‘I'm like the TV Lorraine - just more sweary': at home with the queen of the small screen

The Guardian

08-03-2025

Lorraine Kelly opens the front door with a huge smile. 'You interviewed me, years ago, d'you remember?' Now she looks disappointed. 'Ach, you don't, do you?' Of course I remember. And she's hardly changed. I've brought a photo of us on the GMTV sofa to show her. Back then, she'd just turned 40, was a staple of breakfast telly and was about to launch her own show; a household name, if not quite the mononym she is today. Now she's 65, her show is still on ITV five mornings a week, and last year she was awarded a lifetime achievement Bafta. Oh, and she's just reinvented herself as a bestselling novelist. The Island Swimmer, which reached No 2 in the Sunday Times hardback fiction charts, is about to come out in paperback.
'So how've you been?' she asks. Kelly is the kind of person who you can pick up with where you left off a quarter of a century ago. She's also the kind of person you feel you know, even when you don't. Perhaps that's been her great gift as a TV presenter. She was a good journalist as Scotland correspondent for TV-am but not outstanding. She's a decent interviewer, but she won't be remembered for her incisive interrogations or scoops. What she is brilliant at, though, is being Lorraine – warm, likable, nosy, funny, occasionally steely and sharp-tongued, sometimes potty-mouthed and always 100% herself. Which is why it was a shock in 2019 when she told a tax court that the Lorraine on TV is different from the real Lorraine; that on television she performs the role 'of a friendly, chatty and fun personality'.
Her Buckinghamshire cottage, backing on to the Thames, is as you might expect – plush but super homely. Inside, there are big comfy sofas and piles of illustrated cushions (one is of a saintly looking Dolly Parton, another of Angus the dog is captioned: 'This house is solely for the convenience of our border terrier'). Paintings of Angus, daughter Rosie and her husband of 33 years, Steve, adorn the walls. You can't move for family photos – her grandparents dressed to the nines; her newlywed parents gorgeous at 18; Rosie with her baby daughter Billie. She dotes over the last photo. 'See, I am a real Granny Smith!' she says. I look at her, puzzled. 'That's my married name! Steve is Steve Smith.' I'm already beginning to see the difference between Lorraine Kelly the TV show presenter and Lorraine Smith, wife, mum and grandma.
Daytime TV regulars will know just how obsessed she is with being a grandmother. She can't stop talking about it. Wow, I didn't know you were a gran, I say. Now it's her turn to give me a look. 'You cheeky bugger. Well it is the best thing that's happened to me.'
The Island Swimmer is pure fiction – a romantic mystery about a woman returning to her home in Orkney after leaving unexpectedly many years ago. And yet look at the photos, explore her home, and you can see bits of Kelly's life in the book. The photo of her parents reminds me of the parents of the book's protagonist Evie and her older sister Liv, with whom she has a troubled relationship. Kelly stops at another photograph – this time herself as a six-year-old with her baby brother Graham. 'That's me looking dead happy that my wee brother's here! I look like a demon.' Blimey, I say, you look just how I imagine the young Liv would in her furious jealousy. She bursts out laughing. 'Yessssssss! Hahahaha! It's me as a child, oh my God!' It is exactly how she felt – he was the golden child, and she had been usurped. She admits it inspired the relationship between Evie and Liv. 'My nose was put out of joint when he was born. But now I really like him. He just makes me laugh so much.' What did he think when he read the book? 'He thought it was hilarious. It's not his thing, but he enjoyed it.'' In the book, Liv is accused of attempting to drown Evie. Did she ever try to drown Graham? 'Oh no! It wasn't that bad.'
Above the spices shelf in the kitchen, bottles of whisky are lined up like a military platoon. Which is her favourite? 'I like Highland Park.' Highland Park gets an honourable mention in the book. 'But Steve and I are not guzzlers of whisky,' she says. What's their favourite tipple? 'G&T,' she says. Funny how G&T is the drink of choice for a number of your characters, I say. 'Well you have to write about what you know!'
She and Steve used to work together as part of a small team when they were young – him as the cameraman, she as the journalist. 'I knew right away as soon as he walked in the door. This wee fella from Dundee, I thought, yep that's him, thanks very much! Then it took me a year, but I got him in the end.' Why did it take her so long? 'It was a small working environment, there were only five of us. It was awkward.' What was special about him? 'He's the kindest man. He's funny, he makes me laugh a lot, he puts up with me, he's very stable.'
On with the guided tour. There's a whole shelf of books dedicated to the explorer Ernest Shackleton. 'I'm obsessed with him. Always have been.' Kelly doesn't like standing still. She moves as quickly as she talks. We stop at the magnets on her fridge – souvenirs from places she's been to. One of her favourites is Twatt in Orkney. 'I love that there's a place called Twatt, as if you couldn't love Orkney enough.' She moves on to a photo of Steve with Billie. 'That's my husband with baby Billie, when she was just born. But I don't like to talk about Billie, as you know. Even though she is the best thing ever.' Is it better than being a mum? 'When you're a mum you don't know what you're doing. Now you have all the love and you don't have any fear.'
Angus is barking at the door. 'Come and say hello to Simon!' Angus trots in, yappy and affectionate. A second later Steve arrives back from a game of padel. He's a stocky, handsome man in shorts and a Dundee United top. I ask him if he's still working. 'No!' When did he retire? 'Oh God, years ago, 10 years ago or something.'
Is it true that he watches all Kelly's shows?'Yes, I do.' Is he a tough critic? 'Nooooo.'
'Noooo!' Kelly echoes. 'But it's lovely that he watches.'
Would he ever say, that was a bit shite? 'No, I don't criticise. I'll just say, well, that was a weird guest! We watch together, don't we, Angus?'
Kelly: 'You do, you're very good. As does my mother.'
Could he imagine Kelly retiring? 'No. She never will. She's a grafter. She'll always do something.'
'I do love the writing, though,' Kelly says. 'It's great if you can just get in the zone. I've been very lucky to get a chance to do it.' She's aware that she might have remained unpublished if she hadn't been well known.
Kelly's publicist had suggested we talk over lunch. I find interviewing while eating quite tricky – too convivial to ask difficult questions. Thankfully lunch consists of three Caramel bars and a Penguin. We head off into the lounge as Kelly tells me despite her 40 years in the business, she's never counted her chickens.
She was born in the Gorbals, spent her early years in Glasgow and then moved to East Kilbride 20-odd miles away. Her father was a TV engineer and her mother a shop assistant; they were the talk of the tenement when they were the first family to get a colour television in the late 60s. 'Everybody came to our living room to watch this Frank Sinatra concert.' She says her mum and dad seemed cooler than most of her friends' parents, partly because they were younger and partly because they were into Dylan rather than Mantovani.
She was a bright child – though not as bright as Graham. She would have been the first in the family to go to university, had she not got a job on the East Kilbride News at the age of 17. From the off, she loved it, and was treated as one of the lads in a predominantly male environment. In 1983, she joined BBC Scotland as a researcher, and a year later became TV-am's Scotland correspondent. It was after covering the Lockerbie disaster for TV-am that she moved to London to present Good Morning Britain in 1989.
Kelly says she has never lost the insecurity of a freelancer. She learned her lesson when she was sacked from GMTV while on maternity leave and replaced by Anthea Turner. Ever since, she's always made sure she's had something else on the go to fall back on, whether a radio show, newspaper columns or now, her novels.
'Rosie was teeny-tiny. We'd just moved south, we had a mortgage, and it was scary to have that peeled away from you. I wasn't a member of staff. I didn't have any rights. I didn't get maternity pay. I'd like to think we're a bit more enlightened these days, and that wouldn't happen.'
Cow & Gate proved to be her unlikely saviour. The processed baby milk manufacturer agreed to sponsor a slot on GMTV so long as Kelly presented it. From there, she went on to host her own show, Lorraine Live, and since then hasn't looked back.
In 2010, she launched her current show, simply called Lorraine. It's changed little in format over 15 years, though they recently decided to accentuate the positive because the world is so bleak. 'We made a conscious decision that we'll try to see the light.' She means light as opposed to dark, rather than trivial. As an example, she cites a recent guest, Auschwitz survivor Renee Salt. 'At end of the interview she said: 'I just want peace. If I've got anything to say to the world it's for goodness sake please don't let this happen again.' It was extraordinary. For someone to still have faith in human kindness and peace, wow! That teaches you a lesson, doesn't it?'
Does she worry we could see a return to fascism, with the rise of right-wing populism? 'Oh dear God! I can't believe what's going on in America. It's heartbreaking. It's being torn apart. I don't see how we can go from Obama who, for all his faults, was a good man. How did we go from this articulate, compassionate, interesting person to what we've got now? I do spend a lot of my time being baffled. I do.'
Trump has just announced his plan to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East when we meet. 'I mean …' For a moment even Kelly is lost for words. 'It is easy to be depressed about everything. That's why I think we have to get the joy where we can. I did think it was going to be OK in this country when Keir Starmer got in because I thought, OK he's a bit dull, but we need grownups. And then the first thing he did was take away the heating allowance from pensioners. What are you doing? Why would you do that?'
This is Kelly at her best – demolishing arguments or policies not with logic or facts, but with blunt rhetorical questions that reflect what so many of us think. 'Then he said things are really shit and they're going to get even shitter. We don't want to hear that.' Now she's on a roll. 'We really don't. There are ways of communicating that: 'Things are bad, we know, but don't worry because we're all trying our very best to make it better.' You don't have to overpromise and underdeliver, but you could just go, 'We're going to do our best to make it better, stick with us!' We don't want to hear all that negativity right now. We just don't. It might be me putting my head in the sand, but I don't think it is. We just need a bit of hope.'
And she's still not done. 'I don't recognise this government as a Labour government. And he keeps mythologising Margaret Thatcher which is … scary.'
Kelly has always said it the way she sees it – though perhaps not as uncompromisingly as this. I ask whether she was political as a kid. 'Oh yes, I was in the Anti-Nazi League and had CND badges. When you're young you should absolutely be saying, this isn't good, this isn't right.' Not just when you're young, I say. She nods. 'You should be shouting from the rooftops.' She looks at my plate of Caramels. 'Go on, have a biscuit.'
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Why does she think the world has become so toxic? She stares at her mobile phone, and pokes it with her finger. 'That! All the villages had idiots and extremists, but they were sitting there on their own. Now they've found their kindred spirits on this bloody thing.' She's talking even faster and her voice is getting louder. 'Jesus Christ, David Attenborough gets people being shitty to him! I mean David Attenborough, who is holding the universe together! People shout at him – climate change deniers, hunters have a go at him. And you think, well if they're having a go at him, what's the point?'
People sometimes think of you as soft and mumsy, I say. 'The mad fools! Hehehehe!' But you're pretty tough? 'I can be. Especially if I'm defending somebody or something that I believe in.' Such as? 'When people are unkind. When I was at school there was this lovely person who was our bus driver, bravest person I've met in my life. Her name was Jane. She used to be a chap and was now a trans woman. Jane got people speaking shit to her, saying offensive things. I remember saying to somebody, 'Shut your face, don't be so bloody rude.''
But, even then, she says people were more open-minded than they appear to be now. 'We were much more tolerant. Again, it's social media giving nutters a voice. It makes no sense to me. I know a fair few people who are trans and they just want to get on with their lives. I don't think trans people should have to come on the television, or be part of the debate, to justify their existence. I just think everyone has to be a bit more tolerant. That's why I put a trans person in my book.'
The elderly Freya is the wise, generous heart of The Island Swimmer. 'Freya being trans is probably the least interesting thing about her. I was keen to show she's just Freya. I love her. She's just a lovely, lovely person.' It's touching how she talks about her characters as if they are friends – or enemies. Just as she swoons over Freya, she rages over Evie's boyfriend, the controlling Jeremy. 'He's like all the horrible people I've met in my life distilled into one.' Why did she call him Jeremy? 'It's the kind of name, with apologies to all the Jeremies in the world, you think: oh, he's going to be a knob.'
She looks down at Angus, adoringly. 'Like Angus is a great name; a strong name. Apologies to everyone who can't help that their mammy called them Jeremy.' Kelly has just finished writing her second novel, and is currently editing it. She tells me proudly that she's now signed a deal for a third and fourth.
Earlier this year, she hit out at 'toxic people in telly' – particularly men. In an interview with the Mirror, she said: 'The behaviour of Gregg Wallace and other people that we've seen, should it come about as all true, is appalling.' She talked about the abuse of power and said that TV bosses who enabled this behaviour were as much to blame as the perpetrators. Last year, she said some male presenters lacked 'generosity'. Interestingly, she singled out former fellow morning TV star Phillip Schofield as one who was generous. Schofield resigned from ITV in 2023 and was dropped by his talent agency after admitting to an 'unwise, but not illegal' affair with a younger colleague. Today, she says: 'I think Phillip was awful daft. I think he made a lot of choices he shouldn't have. But all I can go by is what it was like to work with him, and it was easy. He was lovely, and I think it's really sad.'
Kelly has recently been under attack herself. She has been criticised on social media for not presenting her show five days a week. An X account called LorraineKWatch keeps track of her absences. At the end of last year, the account, which has 25,000 followers, concluded that she had only hosted 59.7% of the episodes. This year she has presented 67.5% at the time of writing. I thought she might laugh it off, but she doesn't. 'It's really hurtful actually. It really is. I've not spoken about it before. I'm a grafter and I work really hard and I've had to take Fridays off for the past year. I just thought it was weird to care so much.' Why was she taking time off? 'Initially, it was for my mum who has been ill. And it sort of brings you into line with everyone else because if you look at This Morning, everybody else does four days. And as I'm getting older, I want to do other things, more writing, all of that. Mate, I've been doing this for 40 years, working my arse off.'
I guess the difference is that your show is called Lorraine, I say. 'I get that. I get that 100% because This Morning is just called This Morning and GMB is just GMB.' But she says it does feel horribly personal. 'Maybe it just started off as a wee joke, but it's the way that everyone piles on. It starts off as a wee tiny thing and it gets bigger and bigger. I find it really sad.'
We talk about the highs. There have been so many, she says. And this is when you really see that Kelly is one of life's great enthusiasts – a professional fangirl. She talks about meeting Star Trek heroes Leonard Nimoy ('Mr Spock was my first crush!') and William Shatner; interviewing real-life space hero Buzz Aldrin; being sent to San Francisco for a zero-gravity flight for her 60th birthday; travelling to America on the QE2 with the Cure ('They were delightful – so polite and cute').
She has been groundbreaking in normalising conversation about once-taboo topics such as miscarriage and menopause. In 2017, Kelly revealed that menopause had left her feeling 'flat and joyless'. She only shared her experience because at the time she couldn't find a famous guest willing to talk about it.
Perhaps the thing we remember most from her show are the spontaneous Lorraine moments, often when doing live links with the GMB show – she told Esther McVey she didn't remember her, after the Conservative MP said they used to work together; tore a strip off Jennifer Arcuri, the businesswoman who had an affair with Boris Johnson, for saying nothing in her interview ('What's the point in you coming on and not saying anything?'). In 2023, she voiced surprise at Nigel Farage's relative youth ('Is he only 59? I thought he was a helluva lot older than that. That's astonishing. It just shows you get the face you deserve!')
I ask about the lows. She struggles to think of any. The few there have been tend to be personal. 'I had a miscarriage, which was horrible, and I went back to work too fast. That's the thing I do. I plough on. But lows, not really.' She says she would love to have had more children.
In 2019, she took HMRC to court after receiving a £1.2m tax bill. The battle was about whether she was an employee or a freelancer, and whether she appeared as a performer or herself. Kelly won the case, but for the first time she got a drubbing in the press. Judge Jennifer Dean ruled Lorraine 'presents a persona of herself' so could be described as a 'theatrical artist', meaning payments to an agent were allowed as a tax-deductible expense. Judge Dean said: 'For the time Ms Kelly is contracted to perform live on air she is public 'Lorraine Kelly'; she may not like the guest she interviews, she may not like the food she eats, she may not like the film she viewed but that is where the performance lies.' It made Kelly sound like a fake, and her USP had always been authenticity.
Was that a low? 'Yes,' she winces. 'That was horrible. But we had no choice. We took them to a tribunal because what they were trying to do was unfair. They were trying to say that I was a member of staff when I'm a freelance, so they sent me a massive tax bill.'
She says it felt like a David and Goliath battle against HMRC. 'The thing that has negated some of the stress and angst and bad publicity is that it has helped so many people – not just people in the media or famous people, but, say, hairdressers and beauticians who had been treated as staff by HMRC but were actually freelancers.' How did it affect her? 'Your peace of mind goes.'
To have argued that Lorraine is a character … I begin to say. She answers before I finish as she tends to do when she's on the defensive. 'Yes, that was weird. But that was the only way we could do it.' A lot of people took the piss out of you, I say. 'Oh, they did but that's OK.' Does she genuinely think that Lorraine is a character? Yes and no, she says. 'I am a version of me on the telly. And yes, I'm kind of like that but I'm a lot more open, a lot more sweary, and I'm not that person. There's nobody that goes on television who is themselves.' She says she's quieter in real life; less sociable. 'I am not the life and soul of the party. My husband is. I'm the first one there and the first to leave. I'm at my happiest with people I trust and know, watching something on the telly and having a nice meal.'
What really hurt about the court case, she says, was people thinking she's a tax dodger. 'I'll show you my tax returns. I pay my taxes on time every year, of course I do.' She looks at my plate. 'Have another biscuit.'
I ask Kelly if Steve was right when he said she'd never give up work. 'I would do the telly as long as people want me to do it.' Is she enjoying getting older? 'Yes!' Is her brown hair natural? 'Look, I've got grey.' Hardly any. 'I know, but my mum and granny were the same, then it just went white. Like Helen Mirren. She's beautiful, but she still looks like a normal human being. She's not got the boiled-egg face. I don't like that. I've not had anything done. I'm too scared, and I don't want to. I want to look normal, I want to look like me.' Is there any pressure to have work done? 'Not in the job I do, no. I was never hired for my looks!' She hoots with delight.
Well you say that, but you have been hailed as a sex symbol. 'Hahhaha! By whom? Blind people?' Actually, it was the Daily Mail, among others. 'Well it's very kind, I'll take that all day long.' She's also been called a gay icon. 'I'll take that all day long, too.' And she's been labelled the nation's naughty mum. 'I didn't know that. I'll take that too.' What title is she going for next? She thinks. 'Novelist of the year? No! I couldn't possibly!'
She's just delighted to still be working, still be relevant, and still be finding new things to do. 'I love this stage of my life. Especially with the wee one.' She grins. 'But I don't mention her. I like to keep that quiet!'
The Island Swimmer by Lorraine Kelly is published by Orion in paperback on 13 March. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com