Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
My secret to shining at 6 am? Plenty of spray tan
Susanna Reid on her weird but wonderful chemistry with Piers Morgan... and what it really takes to get a ‘scruffy’ single mum looking so marvellous in the morning. By Kathryn Knight
On weekdays, when her alarm goes off at the eye-watering time of 3.30am, Susanna Reid dozes for ten minutes or so without setting the snooze button.
‘I lie there with my eyes drooping closed and then snapping open again. I call it playing Russian roulette with the alarm clock because I don’t have a second alarm,’ she reveals.
Goodness, this seems a bit out of character. On air, as the host of ITV’s Good Morning Britain, Susanna channels breezy efficiency all the way, whether it’s reporting live on rolling news stories or interviewing everyone from prime ministers to telly personalities and film stars.
I thought she’d have about 17 alarm clocks, all timed to go off at 30-second intervals. ‘Oh no! I’ve never yet fallen back to sleep,’ she assures me. ‘To be honest I’ve been doing breakfast telly for so long that I just wake up anyway. In fact the only time I ended up running late was because I completely forgot to set my alarm at all, but I still woke up and managed to make it on air on time. Naturally Piers thought it was absolutely hilarious.’
Piers, of course, being the irascible Piers Morgan, MailOnline columnist and now Susanna’s co-host on the breakfast sofa. Paired up initially on a temporary basis last summer, he became a permanent addition last November.
The pairing of the sensible unflappable Reid with the shoot-your-mouthoff Morgan might have seemed a bit of a gamble at first, but those telly execs were clearly onto something: 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.
Basically they turned out to have that elusive thing, chemistry – although ask Susanna what kind of chemistry it is and she struggles to define it. ‘You have Richard and Judy chemistry don’t you, which is that they’re married, and you can have Holly and Phil chemistry, where they come in after a night out and you know that they’re great friends,’ she muses. ‘I think what we offer is something different. It’s Marmite and marmalade, sweet and sour, there’s all sorts of ways to describe it.’
One way being ‘Jack and Vera’ chemistry after the famously battling Coronation Street couple. ‘That’s what our producer calls it,’ she reveals.
It’s certainly not a million miles off – as viewers will testify, the pair have a few snippy moments but clearly get on famously. ‘He just put the cat among the pigeons when he arrived and I love that,’ she says. ‘I get tweets every morn- ing saying “you deserve a medal for working with Piers Morgan’’, but it’s quite the opposite. I love the energy he brings; I love the fact that he does interviews in a really kind of bold way and shakes nuggets of information, shakes headlines out of interviews that you wouldn’t otherwise get, which is great. He sets things alight.’
Still, Jack and Vera were known for their gigantic set-tos. Have they ever had a row? ‘Oh no,’ she protests. ‘There’s a lot of elbow nudging and the occasional gentle karate chop to the crook of his arm when we’re just about to come back into vision after an item or an ad-break and I have to get him off his phone when he’s lost in thought on Twitter. But that’s it, honestly.’
Besides, she insists, a lot of people have got Piers wrong – underneath that braggadocio showboating exterior lies a deeply sympathetic heart. ‘He’s actually a very kind and supportive person,’ she insists. ‘Before I knew him properly he invited me to his 50th birthday party and I remember seeing the huge range of people that he’d invited. ‘He’s obviously got a lot of famous f r iends and a number of them were at his party. But there were people there he had known since he wa s ve r y young and also people who he stood by through difficult times, that other people might have abandoned. I remember standing there thinking this is a guy who is loyal to his friends and I’m pretty sure if I was ever in a difficult situation, Piers would stand by me.’
Their partnership certainly marks a new milestone for GMB, which has sailed some choppy waters after its launch in April 2014. Viewing figures were initially disappointing, while Reid herself came in for some stick for jumping ship from the BBC, where she had worked for 21 years, for a rumoured whopping £400,000 salary.
The sniping can’t have been easy, although today she is sanguine. ‘You know that when you start something new it’s going to come under the most extraordinary amount of scrutiny,’ she says. ‘It’s almost like one of our political interviews: if you ask the really tough questions of someone and they come out of it, then you realise how strong they are. So, yes, it’s got a renewed strength now, I think, it had its mettle tested.’
What about the personal criticism, some of which seemed to boil down to accusations that she had, effectively, got ideas above her station? ‘You can’t let things knock you back. I don’t ever take it personally, however much it might appear that way,’ she insists.
‘Journalists have a job to do. It is our job to scrutinise and ask questions, you can’t let it be personal, you absolutely can’t let it be personal. And it’s balanced for me by the fact that I am genuinely doing what I believe is the best job in the world, presenting TV about stuff
‘I love the energy Piers brings, he sets things alight’
that fascinates and excites me. If a few people sometimes criticise you for doing it, that’s a small price to pay.’
Susanna has certainly been there at the sharp end of the ever-rolling news: in the last year she’s reported live from the attacks in Paris and Brussels, not to mention covering the EU referendum, an extended show which kept everyone on their toes. ‘That was extraordinary wasn’t it?’ she says. ‘You went to bed on Thursday evening thinking that the Remain vote had won because that’s what the polls were telling you, and you woke up on Friday morning to a 99 per cent chance that Leave had won. It was a crazy day but exhilarating.’
Meanwhile all manner of personalities have been put through their paces on the GMB sofa and Susanna is anxious to emphasise that it isn’t the soft option. In fairness she isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions: Freddie Starr walked out of their interview when she asked him if he’d done ‘anything that could have been misinterpreted’ in the aftermath of news that he would not be facing trial over sex abuse allegations, while she also gave Nigel Farage a good grilling about the promises of the Brexit camp in the run-up to the referendum, to name a couple of recent memorable exchanges.
There are plenty of light-hearted moments too, like the time last year when Joan Collins arrived on set wearing an eerily similar dress to Susanna (the difference lay in the price – Dame Joan’s was a Dolce & Gabbana number wor th thousands, Susanna’s was £14 from Asda).
‘Oh gosh that was funny,’ Susanna recalls now. ‘What can you do? You’re not going to tell the wonderful Joan Collins to change her outfit; equally it would look slightly odd if I changed because I’ve just presented an hour and a half of the programme wearing that dress and people would wonder why I’d gone and changed. You can’t pretend that it’s not happening, you have to completely embrace it. But isn’t it interesting how if a chap had been on wearing the same suit as Piers or the same tie no one would have batted an eyelid?’
Ah well, isn’t that the nub of it? That female presenters are subject to greater scrutiny than their male counterparts? It’s Susanna, for example, who gets accused of flirting with her male interviewees (in particular after she nibbled the top of her pen while interviewing David Cameron).
Susanna’s not having it, though. ‘Well we are absolutely equals, Piers and I– I just happen to wear a dress and I couldn’t wear the same dress two days running, whereas Piers could wear the same tie two days. Does that mean I am under greater scrutiny in general? I don’t think so. I think the bottom line is about how well you do your job and how much the audience enjoyed your programme.’
It’s a perfect Susanna Reid answer: ever the accomplished live broadcaster – she started her career as a news reporter, so was schooled early on in thinking on her feet – she is basically far too canny to say anything too controversial.
There are also certain areas that are resolutely no-go, among them her love life: single since splitting with her former partner of 16 years, the sports correspondent Dominic Cotton, in 2014, Susanna will not say whether she is back on the dating scene.
‘You can ask me about it, but I wouldn’t talk about it,’ she smiles. ‘I would never discuss my love life.’ Not even a tantalising hint? ‘Not even a tantalising hint, I’m really sorry.’
What she will say is that she remains proud of the way she and Dom have handled the split, in particular when it comes to raising their three sons Sam, 14, Finn, 12, and ten-year-old Jack. ‘I am a single mum, but I’m not a single parent,’ is the way she puts it. ‘The children have two fully involved, fulltime parents who are extremely good friends. Between us we are there for them all the time and I think our chi ldren know that. I’m not sitting in judgement on other people’s relat ionships and splits, and there’s all sorts of circumstances you just can’t account for, but I think we’ve managed to get to a good place.’
It was particularly important for her, she acknowledges, as the product of divorce herself – raised in Croydon the youngest of three, her parents split when she was nine but remained amicable. ‘I’ve seen a lot of divorces in my lifetime; Dom and I were never married, but effectively we’re divorced now,’ she says. ‘It was absolutely our priority to make sure that there was no hostility; I mean there genuinely wasn’t anyway – it was sad our relationship ended, but it was never hostile, and I think the saddest thing for children is if parents turn against each other.’
What she’s keenest to emphasise, if anything, is how resolutely ordinary her life is. ‘We have a remarkably normal life, actually,’ she says. ‘People are often disappointed by the state of my car, for instance. It’s a Y reg
‘I don’t have a tidy bone – messy doesn’t cover it’
Vauxhall Zafira, which I will never, ever abandon. It is an absolute solid workhorse of a car. I think that’s sort of symbolic because the glamour goes on when I’m in the hair and make-up room, but outside of work I’m perfectly, perfectly normal. I am jeans and Tshirt, hair in a scruffy bun.’
This laissez-faire attitude extends to her south London home too. ‘Messy doesn’t even cover it,’ she admits. ‘I don’t have a tidy bone. At home my priorities are that it’s somewhere comfortable to be, that the children are happy there and that all their friends know that there’s an open-door policy at our house.’
In fact, for all her polished on-air professionalism, it seems that off-air Susanna is more laid back than you might imagine. She is, she insists, a ‘let it go’ sort of person, and is pretty much the opposite of a planner. ‘I live my life day to day, to the point where sometimes I’ll realise that the school holidays are coming up or I suddenly realise I have a big event tonight, and I’ll go, “Oh, my goodness I haven’t really got ready for that.” That happens all the time.’
Her approach to ageing is equally laidback: at 45 she is now, by her own admission, ‘closer to 50 than 40’ but remains unfazed. ‘Does that bother me? Not in the slightest, it just genuinely doesn’t.’
In any case, the woman once voted the TV host the nation would most like to wake up to doesn’t have much to worry about – all glossy hair and peachy skin, she looks pretty amazing by anyone’s standards, never mind mid-forties.
‘Thanks, but it’s only because I get very, very, very amazing hair and make-up. I dye my hair, I don’t put anything on the skin, but I use moisturiser. Oh and thank goodness for spray tan.’ No secret appointments at the Botox doctor scheduled for the coming months then? ‘No I don’t think so. My mum’s 75 now and she looks pretty amazing, so hopefully I’ll end up doing as well as my mum.’
Her one bugbear is that her schedule doesn’t really leave enough time for regular exercise, save for a weekly hour-long Zumba class which she ‘loves’ and describes as ‘a little hangover from dancing’.
By that she means her time on Strictly. She was a runner-up on the show in 2013, with one of her sambas prompting Len to make the memorable observation that she was ‘all bounce, bum and bongos’. ‘I’m having that on my autobiography,’ she jokes. Piers, of course, would have something to say about that. ‘He has something to say about everything,’ she smiles. I’d say he’s more than met his match.