‘I’m not your average Etonian’
Bill Turnbull has a secret trick to stop himself from welling up when he leaves BBC Breakfast this month
‘Strictly embodies everything the BBC should try to be’
Bill Turnbull has just joined an elite group of men to make it as cover stars of Saga Magazine: Al Pacino, Michael Palin, Jamie Oliver. The BBC Breakfast presenter is looking quite chuffed at this, but adds: “My face was next to another story, which said ‘more tea, less sex’.”
Are you a fan of this idea? “It depends what kind of tea it is, really,” he laughs.
He is a big tea drinker. By 8am, when most of us have barely managed our first, he has already had about three cups of tea and two of coffee.
Then again, not many of us set our alarm for 3.34am (“every minute matters at that time of the day”), in order to make it into work on time.
This punishing morning regime, the buckets of caffeine and cameras rolling at 6am, all comes to an end on February 26. After 15 years on the red sofa, Turnbull, 60, is now stepping down.
It will be the end of an era. When he joined in 2001, breakfast television was synonymous with the glitz and glamour of ITV’s morning programme, which attracted double the BBC’s viewers. Auntie’s version was seen as po-faced and lacklustre. Since then, he and his co-hosts have managed to turn BBC Breakfast into a ratings behemoth; it now trounces its commercial rival.
“We turned the corner a long time ago, when we started to keep presenters for longer than four years. Viewers like that, they like to get to know you and discover your foibles and your strengths and weaknesses, and have a laugh with you. They feel comfortable. If you change the presentation team too often, the audience never gets settled.”
This of course is a dig at his ITV rival, Good Morning Britain, which in its latest rejig has drafted in Piers Morgan. “A bold experiment,” says Turnbull.
“He’s almost like a pantomime villain. I am sure occasionally it’s a very entertaining to watch, but so far I don’t think it’s getting any traction.”
He promises there will be no tears on his last day. “If there are, I hope they won’t be mine. That’s the thing I am most worried about.
“There is one mental trick I have up my sleeve. I hope it works on the day. I have had to use it once before – the day Sian left,” he says, talking about his long-term colleague and friend Sian Williams, who left the show in 2012.
“She cried and I thought, I can’t have both of us go. So there was just something I did that kept me in control.” He won’t reveal the nightmarish image he uses to trick himself into stony-faced passivity. “That’s a trade secret. If I told you what it was, it might not work next time.”
My mind is swimming with images of Old Testament torment, which seems at odds with Turnbull, who is about as unthreatening as the Easter Bunny.
That, of course, is part of his secret – and charm. To be welcomed into people’s homes, while they get their children dressed for school and argue over the marmalade, requires a certain level of trust and warmth as well as good-humoured blandness.
The Williams/Turnbull dream team was broken up when the BBC controversially decided to move some departments, including Breakfast, to Salford in an attempt to prove the corporation was not London-centric.
Turnbull says: “I can remember when I was first told about it, it was a bolt from the blue. I was on holiday in Italy, by the pool, and the phone rang. I could see it was Sian. And I thought if Sian is calling me on holiday, something has happened. And I did say one, monosyllabic word several, several times – unprintable in the pages of The Daily Telegraph. I just couldn’t believe it. There had been no indication this was in the offing.”
Williams stayed in London. Turnbull decided, with his three children all grown-up, he could afford to undertake the “adventure” to Salford, though he won’t say if he was one of the 11 members of staff who enjoyed a £100,000-plus relocation package to ease the pain.
“I was very surprised by how nice the Salford work experience has been. When I first arrived at Salford Quays it did look a little bit like East Berlin. It was this large, empty square. It’s now livened up.”
After four years in the north-west, Turnbull is moving to Suffolk to spend more time with his wife Sesi and his bees; he is a serious beekeeper and during the Salford period the hives had to stay down south.
His new home is near the sea; he intends to go running along the coast. In his bank manager’s pink shirt – slightly straining at the buttons – he does not look an elite athlete. But he is a health fanatic: running marathons, visiting the gym and trying to stick to the 5:2 diet. His peak fitness, however, was when he was on Strictly Come
Dancing in 2005. He remains the only Old Etonian to have donned the
Strictly sequins. I tell him that I’m surprised he went to England’s grandest public school; he is devoid of the self-regard that curses many Etonians. “Well, thank you very much. That’s a good thing. I don’t think I should be displaying Eton plumage. But I wasn’t your average Etonian; we were fairly low down the sociofinancial scale of families who send their sons there.” It’s all relative, of course. His father worked as a commodities broker in the City.
“Oliver Letwin, I think, was in the year below me. Justin Welby was in my English class.”
How does he feel about Eton becoming a toxic brand? “For me, it was never an issue until David Cameron became prime minister. And then all of a sudden people start looking at you in a different way.”
He shrugs his shoulders goodnaturedly. “If you have to suffer from a prejudice, there are worse prejudices to be a victim of. Only once has it come up – one of the Gogglebox regulars said, ‘I used to like Bill Turnbull until I heard he went to Eton, and I went right off him’. There’s nothing I did!”
He is not fully retiring. In the spring he is hosting a new afternoon quiz show for BBC One called Think
Tank. Critics of the corporation say light entertainment such as this is best left to commercial rivals, if the BBC wants to save taxpayers’ money. Turnbull disagrees: “Somebody in Government [the Culture Secretary, John Whittingdale] suggested the BBC shouldn’t necessarily do Strictly.” He throws his hands up in horror. “That is beyond comprehension. What? We shouldn’t have done the BBC’s most spectacularly successful programme of the last 20 years? Really? Strictly embodies everything the BBC should try to be: nice, warm, humorous, entertaining, musical. People sit down and enjoy it with their kids and think: ‘All’s well with the world’.”
He adds: “If too much gets cut, people will miss it when it’s gone.”
Very possibly. As indeed many thousands will miss waking up to Turnbull, as much a part of breakfast as cornflakes and milk in many households.
He, on the other hand, is not going to miss those 3.34am starts.