Media needs to retain opportunities for ‘working-class voices’ – Lorraine Kelly

TV presenter Lorraine Kelly has emphasised the need for better representation of working-class voices in the media because “if you’re only going to hear elite opinions we’re never going to get anywhere”.

The daytime host appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, where she also discussed the ITV cutbacks which will see her eponymous show reduced to 30-minute episodes that will be shown for just 30 weeks a year from 2026.

Kelly, who has appeared on national TV since the mid-1980s, told the programme: “Things have to change.

“I have been through so many regime changes in my life. For me this is just another one, but it’s seismic.”

She said the part of the reorganisation that upsets her most is breaking up the “great team” that she works with.

“We’re hoping that we can save as many jobs as we can, that’s the aim right now,” she said.

“But you know what, it’s just the world we live in.”

Kelly, who grew up in Glasgow before moving to East Kilbride in her early teens, said she was “crushed” when told she would not get a job at the BBC due to her “working-class Scottish accent”.

She was eventually hired for TV-am by an Australian who did not recognise her accent.

She told Desert Island Discs presenter Lauren Laverne: “I really worry about working-class people not being given the opportunity that I had.

“We talk about diversity quite rightly, but there’s a whole raft of working-class people of all colours, all creeds, all religions, who are being left behind.

“And that all comes down to money because these kids cannot afford to come to London, to live in London, because it’s impossible for them to do that.

“And therefore they can’t get the jobs that they absolutely should be allowed to do.

“You have to hear these voices, because that’s what our country is made up of, and if you’re only going to hear elite opinions we’re never going to get anywhere – or whoever can shout the loudest on social media – we end up in an appalling state.”

Kelly said at the start of her career she “applied for every single job at the BBC”.

“I applied for farming correspondent at BBC Aberdeen. I mean I wouldn’t have known one end of a cow from another.”

Kelly, who has hosted her own show, Lorraine, on ITV since 2010, said of interviewing celebrities and politicians:  “My thing is, and I think I learned that from my parents, is just treat everybody the same. It doesn’t matter who they, how much they think of themselves. Everyone is the same.”

Kelly chose Starman by David Bowie; Rock The Casbah by The Clash and Mama Said by Dusty Springfield among her desert island discs.

She said of Bowie: “At school we all loved him. There was a gang of Bowie fans, I found my tribe.”

Kelly added: “I was a bit of a swot. I actually enjoyed school. I loved learning, I was like a little sponge.

“I kind of bumbled and stumbled my way into television. All I really wanted to do was write. That was always, always the ambition.

“I knew I wanted to be a journalist. I was nosy – well I would say curious – and kind of that’s what I’ve been doing my whole job. I’ve been going ‘why, why, why?'”

Kelly said becoming a mother had also “made me so much better at my job”.

“You have so much more empathy, you have so much more understanding. It definitely, definitely made me better,” she said.

Asked about her on-air persona, she told Laverne: “I am very much myself, but it’s a version of myself. I mean if I was really myself, I’d be taken off the air.”