On court with Lorraine Kelly

Lorraine Kelly may never have played tennis until a few weeks ago, but in December she’s set to take part in an all-star match at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s yet another challenge for the TV presenter who is never afraid to have a go

LORRAINE KELLY’S a plucky sort. Looking for someone to trek across a Kenyan desert in aid of Comic Relief? She’s your girl. A famous face to launch Armed Forces Day in Edinburgh? Call Lorraine. In true Bridget Jones style, she was winched on to Calton Hill from a helicopter, then ordered across an army assault course before firing the One O’Clock Gun at Edinburgh Castle. “I’ll count you down from five,” they said. But the minute an overexcited Kelly heard “Fi…” she fired. That might be the last time they trust a civilian with the gun.

A veteran of four marathons, numerous MoonWalks (her decorated bras are the stuff of legend) and all manner of crazy breakfast telly exploits, it still comes as something of a surprise to discover the Gorbals-born television presenter didn’t always aspire to interviewing Hollywood legends and lottery winners on her red sofa.

“I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid,” she says, “but it was 1977 and I was a girl.” So she found her way into newspapers instead.

She has, incidentally, been up in a Tornado aircraft, as part of what she calls “the best job in the world” but her latest adventure is more down-to-earth. Along with Denise Lewis, Jamie Theakston and Tim Lovejoy, she’s learning to play tennis for the AllPlay Challenge, part of which is an all-star match at the Royal Albert Hall in December. On just her fifth lesson, she looks like she’s doing pretty well from where I’m standing, on the sidelines at the David Lloyd Centre in Dundee.

“I wish I’d done it years ago because I’m really enjoying it,” she says. “When they said to me, ‘How do you fancy tennis lessons?’ I said, ‘Brilliant.’ I’m 51 now and when you get to this age you want to be doing exercise but you don’t want to be doing anything you don’t like. Although I’ve done marathons, it’s laughable. I mean, my times were like five and a half hours and stuff like that. And it was really, really hard – so tough on my knees. You never see a happy runner, do you?” An added bonus is what it’s doing for her bingo wings. “It’s great for your arms,” she says. “I’ve always had a thing about my upper arms – even in my twenties, thirties and forties. But I wore a sleeveless dress for the first time ever a couple of weeks ago.”

As the poster girl for the nation’s curvy girls, she is surprisingly tiny. “She’s so small!” gasp the elderly ladies who stop to gawp as she’s taken through her paces on court. (Note: not “nice forehand return but her serve could do with a bit of work”, but rather: “Do you think she’d fit in my pocket so I could take her home?” That’s the price you pay for being the nation’s sweetheart.) “I’ve always been a 12 to 14,” she protests. “But since the trek, I lost so much weight and I think it’s done something to my metabolism. I got terrible mouth ulcers with the malaria tablets. I could hardly eat. Then when I came back the ulcers took an awful long time to go away so, while I was eating, it was stuff like soups and smoothies and things like that.”

I ask if, in an industry obsessed with keeping young and beautiful, she has ever felt under pressure to lose weight. “Not at all – but only because of the time of day I work. Breakfast telly is so different to any other form of media. I was on TV when I was pregnant 18 years ago and I was huge – I was like an Easter egg on legs – but no-one bothered.

“Then when I came back – I mean, people were still asking me when the baby was due – but there was never any pressure. The only pressure has ever been from me myself, when I know I’m unhealthy.” Her daughter, Rosie, is now 17, and in her last year at school in Dundee, where Kelly lives with her husband, cameraman Steve Smith.

“She’s interested in politics and she’s interested in journalism because she’s grown up with that. So she’s looking to do something like that, but she’s still young. And it’s hard out there, really hard.

“It was kind of the same when I was leaving school, when we were just going into the last big recession in the late 1970s early 1980s. I was very lucky to get a job on the local newspaper, the East Kilbride News, as a cub reporter getting thruppence a week. And I loved it. Absolutely loved every minute of it. I was there for about four years and learned so much.”

From there she moved to BBC Scotland – taking a cut in wages that forced her to work as a waitress in the evenings to make ends meet. “I was the worst waitress in Glasgow but I was good comedy value.”

After eight months a colleague told her she’d never make it in television because of her strong Scottish accent. And, as we have already discovered, our Lorraine likes a challenge. “You’re either the sort of person who, when someone says something like that, you accept it or you don’t. And I didn’t. I went out that afternoon and phoned Greg Dyke.” Incredibly, they put her through. “I must have sounded authoritative,” she giggles. In fact, she giggles rather a lot.

“Greg Dyke said, ‘Yeah, come down for an interview.’ By the time I went down for the interview he’d gone – it was turbulent times at TV-am and Bruce Gyngell had taken over. He said, ‘That’s what we want; we want someone with a Scottish accent,’ and he took me on.” She was at TV-am from 1985 until 1989. Since 1994 she has been hosting her own show, Lorraine, which airs on ITV from 8:30-9:30am, Monday to Thursday. The formula has remained pretty much the same over the years: a celeb interview here, a spot of fashion there and a healthy dose of human interest. “I sometimes say it’s a bit like inviting people into my home – it should be relaxing. That’s not to say I won’t ask the awkward questions, in as much as you can in six or seven minutes maximum.

“And you know what?” she says, “see for those six or seven minutes, you have to do the work. Any time I’m talking to people who want to do it, I say, ‘Don’t think because you’re doing an interview with someone for four minutes that you don’t have to do the work. You actually have to do more sometimes, because you have to be really very focused.’

“I’m not someone who enjoys the gladiatorial kind of interview. I think you can get an awful lot more out of people when you make them relaxed, when it’s more of a conversation.

“That’s not to say you give them an easy ride; you absolutely don’t. And I’m quite happy for people to underestimate me; that doesn’t bother me at all. And it used to work hugely to my advantage when I was a reporter, when they’d send me to do sport interviews; especially football; especially the Old Firm. They’d be like, ‘Oh, here’s a wee lassie.’ And I was a wee lassie, but I’ve been watching football since I was about ten. And it was quite good because their defences would be totally down.”

Among those she has interviewed, she rates George Clooney as the most delightful. “You go to the hotel, and as I was going into the room, Vanessa Feltz was coming out. You know that way some women get a rash across their chest and they’re all, ‘Oh my God, oh my God?’ She came out and said, ‘George and I have got chemistry.’ She’s a hoot, Vanessa. And I know exactly what she meant. He’s utterly charming. With George, for that ten or 15 minutes he’s talking to you, you think you are the only person in the world that matters. That’s a great skill.”

Robert Downey Jr was, she muses, one of her more “wacky” interviewees, beginning their chat by announcing: “Your tits look great.” And, indeed, he’s not the only one to have noticed. The Kelly curves even have their own Twitter account. “So my husband tells me,” she giggles. “I think it’s hilariously funny. I’m not in any way offended. Considering my age, I’m the mother of a teenage girl, I think it’s just really, really funny.” And, to be fair, she’s rather proud of what God saw fit to bestow on her. “They’re not bad; they’re still perky. I’m very lucky, I think it’s more to do with good genes, because my mum looks ludicrously young.”

So, while she may not have been allowed to be a fighter pilot, it’s fair to say Lorraine Kelly has fulfilled most of her dreams. But what happens when it all, inevitably, must end? “I can’t believe how long it’s lasted. It’s been bloody brilliant and I’ll do it for as long as people want to watch, but I know it won’t last forever. I’d love to do some radio, and to write a novel. But that’s a proper nine-to-five job and I’d have to be doing nothing else. It would be something like – I should be so lucky to be so talented – but kind of Maeve Binchy stories, page-turners. It’s all about relationships and it’s so real and true. I couldn’t write about breakfast telly because, honestly, no- one would believe what was going on.”

• To follow Kelly’s progress in the AllPlay Challenge, or find a playing partner, a court or coach, register for free at www.allplaytennis.com. The finale match is at the Royal Albert Hall during the Aegon Masters, 30 November to 4 December