Breakfast television is as woven into Britain’s cultural fabric as crumpets: in the ’90s, The Big Breakfast was the back drop to hectic mornings before school or college. In the noughties, we woke up to GMTV or This Morning and today, some of us start the day heckling Piers Morgan as he cosies up to Donald Trump et al on Good Morning Britain.
Now, the long-reigning queen of Sky News, Kay Burley, has joined the early bird ranks with her own breakfast show in Westminster – and something tells me she hasn’t got any new job jitters.
‘I said to Piers the other day, “You’ve been the bad boy of breakfast for too long. You need to move aside, boy, because I’m going to give those politicians a hard time now,”’ she says triumphantly.
And why would she be nervous? She’s done more live TV than anyone in the world and has covered just about every major news story, from royal births to Brexit.
When we meet in an upmarket restaurant in Central London, it’s funny to think the formidable interviewer who eats politicians for breakfast is the same petite, polite woman buttering her bread next to me. Earlier that day, a clip of her show went viral after she shut down the Labour MP Richard Burgon. ‘The polls say you won’t win,’ she said, discussing a possible December election – to which he replied, ‘The polls said we wouldn’t win last time.’ ‘You didn’t,’ she clipped back in the brisk style that’s become her trademark.
It’s a slice of TV that perfectly sums up her terse tactics and water-o -a-duck’s-back approach. Saying that, three decades in the business hasn’t quashed the excitement she still feels about some of her guests. We meet a few days before she interviews Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon ahead of the launch of their new Apple TV show, The Morning Show – which is about an older, female news reader (Aniston) being replaced by a younger woman (Witherspoon).
‘How lucky am I?’ Kay beams. ‘I adore both of them; they’re spectacular actresses. Although I would have thought Meryl Streep would have been good for the older role and then Jennifer Aniston for the other role. And then they could have found something for Reese Witherspoon. I don’t think seven years is much of a gap to suggest an older woman is being pushed out by a younger woman.'
Parallels between her own role as a 58-year-old woman with a news show and The Morning Show’s themes of sexism and ageism don’t pass her by. She’s planning on talking to Aniston ‘about the fact I’m a woman of a certain age that’s doing that role now and what top tips is she going to give me. Maybe she’ll ask me for mine,’ she says.
The generation of female broadcasters before Burley were generally shooed off the newsroom sofas as soon as they hit 45. Does she worry that it’s only a matter of time until she is replaced with a younger model?
‘No, because I believe I’m good at what I do,’ she says. ‘I’ve worked really hard to find myself in the position that I’m in. Obviously TV is a visual medium so you need to look the part, but I don’t have an [exercise] regime in order to please people who are watching me on the telly. I like to look as good as I can for as long as I possibly can [for me]. Do I worry about youngsters coming up? No, absolutely not.'
‘A lot of people have helped me along the way, so I think my role now is to help youngsters, be that men or women. People often say to me, “Can we go out for a coffee and I’ll ask you a few questions,” and I always say, “Absolutely not. But if you make it a glass of wine then we’re on.”’
Still, since starting her new job two weeks earlier, she doesn’t drink on a weeknight any more. Considering she sets her first of four alarms at 3.55am, it’s easy to understand why. Her morning routine includes reading Politico’s London Playbook, HuffPost, Twitter,The Times, the FT... ‘Then I’m more or less up to speed. ere’s always stuff you don’t know,’ she says.
Once she’s in the office, she’ll have a Pret porridge and a chat with her colleague, political correspondent Tamara Cohen, about the guests who are due on (‘I’m deeply saddened that the Prime Minister is still avoiding me,’ she says, referring to the fact that Boris Johnson has hardly been doing any interviews) while she has her make-up done. She doesn’t really get nervous, she says.
After the show, she’ll walk her dogs and do some exercise. ‘I do this really good one where you lie on the floor and get up again without touching the floor with your hands. I do 50 on each leg.’ She’ll watch The Chase and listen to the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 news, before ending with Sky News and going to sleep around 8.30pm – ready for another day grilling the people who are running our country.
At a time when one misjudged comment can get you ‘cancelled’ and trolls can torment you from the second you wake up, I tell her I can’t think of a more anxiety-inducing job than being on live TV every day.
‘I couldn’t care less,’ she says, bluntly. ‘I couldn’t give a toss. If I have done something wrong, my family or Stuart [head of PR at Sky] will be the first to tell me. If I don’t think I’ve overstepped the mark and they tell me that I have, I will think again about that. I really, really don’t care what middle-aged men with no hair, with their balcony bellies, think when they’re sitting in their basement waiting for their mum to call them up for their tea.
She confesses she found it very difficult to stay composed when Princess Diana died: ‘I knew her a little bit,’ she says
It’s just as well she’s thick-skinned, but I wonder how her only child, Alexander, 25, finds having a famous mum. She says he can get frustrated when people stop them to ask her for selfies: ‘My son doesn’t like it very much because he’s a very private child.'
For most of his life, she has been a single mother with a very demanding job. How did she manage while he was growing up?
‘I didn’t ever think “this is too hard”. I used to have male nannies because I thought it was important to have testosterone around for a young kid. If I ever had to go somewhere at the drop of a hat, he was always well looked after. I don’t have any working mother guilt at all and we have a spectacular relationship now.'
Still, it’s inevitable we all have off days – it must be hard to be a cheery presenter when something is going on in your private life, but on live TV you don’t get much of a choice. ‘You don’t need to know if I’ve had an argument with somebody on the way to work or whatever,’ she explains. ‘But it doesn’t necessarily have to be in your personal life. It could be a story that’s just happened.’
She confesses she found it very difficult to stay composed when Princess Diana died: ‘I knew her a little bit,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t process my own emotions at the time. How she was the same age as me. I could only think about her boys walking behind the coffin. I don’t know what she would think about what’s going on now... [with them] on “separate paths” as they put it. I know that she was such a caring mother that she would be stepping in to try and sort it out.’
It’s clear there’s a softness behind Burley’s steeliness. She’s direct and self-assured; there are no ‘ums’ or ‘errms’ between my questions and her answers. But she’s also convivial and seems to want to put me at ease.
I believe her when she says she doesn’t want to rule the roost, but help the younger women and men coming up behind her. Bad news for anyone trying to knock her off the top spot though, as I’ve got a feeling she’s going to be the bad gal of breakfast for a while to come. ‘I just signed a new ve-year contract,’ she says. ‘I ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.’
Kay Burley@Breakfast is on from 7am to 9am, Monday to Thursday, on Sky News.
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