The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
KT reunited with father and half-sisters on TV
FAMILY: Scottish singer’s emotional journey captured on ITV programme
KT Tunstall has said she had reservations about appearing on TV to search for her biological father as she feared producers were after “a salacious, crazy, Jeremy Kyle-style nightmare scenario”.
The singer, who grew up in St Andrews has always known she was adopted and had tracked down her birth mother herself in 1998.
But when approached by ITV’s Long Lost Family series to help her find her biological father Michael, she said having “not watched telly since about the year 2000”, she was not sure what the programme involved.
She said: “I was totally not aware, really, of many programmes that are... these kinds of real-life programmes. And obviously the worry is, what’s the agenda here? Are they wanting some sort of salacious, crazy, Jeremy Kylestyle nightmare scenario that is going to get everyone watching?
“It became absolutely apparent very quickly that this was a very emotionally mature, very experienced team who literally just want to find family members, put them together in the safest and most positive possible way. So that was sorted out really quickly and after I realised that it was like, ‘Yeah, no-brainer’.”
She is the first celebrity to appear on the show and the 44-year-old also discovered she has two half-sisters – Siobhan and Lesley-Anne.
In addition, her birth mother, Carol Ann, had given her some information on her father.
She said: “I knew his name beforehand, I also knew that he was Northern Irish, I knew that he ended up living in northern Scotland.
“But my mother always said that he’s a good person, with a good heart.
“He’s a nice guy. She told me straight off the bat that he wanted to get married and keep me and be my father, but she was just not able to do that in her life, with him.”
Of her newly found siblings, she said: “I think our father had found it very difficult that he wasn’t able to bring me up and be my father and I think there was some guilt and shame associated with that, so he obviously made the decision to not tell his family about it.”
Tunstall will perform at Glastonbury and is also heading to Japan and China.
The Suddenly I See singer appears on Long Lost Family on ITV on Monday July 1.