'I don’t flirt with Piers, but we are playful and antagonistic and it works': Susanna Reid on staying top of the morning
SUSANNA REID has reigned supreme for more than a decade on breakfast TV – and since joining forces with Piers Morgan on ITV’s Good Morning Britain, ratings have soared. She talks to Richard Godwin about holding her own on the sofa and ‘committed parenting’ post break-up
Susanna Reid wears JUMPER, Johnstons of Elgin. VEST (just seen), Asceno. JEANS, Gerry Weber. SHOES, Jones Bootmaker. NECKLACE, Bee Goddess. RINGS, Joubi, Sweet Pea and Merola
Susanna Reid has overslept only once in her career.
On most days, the presenter of ITV’s Good Morning Britain sets her alarm for 3.20am – an hour she calls ‘airport flight time’, since most of us would only ever get up that early if there were the prospect of a holiday at the end of it.
She brushes her teeth, tosses something over her nightclothes and jumps into her waiting car.
The 15-minute drive is enough time to read the day’s headlines before she arrives at the studio at 3.45am, emerges from hair and make-up at around 6am and is ready to be on air at 6.30am – give or take three cups of coffee.
To say that Susanna, 45, faces the world with a sunny disposition would be an understatement. It’s her job to be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and bulletproof when most of us are still half asleep.
We’re meeting at a South London photo studio at 9am on a Monday morning to discuss the Good Morning Britain Health Star Awards (for which she has nominated her mother, a former nurse).
She is wearing a slinky grey Ted Baker dress and a Whistles sheepskin jacket (both from the Good Morning Britain wardrobe – ‘I’m usually more of a TK Maxx woman’).
What is so disarming on screen – firm handshake, professional smile – feels a little forbidding in real life.
Susanna wears JUMPER, VEST and SHOES, Topshop. JEANS, James Jeans. NECKLACE, Taylor Black. SILVER RING, Monica Vinader. GOLD RING, Merola
I wonder how she would go about dismantling this armour – what would Susanna Reid ask Susanna Reid if she happened to be sitting on her sofa?
‘Oooh!’ she ponders. ‘That’s a good opener. The thing I get asked most of all is: “What’s it like working with Piers Morgan?”’
What is it like working with Piers Morgan? The motor-mouth former tabloid editor, fresh from his not wholly successful spell in the US, joined the Good Morning Britain team permanently last November.
He and Susanna co-host Monday to Wednesday (she shares duties with Ben Shephard on Thursdays and takes Fridays off) and their on-screen chemistry has helped to turn around some disappointing ratings – over the past year there has been a five per cent increase in viewing figures and the programme gets peak audiences of more than a million. (Piers recently tried to stir up a bit of tension by asking: ‘What would your kids say is your most shameful secret – other than “Mummy fancies Piers?”’)
But she insists that she’s unembarrassable on TV – ‘You have to be!’ – however much Piers tries to rile her.
‘I describe him as a mini tornado. The chairs start spinning, the papers go everywhere, interviewees never know what’s going to happen to them.’
Has she learnt anything from him?
‘He always gives his interviews a bit of an edge. He takes them by the collar and shakes them until nuggets of headline fall out. We could all learn from that.’
Susanna wears JUMPER, Chinti & Parker. JEANS, J Brand. NECKLACE, Bee Goddess. RING, Sweet Pea
I suspect he could learn just as much from Susanna, who was once voted the TV host the nation would most like to wake up to (one excitable reporter described her as ‘the sexiest thing to come out of Croydon since Kate Moss’).
‘I think of my style as positive. Why not make people feel good?’
The co-hosts illustrated their easy chemistry after being thrust into the ‘Sofa-gate’ debate (the BBC saw widespread criticism after Breakfast presenter Louise Minchin remained in the ‘junior’ spot to the right of the sofa following the hiring of Dan Walker).
‘I didn’t know there was a senior position,’ says Susanna, ‘Piers is definitely the oldest presenter at the desk.’
The pair even swapped seats live on air to see what difference it would make, ‘I suddenly feel like I have more authority,’ Susanna joked.
She launched Good Morning Britain (successor to the disappointing Daybreak) in April 2014, having been poached from BBC Breakfast, where she was voted the show’s most popular presenter ever, after 21 years at the corporation.
As for her influence on Piers, ‘I calm down his excesses. We have a lot of respect for each other. People make a big deal about our banter and our…’
Flirting?
‘I don’t flirt with Piers, but we are playful and antagonistic and it works.’
And she’s adept at coaxing male interviewees out of their shells. She once told Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys that she bet he’d look good on the dancefloor, and she sucked her pen in what was deemed a lascivious manner while questioning David Cameron.
‘I describe him as a mini tornado. The chairs start spinning, the papers go everywhere, interviewees never know what’s going to happen to them,' said Susanna of her Good Morning Britain co-presenter Piers Morgan
‘I didn’t chew my pen for him – it’s just something I do,’ she says indignantly.
Does she detect a note of misogyny in these accusations? Male journalists get away with all kinds of behaviour without anyone questioning their integrity.
‘I’m over it now,’ she says. ‘In an interview, you aim to be disarming, interesting, engaged. Is that flirting? I don’t know, but I hope it’s great telly.’
She has a steely determination to get to the nub of things. Freddie Starr walked out of an interview when she asked him, after it was announced that he would not be charged with sexual abuse, if he’d done ‘anything that could have been misinterpreted’. She also gave Ed Miliband a hard time over the cost of his weekly shop during last year’s election.
‘He was campaigning on the cost of living – and the estimate he came back with was out of kilter with what a family like his would spend.’
She cites interviewing Cameron twice as a career highlight, but says that actor Will Smith was the most inspiring: ‘Anyone will say that – his attitude is just so positive and delightful.’
She’d most like to interview the Obamas, but, less obviously, Eminem.
‘I’m a fan of his music and I think his life has been extraordinary.’
Perhaps people underestimate Susanna because she makes it look so easy. She’s one of the few British presenters routinely called ‘autocutie’, a term usually reserved for U.S. anchors. ‘I don’t use an autocue,’ she says.
As for the ‘cutie’ part, she’s pretty upfront. ‘We all do things to make ourselves look as good as we can; television is a visual medium.’
The opportunity to move to ITV arrived at the right time, she says. She still feels great affection for the BBC and once said that the BBC runs through her like a stick of rock, but points out, ‘If someone asks you to launch a new programme, you know that these opportunities rarely come up. The fact that it was 15 minutes from my home was a factor, but it wasn’t the factor.’
And if her current routine sounds gruelling, it’s a breeze compared to commuting to Salford three times a week as she did for her final two years at the BBC.
Susanna with her ex Dominic. ‘Dom is one of my best friends, we see each other a lot, and we’re utterly committed to our boys,' she said
Back then, she made a point of coming home to pick up her children from school and cook dinner, so she’d commute to Salford the night before, sleep in a hotel, record the show, then catch the train back at midday.
However, it was during this period that her relationship with Dominic Cotton, her partner of 16 years and the father of her three sons – Sam, 13, Finn, 12 and Jack, ten – ended, leading to speculation that the long hours away had taken its toll.
It was also cited as a case of the ‘curse of Strictly’; Susanna is one of a number of celebrities – including Natasha Kaplinsky and Denise Van Outen – whose relationships ended after they appeared on the show (she finished third in 2014).
Was it upsetting to have her relationship reduced to a tabloid cliché?
‘It is very neat for us in the media to make these associations. Actually, nobody knows what’s going on. Things are much more complex.’
The couple remained living under the same roof after the split and, while Susanna prefers not to go into the details for her sons’ sake, it’s fair to say that they still take a collaborative approach to parenting.
‘It was essential. Dom is one of my best friends, we see each other a lot, and we’re utterly committed to our boys. We’re very open and loving with them.
'Nothing is off the table when it comes to discussing issues – I want them to know what’s happening in the world and come up with their own opinions.’
Susanna’s mum Sue as a staff nurse at Westminster Hospital, 1966
Susanna and Dominic are fortunate that both their mothers can help out with childcare – and it’s clear she sees her own mother as a role model.
Susanna grew up in Croydon as the youngest of three children and went to the fee-paying St Paul’s Girls’ School.
Her mother Sue was a nurse and health visitor; her father Barry is a management consultant. They divorced when she was nine.
At the time, Susanna ‘cried and cried’, and says that the experience made her a ‘commitment-phobe’.
However, reflecting on it now, she doesn’t feel that she lost out.
‘My mum was never a single mum. Both of them remarried. I always had two parents.
'It’s like my situation – I’m not a single mum. I’m separated from the boys’ father but there are two parents involved.’
Susanna recently brought her mother on to the Good Morning Britain sofa to talk about the Health Star Awards.
‘Sometimes you experience the most wonderful treatment but never get the chance to say thank you,’ says Susanna, explaining why she nominated Sue for the Community Health Star Award.
‘She’s the one any of us turn to when we have any kind of ailment. When I had my first son, she was there at the hospital with me. It was a long labour.
'I remember her turning to the midwives and saying: “I think it’s probably time to get the baby out now, don’t you?” Sure enough, it was emergency caesarean time.’
She credits her mother with sparking her ambition to become a journalist – Sue was once a section editor for Nursing Times magazine. Susanna’s juvenilia included a review of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat at Croydon’s Fairfield Halls, which she submitted to the local paper aged ten.
‘It came back with a note saying thanks but no thanks. But I wasn’t to be put off!’
Later, she wrote articles for the St Paul’s magazine, including an interview with The Body Shop founder Anita Roddick.
‘She said, “Don’t go to university. Be an entrepreneur.” To this day, I regret not making that the headline – imagine the ripples that would have run around school.’
At her mother's 75th birthday party earlier this year. ‘She’s the one any of us turn to when we have any kind of ailment. When I had my first son, she was there at the hospital with me. It was a long labour,' she said
Susanna went to the University of Bristol, where she studied politics, philosophy and law, and edited the student newspaper, before completing a postgraduate degree in broadcast journalism at Cardiff University.
There is a long-standing rumour that she scandalised the Bristol campus by living with one of her lecturers, but she laughs this off.
‘He was never my professor and we only got together after I left. I remember that story coming out and thinking, “Is that the best you’ve got? Woman has a relationship in her 20s? I must be pretty clean then, mustn’t I?”’
She’s certainly unflappable.
‘One of the best pieces of advice that Bill Turnbull gave me was: “When you’re caught in a difficult situation, make it obvious that you know you’re in one – and then get out of it.
'As soon as you pretend it’s not happening, you freeze.”’
Does that apply to life, too?
‘Oh my goodness, yes. Television is brilliant for teaching you life skills.’
Susanna has a quick-witted, show-must-go-on approach to everything. When I ask her what scares her, she has to think hard.
‘I’m a “feel the fear and do it anyway” person.’
She does think up one incident, when she and the Good Morning Britain team participated in a charity event that involved her leaping off a high platform on to a zipwire.
‘But what I’m even more scared of than heights is being defeated. I wasn’t going to let it defeat me.’
Nor is she scared of ageing, even in such a superficial industry as TV.
‘Things are changing. My closest friends are still doing great things – Carol Vorderman, Carol Kirkwood, Lorraine Kelly. If you’re a brilliant broadcaster, why would you do anything else?’
Has Piers inspired her to look to the U.S.? She seems startled at the idea.
‘I never look further than the next programme,’ she says. ‘I’ll be on the sofa tomorrow at 6am and who knows what will happen by 8.30am?’
MUST REID
READING
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante. She’s an Italian writer and it was recommended to me by Sophie Raworth, my good friend from the BBC. I have since bought it for another friend; female friendship is important to me.
LISTENING TO
Jack Garratt, whom I heard perform live at the Brits. He plays loads of different instruments and is an incredibly talented singer-songwriter. I have his album Phase on repeat.
EXERCISE OF CHOICE
Zumba, because it’s dance that keeps you fit – it’s good fun and the music is great.
KENDALL JENNER OR KATE MOSS?
Kate Moss – she’s from Croydon like me.
TAYLOR SWIFT OR ADELE?
Taylor when you want to bounce around and Adele when you want to wallow.
FAVOURITE CITY
London – it’s where I live and grew up; it’s where I love working.
LIFE MANTRA
‘Everything seems impossible until it is done.’ If you think something is tough then just imagine the point when you can look back and say ‘I did that’ and it will motivate you.
FASHION ICONS
Debbie Dresses at Good Morning Britain because she picks our clothes and always chooses great stuff.
MUST-HAVE ACCESSORY
My wireless headphones because I listen to music all the time.
MAKE-UP BAG ESSENTIALS
A tiny pot of Vaseline because it’s great for glossy lips.
MOST TREASURED POSSESSION
I’d love to say something emotional but I’m afraid it would be my phone.
FAVOURITE FILM
I think all journalists love a film about journalism and my dream when I was young was to be a war correspondent, so I watch James Woods in Salvador regularly.
Hair: Heath Massi at Frank Agency. Make-up: Afton Radojicic at Stella Creatives Agency. Styling: Pip Hamilton at Frank Agency. Additional photography: Rex/Shutterstock, Xposurephoto.com
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