WHY I’M A VERY EMBARRASSING MOTHER, BY LORRAINE KELLY
She may be daytime TV’s queen of cool, but her awful dancing, Tinder confusion and annoying questions still make her daughter Rosie cringe
TV PRESENTERS don’t come much cooler than Lorraine Kelly. As the face of daytime TV, she’s interviewed just about every A-lister ever to grace a red carpet. Hanging out with the likes of Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Will Smith and Helen Mirren is all in a day’s work. Lorraine has become the face and body of everyday fashion and is a genuine gay icon. But there is one person who finds this much-loved broadcaster genuinely embarrassing, she admits… her daughter Rosie.
“I can actually be annoying without realising that I am being,” Lorraine says, through that familiar giggle.
“I think one of my most cringe-worthy moments was when Rosie and I went out in Marbella. I thought it was a concert but it turned out to be a nightclub and I danced until two in the morning. I thought I was about 17, but I was embarrassing Rosie because I was dancing really badly.”
Rosie loves her mother to bits, but she is not about to contradict that assessment.
“Mum you are SO annoying,” she chips in. “The most annoying thing you do is whenever I’m watching TV or a song comes on the radio, you always ask, Who’s that? You do it all the time!”
Until the pandemic, Rosie, 27, was working as a marketing director in Singapore, but last year she returned home, joined her mum on Celebrity Gogglebox and started a mum and daughter podcast called What If?, in which they pose What If? questions to celebrities, such as Craig David and Shirley Ballas.
While they have a great dynamic on the podcast, they confess that they can’t help winding one another up.
“I know Rosie gets embarrassed when I say You Tubing when I mean YouTube,” admits Lorraine. “I have even mixed up Tinder (a dating app that matches singles) and Grindr (a dating app for gay, bi and trans people).” Does that make Rosie cringe too?
“I generally find it funny,” she says, “but with the Grindr thing, I just don’t think you should even know what that is Mum,” she chides.
“Well you know, I’ve got to keep up with things!” shrugs Lorraine.
The TV presenter has become known for her sharp sense of style, but she owes a lot of that to her daughter, she says.
“I used to love it when Rosie would go out with her pals and before she went out she would come downstairs and show us what she was wearing. That was great. I loved that,” she reminisces.
“But now I do that to her and she says to me, ‘Step away from the cardigans and stop wearing elasticated waists!’ She has always had a much bigger sense of style than I have.” And that has nothing to do with age, she insists. “I think the vast majority of women are in their prime as they get older and when you get women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s – because my mum is 80 now – we are all taking care of ourselves and women of our age are no longer invisible like they used to be,” she says.
“I certainly don’t feel invisible at my age. If you say to me, ‘You are 61,’ that doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s like William Shatner, who rocketed into space, and says he feels like a teenager. I’m the same!”
BUT ONE area that Lorraine takes very seriously is the safety of women, especially since the shocking murder of 33-yearold Sarah Everard. Since her daughter returned to London, it has left her feeling very protective,
“Rosie was in Singapore where it’s a very safe environment and she is very, very sensible but I did have to remind her that it is a different culture in the UK and it isn’t as safe,” she says.
“You have to be careful walking home late at night and you can’t leave your drinks unattended in a bar, but she knows that anyway.
“I’m just overly, overly protective. I am a worrier and I do worry about Rosie when I am at home and she is out. I like to wait up for her. Rosie always says, ‘Why are you still up?’ And I say, ‘Well I couldn’t sleep’, and it’s only because I want to make sure that she is in her bed. But I told Rosie that when she has kids that she will be like that, everybody is like that.”
Lorraine has vowed never to put pressure on her daughter to have children, even though her path to motherhood was difficult.
The TV presenter was 34 when she became a mother, and she and husband Steve were keen to have more, but there was a miscarriage when she was nearly 40 and, despite attempts to conceive, it sadly wasn’t to be. Last week, she interviewed Myleene Klass about her four miscarriages, which prompted Lorraine to speak about her lost baby. “Myleene was very brave,” confesses Lorraine. “She was saying that it happens to so many people, and that’s when I spoke out about it. It just seemed right when Myleene was sharing her experience for me to add what happened to me as it’s important for people to know what other women go through. “We do have to talk about it and we do have to remember that it has a ripple effect. Partners suffer as well as potential grandparents and other kids as well. “There are times when people don’t really know what to say to you and I found that really hard when it happened to me. I felt that it was cathartic to speak about it and I got a really brilliant reaction and a lot of viewers told me their experiences. I’ve had so much kind feedback since. “Viewers still send cards and little presents to Rosie on her birthday. There is that thing about breakfast TV when you are in people’s houses and they feel they are an extended part of your family.” It’s clearly an enduring regret that more babies didn’t follow. “We were very much of the mindset that if it happened that was great and I would have had a football team,” she declares. “But we had a healthy and happy baby and we didn’t want to go down the road of IVF after that. But if we hadn’t had Rosie, then we would have had IVF.
“Ultimately we feel very fortunate to have Rosie; to have a healthy happy beautiful baby who has turned into a beautiful girl.”
So how does Rosie feel being an only child? A lot of love goes into caring for the family dogs, she says – Ruby, her puppy, and Angus, Lorraine’s dog.
“The thing is I don’t know the difference. Mum never spoke about it really. But we have the best family unit.”
Lorraine and Rosie’s cameraman father Steve Smith have been happily married for nearly 30 years and Lorraine recalls what a support he was when she lost her job. “I was at GMTV and I had Rosie and when I was on maternity leave, they said, ‘Well thanks very much’, and they had someone else to replace me.
“I had to get my CV and little VHS tape and look for another job. I was lucky that the channel had been approached by a mother and baby sponsor and they wanted me to host a parenting style show.
“Rosie was born in June and I was told not to come back in September, which was probably too early to come back from maternity, but that is how it was then. Then I did this mother and baby thing in the November and I got my own show by January, so it all worked out really well, thank goodness.”
SHE SAYS that Steve stepped up on childcare. “He was more the one that would say, ‘Brush your teeth and do your homework’. It was good cop, bad cop – and I was totally the good cop. Maybe because I was working quite a lot and I had Mum guilt. I am not big on confrontation, even with my own child.”
Lorraine says her non-confrontational style informs her interviewing technique, but does not stop her taking celebrities to task if she feels it’s warranted.
“I think you can hold people to account but you don’t have to be gladiatorial about it,” she adds. While she might excel at interviewing celebrities, one show that we won’t ever be seeing Lorraine on is Strictly.
“I simply can’t dance,” she announces and Rosie agrees, “No, you can’t dance. In fact you’re banned from quite a lot of things... Dancing On Ice and I’m A Celebrity.”
“I love watching all these shows,” says Lorraine “but I would go nuts on I’m A Celeb not having books and being surrounded by people that are really irritating. No thank you!
“I would much rather sit down with Rosie and have a good in-depth chat with a fabulous guest on our podcast!”
To listen to Lorraine and Rosie’s Beauty Pie sponsored podcastWhat If? go to pod.link/lorraineandrosie