GOOD MORNING SUNSHINE!
Popular breakfast TV presenter Ranvir Singh tells us how she’s living the dream ever y day
Having worked her way up from a job in local radio, Ranvir Singh could not have been more thrilled to land her coveted role on Good Morning Britain.
The cheery presenter has won plaudits for her straightforward explanations of topics as complex as Brexit, but she admits that being on air while the rest of the nation are still munching their cornflakes takes its toll.
Nothing brought that home more than the day she read the news live on air in slippers!
“The camera panned across the studio floor and somebody said, ‘Why is she still wearing her slippers?’” Ranvir laughs.
“I’d been working all week and by Friday my feet were so tired I couldn’t bear to put my heels on, so I got into the taxi from my hotel in my slippers.
“At work I thought, Oh, I’ll put my heels on in a minute.
IAnd then it got to six o’clock and I wandered into the studio and started reading the news. I’d forgotten I was still wearing the slippers!”
On a more serious note, Ranvir was forced to tackle her punishing hours when she was involved in a car crash three years ago.
“When I got out, I felt this wave of greyness,” she recalls. “The only thought I had was, could go to sleep right now.
“It was a literal wake-up call, so I now try to prioritise sleep. I get into bed with my seven year-old son at 7.30pm. Once he’s asleep I’ll read on my phone, and I try to turn the light off before 9.30pm.”
Away from breakfast television, Ranvir can often be spotted reading the ITV news bulletins and she has also been working on series such as Real Stories With Ranvir Singh and Eat, Shop, Save.
But she decided to cut back on some of her programmes after her accident.
“I went to see a sleep specialist for a documentary I was working on and I told him about my working life and the fact that I didn’t know what it felt like not to be tired,” she says. “He said getting up at 2.30am and then going into Downing Street, which is very cold and dark, was damaging my circadian rhythms.”
Ranvir grew up in Preston, Lancashire. Her mum worked in a factory, her dad died when she was nine and her two older sisters were grown up, so Ranvir spent a lot of time watching television.
“I was quite a bored child. We had no car and didn’t go on holiday. The TV was everything in my life during the summer holidays,” she recalls. “They say you are your environment, so maybe it was obvious that I was going to work in television.”
Ranvir joined Good Morning Britain in 2014. Three years later, she was appointed political editor. Not well connected in Westminster she managed to turn her lack of experience into a positive.
“Good Morning Britain’s thinking was that they didn’t necessarily need somebody who was plugged into all the Westminster shenanigans, they needed somebody who could speak using normal language,” she explains.
Home these days is the Chilterns, an hour’s drive from London, where she lives with her seven-year-old son Tushaan and her mum.
“I’ve been a single parent since my son was born, so I don’t ever get a sleep-in,” she says. “But I love being a mum.”
At weekends she likes nothing more than taking her son trampolining or to the park. “And we really want a dog. If circumstances had been different I would have had a second child, but I’m not, so I’m going to get a dog!”
Ranvir (42) recently applied to be a volunteer on Refuge’s domestic abuse helpline. “I still get a tingle presenting News At Ten, but I want to find some other meaning in my life after the age of 40 too,” she explains. “Yes, there are always more programmes I could make and I could try to get higher up the career pole, but actually how much happiness and meaning does that give to your life?”