Selina Scott: How MI5 tried to recruit me to become a spy

FORMER BBC ‘golden girl’ Selina Scott will shock an audience at the Edinburgh Television Festival by revealing how she was invited to become a spy for MI5.

The Real Marigold Hotel star, 67, is to appear on a platform next Thursday under the headline ‘Legendary Women Of TV Tell All’, but the organisers could not have imagined they were to be given such a scoop.

Selina, who was a newsreader on ITV’s News At Ten before she was poached by the BBC to launch Breakfast Time, will disclose how she was invited by a mysterious third party to discuss a job offer at a discreet location in St James’s near Whitehall while she was a student. When she arrived, she was shocked to discover she was being interviewed by an agent from the secret services.

‘I listened, but politely declined the offer,’ Selina tells me. ‘Only years later do I realise how extraordinary it was. The meeting was very civilised: tea and biscuits, that sort of thing. Very British. I think the idea was I would go to work for them after I had graduated. God knows what would have happened to me if I had said yes.’

At the time, she was an undergraduate at the University of East Anglia, reading English and American studies.

Intriguingly, her tutor was the wellconnected polyglot Sir Malcolm Bradbury, author of the bestselling novel The History Man, which was turned into a hit television series starring Sir Antony Sher as a lascivious university professor.

Curiously, later in life, James Bond producer Cubby Broccoli invited Selina to his Mayfair office and asked if she would consider the role of Miss Moneypenny. ‘He was very interested in looking at my legs,’ is all she can remember from the meeting.

Would Selina ( pictured in the Nineties) have made a good spy? She can certainly keep a secret and has managed to ensure her private life remains very private.