him laugh as well.’ The uniform was only one of the stumbling blocks she had to try to overcome. ‘We all had to wear high heels and shorts and the problem was that all the other girls were more like supermodels, all slim with great long legs. Then I would roll up, dishevelled and tired from a full day at work, refusing to tuck my shirt into my shorts because I felt like a little tub.’ But it wasn’t just the look that Lorraine got wrong back then. ‘Once I tried to make this poor customer an Irish coffee but the only way I could get the cream to float was by shoving in loads of sugar. The guy took one sip and nearly threw up.’

She is keen to point out that she wasn’t the only bad waitress in the city in those days – she reckons her old pal Joyce was also vying for the honour. Joyce was working at a trendy place called The Spaghetti Factory and one night Lorraine, along with a new boy she had just started seeing, decided to drop in on her. ‘We both ordered spaghetti Bolognese. Joyce was desperate to make a good impression but unfortunately as she was bringing over the Parmesan cheese she slipped and it all ended up going in my open handbag on the floor.’

On a more serious note, Lorraine admits that having two jobs was leaving her exhausted. It was really hard, working until the early hours after a full day’s work at the BBC, but she was brought up to believe that bills have to be paid and that you work whatever hours you need to work to pay them.

‘I’m a pit pony when it comes to work and I learned to be one right from the start. I started work at 14. As a child it was all: “What do you mean you’ve got a broken leg and an iron lung? Get to school!” Yes, the hours were long, but I’d have noticed them more if I was down a mine. My parents instilled the working-class work ethic into me from the start, that real Calvinistic thing. You never skip school, you turn up on time, you work your shift, you never skive, you respect money but you aren’t obsessed by it.’

That said, a little more money wouldn’t have gone amiss for Lorraine in the early 1980s. During her quiet moments at Charlie Parkers, she would stand by the door and look longingly at the Rogano restaurant on the Royal Exchange Square, which had the reputation of attracting the rich and famous and, back then, had a really strict door policy. ‘Liz Taylor had dined there and apparently even Ted Heath was turned away when he was Prime Minister because he hadn’t booked a table. I could never have afforded to go there back then, but I always hoped that one day I might be able to make it happen.’

Meanwhile, Lorraine was starting to worry that leaving newspapers for the BBC had been a bad move. Every day, she commuted on the ‘clockwork orange’ – the city’s fifteen-station circular underground network – but she got none of the buzz she had experienced on the East Kilbride News. ‘The experience was really valuable but it was pretty miserable at the BBC,’ she remembers.

Like most of her fellow researchers she was hoping that one day she might get out of the back office and on to the screen, though for her the desire had been a long time coming. ‘I always used to joke that the only thing I knew about television was that my dad fixed them for a living,’ she says. Her great aunt had been a dancer with the Scottish equivalent of the Tiller Girls but Lorraine had never wanted to follow in her footsteps and go on stage. She had never been in any school plays or joined the local drama group, so could she suddenly break out of her shell and shine in front of the cameras?

But the more she thought about it, the more Lorraine wanted to give it a try. It was another big challenge for someone who was already making a habit of climbing mountains. In a pattern that would soon be her hallmark, it turned out that the more people who told her she would never make it, the more determined she became to prove them wrong. The big problem, however, was an unwritten rule that you had to speak with the BBC’s standard ‘received pronunciation’, or maybe a posh Edinburgh accent, before you were allowed on screen. Lorraine had neither – but she still managed to get a camera crew together and head out on to the streets one day to help film some vox pops with members of the public. If it went well, she thought, it would be her calling card to more on-screen jobs in the future. And, as she worked on the footage in the editing suite, she genuinely thought the segment had been a success.

‘Lorraine, can you come in and see me for a moment?’

When she got the call from the chief producer later that day she was convinced he must agree. But she couldn’t have been more wrong. She was going to get the shock of her life.

‘I sat down in his office and he said: “We can’t have you on television. Your accent is no good.” He said it was too Glaswegian, he even used the word “offensive” to describe it. Finally, he told me I would have to have elocution lessons before I was ever to go on screen again. It was a huge shock, it was crazy.’

Shell-shocked and angry Lorraine headed back to her desk to stew. Away from the office she talked about the rejection with friends. Should she give up her new dreams and put up with a life in the broadcasting backroom? Should she find an elocution teacher and change the way she was to try and succeed? Or should she simply rise above all this and make a success of her life on her own terms? None of her colleagues were surprised when their tough little friend took the latter option. She had decided that her boss would be the latest person she would prove wrong – and she would never regret it.

‘Ultimately this turned out to be the best thing the guy could have done for me, because my ultimate reaction was just “Bugger you”. It really offended me and I thought, no way, I’ll show you, and it was a huge spur for me to move on and ultimately up.’

Fortunately for Lorraine, the BBC wasn’t the only television channel in Glasgow in the 1980s. The brash new breakfast-time station TV-am had an office there as well, and Lorraine decided that if she was going to get a job there she might as well take her request right to the top. Using the confidence she had gained as a newspaper reporter she picked up the phone and asked to be put through to the controversial new editor-in-chief of TV-am, Greg Dyke. Amazingly, he took the call and she asked the famously abrasive executive for a job in his Glasgow studio. He found her one.

‘The balls of me! I can’t imagine being able to do that,’ she says now when she thinks back. She also couldn’t quite believe how big a gamble she was taking by refusing to accept the status quo at the BBC – because a tiny bit of her had to accept that when it came to accents her BBC boss had been right. ‘Back then no one on the telly talked like me. No one had strong regional accents at that point. But I just had a feeling that this had to change.’ She was right, not least because Aussie Bruce Gyngell, the new boss at TV-am, was thinking exactly the same. After several secret meetings, interviews and screen tests Lorraine was offered a new contract at TV-am. Little more than nine months after starting at the BBC she handed in her resignation and prepared for her fresh challenge.

At her leaving party, Lorraine’s former colleagues crowded around and gossiped about the industry. There were mixed opinions about whether she was doing the right thing. Some pointed to the huge financial and ratings crisis that had engulfed TV-am since it started broadcasting little more than a year earlier. At the start it was led by media heavyweights David Frost, Angela Rippon, Anna Ford and Michael Parkinson. They had been given a ‘mission to explain’ – but audiences didn’t want to know. Within months the station was losing huge sums of money, triggering rows and resignations backstage and in the boardroom. The BBC’s Breakfast Time show, by contrast, was booming.

So was Lorraine backing the wrong horse by quitting the Beeb and joining TV-am? While no one could predict the future, Lorraine was convinced she was doing the right thing. She had enjoyed talking to Greg Dyke when she had called up, incensed at the BBC and practically demanding a job from him. She had got a taste of his enthusiasm and energy, of his determination to shake up the channel. And as a viewer she was convinced TV-am had already turned a corner. The friendly faces of Anne Diamond and Nick Owen were now on the sofa for the flagship morning show (as well as the puppet Roland Rat, jokingly referred to by insiders as ‘the only rat to ever join a sinking ship’). Ratings were edging up and the staff Lorraine met in her first few days on the station were equally optimistic. There was a near palpable sense that TV-am was a place of opportunity, that everything was possible for those who worked hard. And with hard work firmly in her DNA, Lorraine could hardly have felt more at home.

Her job title, in the autumn of 1984, was Scottish correspondent. This meant she had to cover any and every story the producers and news desk threw at her. From the start, she was on call and could be bleeped twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and she was – darting off to report back on fires and floods, road accidents and riots, crime scenes and crack houses. It was a steep learning curve and an adrenaline-filled thrill from day one.

‘I always had a bag packed with clean knickers, a toothbrush and extra socks so that I was ready to head out for a story even in the middle of the night – which happened a lot more often than you might think. As part of the TV-am team we covered everything, went everywhere. Not only news but sport, features, music, quirky human stories, everything.’

Her parents say they were amazed at the transformation in their daughter. ‘Seeing her on television was just extraordinary, and even if I had to get up at 6am I would sit and watch the whole programme,’ recalls Anne. ‘We were so proud of her when she was the East Kilbride news girl, and we’ve been proud of her ever since she went on television.’

In 1984, though, Anne and John were also a little bit shocked at the new confidence their daughter was displaying. ‘When John and I heard Lorraine talking shop to the producers about the next day’s show, for example, we were really impressed because she sounded so professional. For my part I am just amazed at Lorraine’s ambition and I don’t know where she gets it from,’ says Anne.

Others were starting to recognise it as well, and Lorraine was winning some influential supporters. ‘I’ve often turned on the television at some godforsaken hour and seen Lorraine at some disaster or other, standing in the snow or the rain. There are no excuses from Lorraine. She’s always been someone who gets out there and does the job and that’s why she’s a good reporter rather than just another pretty face,’ said Hugh Terris, one of her former journalism lecturers, of his erstwhile charge. ‘She may be sweet but Lorraine is very direct and very sure of what she wants,’ remarked Scotland’s Daily Record reporter Roz Paterson after first meeting the woman who was fast becoming one of the most recognisable faces in Scotland.

Back then, after little more than a year in her new job, Lorraine says ambition and excitement carried her through – and her desire to succeed meant she was constantly asking her producers to find her new stories to cover, wherever and whenever they might be. But while her mum and best friend Joyce say they could tell that she was thriving, Lorraine admitted that the role did take a heavy toll on her personal life and even her health: ‘It was physically and emotionally hard. I had no social life and I could never get blootered. And being on call twenty-four hours a day meant I would just grab food whenever I could – takeaways, microwave meals, bags of crisps. There was dust on my cooker for years.’

Fortunately, the TV-am crew that she tended to work with were good company. ‘Ambitious but not ruthless,’ was how one of her first producers described their on-camera talent. Others applauded the fact that Lorraine was always happy to muck in with the rest of them – and was never shy of buying a round of drinks when the cameras were off. So while she had split up with her boyfriend in her first year at TV-am – mainly because she was either away or too tired to spend time with him – she didn’t feel short of friends. After a while, one of those new friends was to become much more. Lorraine was starting to fall for her cameraman, Steve Smith, and their relationship was to move up a gear one long night in Glencoe.

The pair were filming a story about the mountain rescue teams, with Lorraine taking on the part of a victim dumped high up the mountain in a snowdrift. ‘It was a giggle, and later on we were having a few drinks in the bar when we looked at each other and, suddenly, something clicked,’ she remembers. ‘Because we had worked together for about a year and got on brilliantly as friends, I always say it was friendship at first sight. And it was all the better for that.’

For his part, Steve reckons he could have blown his chances by coming up with what the couple still jokingly refer to as the least likely chat-up line in history. ‘Do you fancy coming to see Dundee United play Hearts?’ he asked at the bar that night. Fortunately Lorraine said ‘Yes’ without missing a beat. And so the following weekend they wrapped up warm, headed off to Tannadice Park and sat through one of the dullest draws of the season.

‘Steve was mortified because he thought I would never want to see him or United again,’ Lorraine says. ‘But I was hooked on them both – I had found the whole day really romantic and I’d really enjoyed everything about the game.’ And so the girl whose father had taken her to Rangers’ games more than a decade earlier got ready to switch her allegiance. Lorraine knows far more about football than many people might expect. She remembers well all the big names at Rangers, including the likes of Derek Johnstone and Derek Parlane, who played in the first games she watched. And years later, she still harks back to the glory days at Dundee. ‘United played brilliant football back in the 1980s. They had the likes of David Narey, Paul Hegarty and Paul Sturrock when he was still skinny and beautiful. Virtually every single player in that United team had come up through the ranks and was so committed. That’s what attracted me to the team after Steve had taken me there for the first time and turned me into a lifelong fan.’

For the next twenty-five years and beyond, Lorraine would follow Dundee United’s fortunes – calling herself an ‘eternal optimist’ in the bad times and even ringing up local radio stations in the town to offer her advice on the latest club crisis. She also raised some eyebrows when she said she always wore her favourite ‘lucky tartan knickers’ when the team was playing key games – even if she was miles away in England or overseas at the time.

Lorraine and Steve’s next big date in 1985 was a little bit more romantic than an evening on the terraces at Tannadice. They were both in line for a rare weekend off, so they decided to head west to Mull where they found a tiny, isolated hotel. ‘We went for a long walk and got drenched. But later we ate Mull cheese on homemade oatcakes and drank a cracking bottle of red wine in bed. It was fab,’ she remembers.

Back at work and back on call the pair decided they should move in together, and started a gypsy existence that would characterise and cement their relationship for the next five years. ‘I still had my tiny rabbit hutch of a flat in Glasgow, about ten minutes from the studio, so we lived there during the week and then we moved into Steve’s flat in Dundee at weekends,’ Lorraine says. A clever division of labour provided instant domestic bliss: having survived on beans on toast as a single girl she was more than happy to let Steve cook meat, two veg and all the trimmings every night now they were a couple. ‘Basically, I was happy to let Steve do the cooking while I opened the wine,’ she says. ‘He can cook a curry to die for while I can open the wine faster than anyone I know. So we made a good team.’

After their first, blissful weekend away together in Mull, the couple’s joint holidays were not always to prove so successful, however. Desperate to escape the Scottish winter, but both still utterly broke, the most they could afford for their first big trip was a week in Tunisia – in January. It was the lowest of the low season and while the hotel looked idyllic in the brochure, basically it was still being built. There was scaffolding up one side of it and the sound of drilling was deafening. To make matters worse, it was in the middle of nowhere, there were no shops or even a beach nearby. ‘Then we saw our room and it looked like a prison cell with two single beds, a tiny window and not enough room to swing a bikini. It was cloudy and wet when we arrived, the bad weather didn’t lift and it took ages to trek to the nearest town. We spent a lot of time hungry.’

With hindsight, the pair say it might have been better if they had stayed this way – because when they did start eating things got even worse. ‘After one very bad meal we both got terrible food poisoning and were quite literally fighting over the bathroom for the next three days,’ Lorraine says of the Tunisian experience.

Relationship experts say these kinds of disasters can either force couples apart or tie them even closer together. For Lorraine and Steve it was the latter. ‘The whole holiday was utterly miserable and probably the most unromantic experience imaginable but I did think that if we still loved each other after that we could survive anything,’ says Lorraine.

As it turned out, the trip would set the tone for almost all of the pair’s future holidays. ‘It seems as if every time we go away together we end up in casualty,’ Lorraine says. The following year, for example, the pair had a bit more cash to spend and flew out to stay in some beach huts in Thailand. Steve hit his head on a boat and needed medical treatment – and while some sympathy from Lorraine might have been in order he wasn’t going to get it. ‘He came out of hospital after having stitches and I burst out laughing. They had bandaged his head and tied the spare bandage into a bow so it looked as if he had these huge, stupid ears like Mickey Mouse. It was hysterical – or at least it was to me,’ she remembers.

Back at work, their love affair started to give them a surprising career boost. For some time the TV-am bosses had been praising Lorraine and her crew not just for being ready to cover any story, anywhere, but for almost always beating the rival stations and being first on the scene. Lorraine decided it was only fair to explain why this was. ‘While other crews were trying to track down their cameraman, I had mine tucked up in bed with me,’ she joked to colleagues.

* * * * *

While so much was going well in her life and her career, Lorraine did have one worry as she approached her mid-twenties. She was finding it harder to ignore the fact that she needed glasses. ‘My mum, dad and brother all wore them and for years I thought I had escaped. But the television screens were getting more blurred and I had to do something about it,’ she said. Armed with a prescription she set out to choose her first pair – and made an immediate fashion error. ‘I decided that if I had to have glasses then I might as well go for ones with enormous frames. They were just a bog standard price, nothing posh, but they were massive. I thought they were so fashionable but I basically looked like the Fearless Fly.’

Unfortunately, this turned out to be only half the problem. Because she wasn’t used to having glasses, she kept sitting on them, dropping them and treading on them. ‘In the end I had to keep them together with sticking plaster and was going around looking like Coronation Street’s Jack Duckworth. I couldn’t possibly wear them on screen so just before I was due to do a report I used to whip them off and hand them to the cameraman.’

But in a moment worthy of her comedy favourite, Lucille Ball, Lorraine admits that things didn’t always go this smoothly. ‘My job back then really wasn’t glamorous, whatever it might have looked like on screen. One time we were halfway up a mountain in the freezing cold, doing an early morning report and I had hurt my neck so I was wearing a surgical collar and three coats to keep warm. I handed the cameraman two of the coats, then the surgical collar but almost forgot my Jack Duckworth glasses.’

Her cameraman that morning – as he was most mornings – was Steve. Because he was so used to seeing his girlfriend in her Fearless Fly glasses, he nearly forgot about them as well, but at the last moment he remembered. Lorraine handed them over and viewers were spared what both said would not have been a pretty sight over breakfast.

Being able to laugh about incidents like this made the pair’s professional and personal relationship even stronger. Best pal Joyce says it was clear that this was a love affair built to last – even though a few sudden separations were to put it to an unexpected test.

The first split came in 1987, when Lorraine spent two months in America as part of a major leap up the career ladder. TV-am was grooming her for a bigger role and wanted to see if she had what it took to cover news, human interest, entertainment and political stories from overseas. She spent half her posting in Los Angeles, half in Washington DC, and unwittingly proved herself to be more serious about her job than many of her new American colleagues.

‘I was doing a piece at the White House, a serious news piece about American politics, and they asked if I could run through it all again. The American cameraman was really concerned about the first version so I was worried that maybe I hadn’t got my head around the politics or hadn’t said it well enough. But it was nothing like that. He was just worried that my hair looked a bit messy. Now I don’t care how many hairs I have out of place as long as it’s not distracting to viewers, but in the States they seemed more interested in the way that I looked than in what I was saying.’

Shortly after coming back to Scotland and back on permanent call for TV-am, Lorraine was sent back to the airport. She was flown out to New York for one of the station’s flagship celebrity interviews, this time with Annie Lennox at the height of her Eurhythmics fame. What the two women couldn’t believe, after the interview was in the can, was that neither of them had needed to be in the USA after all. ‘Annie had been in Aberdeen, where she was living back then, and I had been in Dundee. Neither of us could believe they had flown us thousands of miles for the interview when we had started out just a few miles down the road from each other. Not that we were complaining, of course.’

Lorraine’s next two flights illuminated both the serious and the exciting sides of her job. The first was when she climbed nervously into a helicopter before dawn one morning to fly out to cover the story of another helicopter’s fatal crash. The second, shortly afterwards, came when she pulled on a G-suit to do an interview in a Hunter jet being flown – sometimes upside down – through the valleys and over the lochs of the Highlands. It was exhilarating stuff and it looked as if a whole lot more was on the cards.

* * * * *

TV-am bosses sent Lorraine to the company doctor for cholera, polio, yellow fever and tetanus jabs. After her successes in LA, Washington and New York they were ready to give her a roving international role, adding her to their roster of proven, reliable reporters who could cover any story, in any part of the world and at any time. But as it turned out the jabs were hardly needed. Because in 1987 and 1988 all the big news stories of the moment seemed to happen in Scotland. TV-am wanted Lorraine first on the spot to cover each of them.

The first flared up in October 1987 when rioting erupted at Peterhead Prison in the north east of the country. Around 50 of the jail’s most dangerous prisoners took control of the infamous D Block and the SAS was ultimately sent in to break up the siege. Similar mini riots broke out across the country over the next few months, with Lorraine reporting live on almost all of them.

On 6 July 1988, however, an even bigger story broke. Just before 10pm a series of explosions were reported some 120 miles off the north-east coast of Scotland. The Piper Alpha oil rig was ablaze, with smoke and flames soaring 350 feet into the night sky. A huge rescue operation was launched, with around 30 helicopters and boats heading out to what was the largest and oldest oil platform in the North Sea.

Early reports said some 225 men were working on the Occidental Oil rig, and when Lorraine and her crew arrived in Aberdeen in time for the live broadcasts the following morning it seemed that precious few had been brought back alive. The first interviews she carried out were with the coastguard and emergency service staff who were coordinating the rescue. She followed this by speaking to the oil bosses and engineers who described the structure itself and its likely condition after such a fierce explosion. Then, most memorably, came the families of the missing workers, the hospital staff who were helping survivors, and the bereaved.

Lorraine remained in Aberdeen for three weeks that summer, broadcasting every day in the aftermath of what was the worst North Sea oil disaster ever seen. Along with other reporters, such as the BBC’s Mike Donkin, Lorraine and her crew did take risks. Four days after the explosion, for example, she was called to a helicopter launch pad at 4.30am for a safety briefing before being flown out to sea and past the smouldering rig itself. They landed on Texaco’s Tartan platform, the closest to Piper Alpha, the first reporters to have got this close to the scene of the tragedy and the first to fly past it. After four hours on Tartan, filming and interviewing the workers there, they flew back over the North Sea to Aberdeen.

‘There was total silence in the helicopter as we passed Piper Alpha,’ said the Texaco director of the tense journey. By then the scale of the disaster had become more apparent. A total of 59 people were brought back alive from the rig – but 167 were not. The town of Aberdeen was in shock and mourning, and Lorraine continued to be in the middle of the debate as everyone tried to piece together exactly what had happened and how it could be prevented from ever occurring again.

Heading back to Glasgow in August 1998, Lorraine was mentally and physically exhausted, but more was to come: ‘I thought the Piper Alpha catastrophe was the worst human tragedy I would ever see, that I would never again tackle anything as awful. Then, of course, in the winter came Lockerbie.’