Cover story
Putting paid to preconceptions, TV presenter and new novelist Lorraine Kelly on sex, swearing and her husband’s selfless commitment to checking her boobs!
While wild camping in Zimbabwe last September, after finishing the final edit of her debut novel, Lorraine Kelly needed Wi-Fi to file the manuscript to her publisher.
But when the staff at an anti-poaching station near the Zambezi River refused her request for access, the TV presenter had a light-bulb moment.
‘I got out my phone and pulled up a photograph of myself with David Attenborough,’ recalls Lorraine, 64. ‘The chap went, “You’ve met David Attenborough?” and I went, “I have indeed, I’ve interviewed him. He’s a smashing fellow.”’
Wi-Fi promptly granted, Lorraine met her submission deadline and today, at her woman&home cover shoot at a magnificent house close to her Buckinghamshire home, a printed copy of The Island Swimmer sits on the make-up table before her.
‘We’ve got David Attenborough to thank for that. He has no idea of his power!’ laughs Lorraine, adding how she put her ‘heart and soul’ into the story, which is set in Orkney and follows lead character Evie as she confronts childhood trauma through the power of cold-water swimming, a hobby that Lorraine also enjoys.
As well as her book – the first of a two-part deal – 2024 marks Lorraine’s 40th year in TV, and with her cameraman husband, Steve Smith, who she met in 1984 after joining breakfast show TV-am as ‘a baby-faced correspondent for Scotland’.
The couple – who began dating in 1985 and share a daughter, writer and podcaster Rosie Smith, 29 – covered huge national stories, including the 1988 Piper Alpha oil rig disaster and, later that year, the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie.
Today, while retired Steve, 64, ‘looks after all the house stuff’, Lorraine still works flat-out on >>
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the weekday ITV morning programme she utterly adores. ‘I’m not going to work thinking, “Another day at the coal face.” I’m meeting incredibly interesting people and surrounded by a wonderful creative team,’ enthuses Lorraine. ‘As Michael Palin says, the best thing you can have in the world is curiosity. Don’t ever lose your curiosity because it takes you everywhere.’
Warm, enthusiastic and with her finger on the nation’s pulse, Lorraine is also, as we gloriously discover during five hours in her company, no holds barred, hilarious and occasionally X-rated (yes, really!). Read on to unveil the rarely seen side of Britain’s best-loved daytime TV queen.
It was a dream to write a novel.
I’ve always said I wanted to be a novelist but I couldn’t carve out the time, especially when Rosie was young.
