Konnie: I was being a terrible presenter and a terrible mum ... so I gave up TV
AS Blue Peter’s longest-serving female presenter, Konnie Huq looked set for an enduring broadcasting career when she left the show after 11 years in 2008.
Instead, she chose to abandon TV after having children because she realised she couldn’t ‘have it all’.
Speaking yesterday, she said she realised she was ‘doing everything terribly’ when she attempted to work full time and be a mother.
Miss Huq, 45, is married to screenwriter and broadcaster Charlie Brooker, 49, and they have sons, Covey, eight, and Huxley, six.
Now a children’s author, she limits her work to 9am to 3pm so she’s always around to drop the boys off at school and pick them up.
Speaking on the Alonement podcast, which highlights the positive side of spending time alone, Miss Huq said she realised that she couldn’t carry on with her television career after she took a job on Sky’s quiz King Of The Nerds. She had to get up at 5am to express milk before commuting to the studio in Chelmsford every day.
‘I just remember [thinking] “I’m just doing everything terribly – I’m working terribly and I’m mumming terribly”,’ she said. ‘And those years go so quickly, kids grow up so quickly, and it’s about quality of life. To get to drop-offs and pickups I will move heaven and earth. All my work is now done in the window of 9am until 3pm because I want to be there.
‘In your primary years you are shaping and forming – these are the adults they will be.
‘Even by your secondary school the blueprint is set, by your twenties you are done, by your thirties you need therapy to undo all that weird stuff in your head so really if you don’t get the primary years right, you have screwed up an adult basically.’
The presenter, whose children’s book Cookie And The Most Annoying Boy In The World came out last year, said she has barely spent a night away from the children since they were born.
‘I really don’t feel the need to get away,’ she said. ‘I did one job where I overnighted away from them and I haven’t been away for a holiday with a girlfriend or anything and I really don’t mind. I like them, they’re fun.’