TV star Lorraine Kelly explains her family comes first as she no longer works Fridays on her ITV show
Lorraine Kelly has admitted her beloved mum has “not been well” and she has reduced her workload to spend more time with her.
The ITV host has stopped working on Fridays and says it has given her more time to be a granny and to spend time with her mother, who she credits for making her so inquisitive. Lorraine was born in Glasgow on November 30, 1959 to teenage parents, mum Anne and dad in the tough Gorbals area of the city. She says mum Anne taught her to read before she even went to school which gave her a head start in life and he love of books.
Now it is Lorraine’s turn to be around for her mum when she needs her. Speaking to woman&home magazine she explained: “Not presenting on Fridays gives me a chance to breathe and brings me in line with everyone else. Phil and Holly used to do four days, lovely Ben and Cat do four.
“Susanna does four and three. I wasn’t sure about it at first because I’ve been working five days a week for 40 years. It was a wee bit of a wrench. Sometimes you’ve just got to take a step back in order to appreciate what you’ve got, and it has certainly made life a lot easier with my mum not being well. She has this horrible kidney problem, but is doing OK now. As far as looking after her goes, also with Billie and then the writing, it has been a good change.”
Anne appeared in an ITV documentary last year to celebrate Lorraine’s 40 years on screen. She recalled how she was all set to go to university until she went to work as a junior reporter at East Kilbride News. Her mum Anne remembered: “She did that and liked it and that was it, university out the window. She thoroughly enjoyed it and she was good.” Anne also still gives Lorraine constructive criticism about her interviews on TV too. Lorraine also used the magazine interview to explain why she no longer really used X, formerly twitter anymore.
Lorraine Kelly as baby with mum Anne growing up in Scotland
She said: “I don’t do X any more. It’s too toxic and life’s too short. I’m 65. It doesn’t bother me if somebody says horrible things about me, but if I was starting out in my career, the kind of person I was in my late 20s and 30s, I’d be destroyed.” Lorraine met her husband Stephen Smith when working on TV Am when he was a cameraman and the pair married in 1992 and have remained inseparable ever since. Their daughter Rosie has now had a child of her own too.
And Lorraine has vowed to be a granny with an attitude to the baby girl born in August last year. She said: “Billie is the light of my life. I really miss Billie when I’m not with her. They’re an hour away [in north London], and I babysit as often as I can, but I don’t interfere. I’m just there. I love the fact that I’m Granny Smith!
Lorraine doesn’t skirt around the issues in new interview (
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Lorraine spoke to woman&home
“I’m a mischievous granny. As Billie gets older, we’ll get up to all sorts of nonsense. I want to take Billie travelling everywhere on adventures, like to see the penguins [in Antarctica]. When you’re a grandparent, you see the world through their wee eyes and rediscover everything.”
She also told the magazine she is against cancelling people and they should instead be called out, having recently criticised Gregg Wallace herself on screen. She also urged people to try to stand up for themselves if they are being mistreated.
She said: “If somebody is misbehaving, being inappropriate and making anyone feel uncomfortable, they have to be called out so they can apologise. I object strongly to people enabling that sort of behaviour, and that happened in the past [like with] Gregg Wallace. You’ve got to be strong as a boss and say ‘No’.”
She added: “I’m against cancelling people. You’ve got to hear their point of view, so you can go, ‘They’re being an absolute t**t, what a load of old twaddle.’ You should never be cancelled for something that you believe, unless it is something heinous. I may think you’re the biggest w***er that ever roamed the earth, but you should be allowed to express your opinion.
“If we only talked to people that we agreed with, we’d be living in an echo chamber, all patting each other on the back saying, ‘How smug are we?’.”