TV presenter Lorraine Kelly has said she thought nothing would be “as bad” as covering the Lockerbie bombing until she reported on the Dunblane massacre.
Kelly, 64, was speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain to celebrate 40 years in television when she said that as a parent, the Dunblane gun attack, which saw 16 children and one teacher killed and 15 others injured at Dunblane Primary School in 1996, “hit particularly hard”.
She went on to say that when she covered the Lockerbie terror attack in 1988 she told herself that “somehow it wasn’t real” in order to avoid becoming too emotional.
A total of 270 people died when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by a terrorist bomb in the Scottish borders town on December 21 1988.
Asked about how those incidents had affected her early career, Kelly said: “I think Lockerbie, I was very young and very inexperienced, and the only way I think anybody got through that was thinking that somehow it wasn’t real, and you had to almost close everything off and just be very focused on the story you were trying to tell.
“And the reason that I love doing what I do so much, is we’re allowed to have emotions, we’re allowed to somehow try and tell everyone what it was like to be there on a story like that.
“I thought when I did Lockerbie, ‘nothing will be as bad as that’, the worst terrorist atrocity in Europe that there has ever been, and I thought, ‘nothing will be as bad as that’.
“Then Dunblane happened, and I think because Rosie (her daughter) was about two then, and I think when you’re a parent, it hit everybody hard, but when you’re a parent it hit particularly (hard).”
The Scottish presenter went on to speak about growing up in “poverty” and how it had shaped her career.
She said: “When you grow up like that, that’s your reality, isn’t it?
“And I had amazing parents, I mean, they were so young (18), I thought I was five months premature for ages, but mum and dad had to get married.
“But our house, there was always books in our house, they taught me to read and write before I went to primary school.
“I went to an amazing primary school, the teachers were brilliant, absolutely brilliant, and really encouraged us, but yeah, there was real poverty.”
Kelly added: “(My parents) got married, moved into a one-room in the Gorbals with an outside loo and managed somehow, they just were grafters, I’ve learned so much from them.
“I’ve learned that work ethic, that you work hard, you’re decent to people, you treat everybody the same, and as I say taught me a love of reading, which has allowed me to do this job.”
Kelly began her journalism career on the East Kilbride News, turning down a university place to study English and Russian to join the newspaper, before joining BBC Scotland as a researcher in 1983.
In 1984, she joined TV-am as an on-screen reporter covering Scottish news, and in 1990 she began her presenting career on Good Morning Britain, before getting her own show, Lorraine, in 2010.
A special documentary on her career, Lorraine Kelly: 40 Unforgettable Years, will air on ITV1 at 9pm today, while this morning’s episode of Lorraine will also celebrate her career from 9am.
