Eight things we learned from Lorraine Kelly’s Desert Island Discs

The BAFTA-winning broadcaster Lorraine Kelly has been waking up Britain for more than 30 years, but behind the warmth and laughter of breakfast TV is a story of grit, resilience and curiosity. On Desert Island Discs she talks about growing up in a Glasgow tenement, being on the front line on some of the UK’s darkest news days, and the beloved daily show that bears her name.

Here are eight things we learned from her Desert Island Discs.

When Lorraine moved to the Scottish town of East Kilbride at 13, she didn’t know a soul. “It was a massive secondary school, over a thousand pupils. I thought, ‘How do I make friends?’ And it was through David Bowie. There was a gang of Bowie fans. I found my tribe.”

She embroidered his name on her duffle coat and sometimes put the iconic Ziggy Stardust circle on her forehead. “If it hadn’t been for Bowie, I probably would’ve been really lonely.”

Her deep love of Bowie leads her to choose Starman as her first disc. “When he pointed his finger [directly at the camera] on Top of the Pops and sang, ‘I had to call someone and I picked on you,’ I honestly thought he was talking to me.”

2. Things could have turned out differently for baby Lorraine

Lorraine’s parents Anne and John were just 18 when they met, she tells presenter Lauren Laverne. “She got a job in a record shop, he was an apprentice TV engineer and he took her out dancing. One thing led to another, and my mum found herself pregnant.”

Then they had to break the news to Anne’s mum, known as Granny Mac. “She was a very, very formidable woman. She wanted my mum to have the baby – which was me – put up for adoption. And my wee dad, who was from the Gorbals, with his Elvis haircut and his wee suit and his wee pointy winkle-picker shoes like something out of Aladdin, he goes up to the scariest woman in the world and says, ‘No, we're going to get married!’”

And they did: Anne and John were married in July 1959 and Lorraine was born in November. Lorraine laughs, “I always remember when I was old enough counting on my fingers, and my mum would go, ‘You were premature!’”

3. She’s obsessed with Antarctica

“My dad got me my first telescope when I was five,” Lorraine says. “I was into all of that – space, science. Antarctica is an obsession of mine. I’ve loved Ernest Shackleton since I was a kid.” Lorraine has a library of books about Shackleton and keeps his account of famous Antarctic expedition South: The Story of Shackleton's Last Expedition 1914-1917 by her bedside. She even chooses South as the book she’d like to take to the desert island.

4. She honed her journalistic skills at the local newspaper

Lorraine started out as a reporter at the East Kilbride News covering “everything from judging the bonnie baby competition to reviewing the rep theatre to sitting in council meetings. Oh jeez, that was dull. That was when the clock went backwards.”

She loved the hands-on nature of local journalism. “It was hot metal rather than computers. You’d go and put the paper to bed. I felt like a real inky-fingered hack.”

5. She was told she’d never be successful in TV with her accent

While working as a local journalist, Lorraine was desperate to get a job at the BBC, applying for every job that was advertised – even farming correspondent. “I wouldn't have known one end of a cow from another,” she laughs.

Lorraine Kelly in the Desert Island Discs Studios.

He went, ‘Nope. You're never going to be a reporter. Maybe if you take elocution lessons, but you're never going to make it in telly with that accent.’

Lorraine recalls being told she wouldn't make it in TV.

Her tenacity paid off; in 1983 she got her first TV job as a researcher, even though it came with a pay cut. “I worked as a waitress at night for a pound an hour to pay the mortgage.”

She loved the job, and wanted to be a news correspondent, but was eventually called into the boss’s office. “He just took his glasses down and looked over them. He went, ‘Nope. You're never going to be a reporter. Maybe if you take elocution lessons, but you're never going to make it in telly with that accent.’ I was absolutely crushed.” But the next day she heard there was a job going as an onscreen reporter at TV-am – and got the job.

6. TV in the eighties was an old-school environment

Working in an office of two kept Lorraine very busy: “I'd get mail in the office and it would say, ‘Head of Politics’. Oh, that would be me. ‘Head of Sport’. Me again. ‘Industrial Correspondent’. That'll be me,” she laughs. “But it was amazing because in a newsroom back then, women of my age wouldn't be allowed near a big news story. They would do the funny wee bit at the end, or the girly story, whatever that may be. So, it was an amazing learning curve.”

And the job required some strange methods in order to get the stories from Glasgow to the London office. “We would send the cassettes in an envelope. I would go to the airport, find a pilot — British Airways, British Midland — and say, ‘Is there any way you can take this with you? Somebody will be at the other end to pick it up.’” She laughs now. “I know it’s insane!”

7. She had a special chemistry with her first on screen co-host

Lorraine began presenting Good Morning Britain alongside Mike Morris in 1990. They forged a strong working relationship, developing secret codes to help navigate live interviews.

“Mike was a very kind, very generous, underrated presenter. We got to the stage where we could finish each other’s sentences. I knew when he was going to do a follow up question, obviously I’m not going to stand on that. I will lean back. And we had this kind of thing where if he asked the first question and I wanted to ask the second question, I would tap him on his leg and if he leaned back, I could jump in but if he leaned forward, he had something else to say.”

8. She still feels like an outsider — even with an OBE

Lorraine has been honoured with an OBE, a CBE and a BAFTA Special Award, but says the imposter feeling never goes away. “I still feel as if I don’t really belong here. Somebody’s going to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m terribly sorry, there’s been a mistake. You have to leave. You’re not good enough.’”

And she worries now about whether a career like hers could happen. With recent cuts to TV broadcasting, “there’s a whole raft of working-class people being left behind,” Lorraine says. “These kids can’t afford to come to London. Therefore, they cannot get the jobs they absolutely should be allowed to do.”

The cultural cost? “Enormous. If you’re only going to hear elite opinions, we’re never gonna get anywhere.”