After 30 years, why BBC star Jackie’s quit Reporting Scotland
Broadcaster Jackie Bird quits BBC news show – in secret
AS Jackie Bird wrapped up the evening news bulletin on Wednesday, more than 345,000 viewers had no way of knowing it was the end of an era.
Fifteen hours later, it was revealed in a press release that the veteran broadcaster was giving up her role as presenter of BBC Scotland’s Reporting Scotland after three decades.
The lack of fanfare was fitting for a woman who became a TV icon – despite once dismissing her job as merely ‘reading aloud’ and ‘not rocket science’.
‘I’m not leaving the BBC, I’m just vacating the news desk,’ the 56-yearold said in a statement yesterday. ‘I’ve been fortunate to cover most of the major news stories in Scotland over the last 30 years.’
The mother of two also disclosed that she had been ‘planning this for a while’, joking that she ‘thought I’d give it until Brexit was sorted, but I
‘It’s something I have to do’
fear I might have to stay for another 30 years’.
Most of her colleagues in the newsroom were said to be shocked by her sudden departure, and Miss Bird revealed that she was ‘actually apprehensive about making such a big change – even last week I considered changing my mind and staying, but it’s something I have to do’.
She said she wanted to have more time to present, write and produce projects outside news.
Miss Bird’s role as host of the BBC’s Hogmanay show since 1999 is also in doubt, after corporation insiders told the Mail the show had gone out to competitive tender – ‘so who presents it will probably depend on who wins the contract’.
Composed and seemingly unflappable, the former newspaper journalist delivered the nightly news on Reporting Scotland with all the poise of a seasoned professional. Even in a crisis, the measured tone of one of the nation’s most popular news presenters rarely faltered.
But it is hard to believe the woman who has made her living from her voice once had such a terrible stammer it would take her more than half an hour to say her own name: talking aloud was so excruciatingly embarrassing that she would avoid it at all costs.
Her confidence gradually grew after she got a job as an office junior on DC Thomson’s Jackie magazine in Dundee, living in a ‘room in a tenement flat with ice on the insides of the windows and a one-bar electric fire’.
She was sent a demo single by a new band called Duran Duran, and ‘begged the editor to let me give them the prestigious centre spread as I predicted they’d be huge’. Later she became ‘quite pally’ with the group.
An alternative career as a professional singer was an option for Miss Bird, born in Hamilton, Lanarkshire. She was performing in clubs from the age of ten and continued to sing professionally to augment her income.
She once auditioned for Paul Weller and in her teens formed a band, Street Level, touring across Scotland and supporting Echo and The Bunnymen.
But her ambition was always to work in television. She remembers watching Mary Marquis – one of the three lead presenters of Reporting Scotland at its inception in 1968 and subsequently the programme’s main anchor for most of the next 20 years – and dreaming the job was hers.
Realising her future lay in the media, she got a job at The Sun in Glasgow, where she met her future husband, Bob Bird, 63, and followed him to London, making the move into television as a reporter and presenter.
When her husband’s career took him back to Scotland – they divorced in 2006 – she did a stint reading the news with Radio Clyde before joining Reporting Scotland in 1989.
Since then, she has been beamed nightly into people’s homes at 6.30pm, becoming a familiar face to viewers and fronting bulletins at times of
national tragedy and political turmoil, including the Dunblane school shootings in 1996 and the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.
She likes to cite an ‘old adage that presenters aren’t necessarily paid for what they do but what they can do’.
In an interview she said: ‘What you are there for, as happens in news every other night, is to keep the thing looking professional when the unexpected happens.’
A keep-fit fanatic – she once famously said that ‘exercise is better than sex any day’ – she is equally driven in her health regime, which includes rowing, running and swimming. Branching out from her day job, she wrote a sitcom, Having it All (submitted under a pseudonym), which was bought by Radio Scotland and aired in 2007.
She also set up her own company, Jackie Bird Media Ltd, in 1990, and has a sideline in hosting corporate events. It was while she was scripting ice-breakers for these that she realised how much she enjoyed writing comedy.
‘You tell one joke before you launch into the evening event,’ she said, ‘but, when I started hitting the ten-minute mark, it was becoming more like a stand-up routine.’ While her career was important, family has always come first. She was once offered a job at ITN on night shifts, but turned it down because it would have meant being away from children Claudia, now 25, and Jacob, 24.
In her role as host of the BBC’s Hogmanay show, she was slated in 2000 over her choice of revealing outfit – a gold-sequinned, backless number with a plunging top.
She later said the experience was ‘hell on earth, some of the vitriol really hurt’ – but hit back at her critics in a newspaper piece a few days later.
In 2012, Miss Bird, who married fund manager Robin Weir, 52, in 2007, had sections of her small and large intestine removed after suffering a rare bowel condition – but quickly returned to work.
And last year the newsreader, who also presented Children in Need shows in Scotland, criticised male BBC bosses who ‘sniggered’ after she revealed she had begun to suffer from the menopause, and hit out at the NHS for failing to offer enough support for women with symptoms.
She revealed that for the past five years she has been plagued by hot sweats and psychological issues, including confusion and a loss of confidence. When Miss Bird suggested the BBC carry a series of programmes about menopause, she said ‘a couple of senior male bosses, who shall remain nameless, had a little snigger and I never heard from them again’.
Yesterday corporation bosses paid tribute to Miss Bird, with BBC Scotland’s head of news Gary Smith praising her as ‘one of the most talented and committed journalists I’ve ever worked with’.
BBC Scotland said ‘all attempts to get her to rethink [her departure] were met with the steely resolve that newsroom colleagues have come to respect and admire in one of the nation’s most experienced presenters’.