Born in Glasgow, Lorraine Kelly has worked in journalism since she turned down a university place to join the East Kilbride News at the age of 17. The 62-year-old became Scotland correspondent for TV-am in 1984, and joined GMTV when it launched in 1993. Since 2010, she has presented Lorraine on ITV.
What was the best thing you did on screen last year?
To be honest, just keeping going and still being able to do my job through the pandemic. Covid got very close to us with what happened with Kate [Garraway and her husband, Derek Draper, who was hospitalised for more than a year], and a lot of our crew have been affected in some way, so we had to be very careful. Video calls have definitely made interviewees more accessible, though – I did lots of big, big stars on Zoom from their houses. I’d be in my house in my slippers, and there’s George Clooney, or Pierce Brosnan in his house in Hawaii. It made it feel more human – you could be like: “Oh, I have that book too!” I also made a documentary, Return to Dunblane, which was something I really wanted to do. What the families did there to change the law was a remarkable achievement – they made something positive out of something unimaginably horrific. I think the fact that I did hard news for years and I was a correspondent was the best training. If you can report on something like Dunblane or Lockerbie, you can do anything.
