Jackie: Why I really quit TV job
EXCLUSIVE: The nation’s favourite newsreader gives her f irst interview since leaving Reporting Scotland last week after 30 years...
IT’S a claim to fame one might not expect from a doyenne of BBC Scotland – but Jackie Bird’s eyes are dancing as she reveals she has a cocktail named after her. More than that, she finally got a chance to taste the ginbased Jackie Bird for the first time in a Glasgow bar three days ago – though admits she found it ‘excruciatingly embarrassing’ ordering it for herself.
Out for farewell drinks with her boss and a producer after her shock announcement last week that she was quitting the Beeb’s prime time news programme after 30 years, they had found themselves at a media-themed restaurant in the city centre, following a recommendation from friends that Jackie was ‘on the menu’.
‘So I found myself ordering the Jackie Bird cocktail,’ she says, laughing at the recollection. ‘It’s gin and a gorgeous mousse, which sounds an odd mix, but I really enjoyed it.
‘I even got it for nothing, which was nice. But just how vain does that sound, to go and drink a cocktail named after you?’
The only slight dampener on the occasion, and she admits to wincing inwardly as he said it, was when the barman cheerily announced as he handed over her free drink that he’d been ‘watching her on TV since he was a child’.
‘Of course, I knew what he meant,’ says the 56-year-old star, ‘even if it was something of a back-handed compliment. Everyone’s been so kind. I’ve been really touched.’
Today, four days on from her final stint on Reporting Scotland, she’s already embracing her new freedom.
The immaculate onscreen persona recognised by viewers has been shelved for now and in her place, the ‘real’ Miss Bird has taken over, hair pulled back casually in a ponytail, make-up free, and she’s dressed in a baggy sweatshirt and ripped jeans.
She’s spent the morning weeding her garden on the South Side of Glasgow, her Siamese cat Willow by her side.
‘People see me and think I teeter about in high heels all the time,’ she says, with the trademark grin usually seen by viewers as she wraps up
‘People think I teeter about in heels all day’
the news. ‘This is the real me.’ In a digital age, it seems incredible that she managed to keep her departure from the BBC secret for so long, but it is something, she says proudly, that has been ‘slow burning for a while’.
She adds: ‘It’s a scary prospect. It’s terrifying, in fact.
‘But it’s exciting because I want to do other things and pursue my own projects.
‘There has not been one eureka moment, it’s been a slow burn and then you just know with complete certainty that you need to do something new.
‘I found myself dabbling in research for other projects and I would always have to put it away to go and do something else, because I was in news.
‘Up until a few weeks ago, I changed my mind on a regular basis about what I was about to do.
‘The boss didn’t help by asking me on a regular basis would I change my mind.
‘It’s done now, I can’t undo it. I wanted to go on my terms and that’s what happened. It was always going to be my choice.
‘Instead of taking my foot off the gas, though, I fully intend to put my foot hard down. Like third gear up a hill. Get the revs up.’
The nation’s shock at her departure from the BBC – though she promises it is only temporary and she hopes to return further down the line as a documentary maker – is perhaps summed up by the actions of a complete stranger she met in the street three days ago.
About to pass her, the woman suddenly dropped the bag she was carrying and asked the TV presenter if she could ‘give her a hug’.
Touched, Miss Bird says: ‘It was so nice. It made me feel quite emotional. She said, “I’m really sorry to interrupt you”, and then hugged me.
‘But I know I’ve made the right decision and there’s no going back. I’ve no regrets and feel I’m actually part of the current zeitgeist.
‘Millennials now have this focus on being happy as opposed to climbing the greasy pole, and I think that’s also now something even my generation is thinking. They’ve done the stuff they had to do, so they now want to challenge themselves.’ Her journalism career began as an office junior on DC Thomson’s Jackie magazine in Dundee, but she could just as easily have been a professional singer – if it had not been for Paul Weller, former frontman of The Jam, ‘dashing her dreams’. The musician, about to leave the band to form The Style Council, had placed an ad in Smash Hits magazine in the early 1980s for a new singer protégé.
The young Jackie, whose maiden name was McPherson, responded and soon found herself offered the job – only to have him change his mind at the last minute and offer the spot to Tracie Young.
Miss Bird, who had performed in clubs from the age of ten and continued to sing professionally to augment her income, recalls: ‘I got the job singing for Paul Weller.
‘It was fantastic and I was about
to give in my notice when I got a not so lovely letter from him saying, “I’m really sorry, I’ve found someone else”. I believe after a few hits Tracie sank without trace.’
She did form a band, Street Level, touring Scotland and supporting Echo and the Bunnymen.
But she adds: ‘Paul Weller’s decision broke me. For years, I couldn’t watch him or listen to him. I was working as a journalist but music was my life. I thought I was Chrissie Hind.
‘You look back and you think, “Oh, dear God! Why did they let me through the door?”. But you have a misguided belief in your talent and you just brazen it.
‘The reality is my music career would probably have been about the same as Tracie’s, I’m afraid to say. I would’ve had my 30 seconds of maybe fame. Instead of my 30 years of a different kind of fame.’
She later got a job at The Sun in Glasgow, where she met her future husband, Bob Bird, now 63.
She 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.
More than 345,000 viewers watched her wrap up her final bulletin last Wednesday, unaware, like most of her colleagues, that it was her farewell. It was just the way she liked it. No fuss.
‘That was the best way to do it,’ she says, unapologetically. The news is the news. If I’d started saying, “This is my last day…” – well, you can’t have that at the end of the news. You can’t have that when at the start of the programme you’re reporting that someone is dead.’
The mother of two – who has a daughter, Claudia, 25, and son, Jacob, 24 – adds: ‘The irony is that because I came down with a stinker of a cold, I was in on Monday, but came in on Tuesday knowing it was my penultimate day and they sent me home as I sounded so nasally.
‘I still sounded ropey on Wednesday but I couldn’t tell anyone why I’d come in despite being sick. The make-up artists are miracle workers anyway but that day it was like, “Thanks a bunch”, with my puffy eyes and the cold.
‘Everyone kept asking why I was in and I couldn’t say I’m actually in because this is it. It was quite hard to keep the secret.’
Always composed and seemingly unflappable, what she will actually miss about the show might surprise you. The excitement of a breaking news story goes without saying, but it is the near-disasters in the studio and the ability of her team to pull it all together with seconds to spare that she loved.
She explains: ‘Often stories aren’t ready, people aren’t ready, interviewees aren’t ready.
‘The trick is that the viewers never know because you and the team have just dealt with them.’
So who will now fill the void in the role she filled, latterly, three days a week? Too diplomatic to speculate, she says: ‘They’re already running a book and it will be interesting to see.’
As for Miss Bird, she reveals she has already had a ‘big long sit down’ with the head of the new BBC Scotland digital channel to discuss possible opportunities for documentary making.
She admits she is particularly interested in focusing on health and wellbeing issues.
One subject she would like to touch on, having experience of it first hand, is the menopause.
Writing in The Scottish Mail on Sunday recently, she confessed
‘It was quite hard to keep the secret’
that for the past five years she had been plagued with hot sweats and psychological issues, including confusion and a loss of confidence.
She described how her original suggestions that the BBC carry a series of programmes about the menopause had led to a couple of senior male bosses, who shall remain nameless, having ‘a little snigger’ and then she ‘never heard from them again’.
Now, she says: ‘I’m still in the grip of the menopause. Sadly, it lasts for a long time. In fact, I was having lunch with some girls the other day and every one of us is suffering a different side effect.’
It has made her ponder more the type of programme making she would like to get involved in and, now suddenly with more time on her hands, she has found herself hooked on the BBC’s Celebrity Painting Challenge, presented by Mariella Frostrup and starring former Bond girl Jane Seymour as one of the competitors. She says: ‘It’s one of the best shows on TV just now, but what I particularly love is the honesty of Mariella Frostrup and Jane Seymour’s beautiful, yet lined, faces. There is no artifice or Hollywood ego. What you see is what you get. It’s the most uplifting thing on TV.
‘It’s real people, which is an antidote to shows like Love Island. You want to see yourself reflected back. You don’t want to see a bikini-clad Love Island babe when you’ve got your tea in your lap.’
Slightly disconcertingly, she says she has not completely turned her back on music, admitting to still being a ‘tolerably good cornet player and mediocre guitarist’.
She is also the singer in an occasional group – named Midlife Crisis – with fellow BBC stars John Beattie (on guitar) and former Deacon Blue drummer Dougie Vipond, which has formed in the past for staff parties and ‘the odd private function’.
‘John’s a great guitarist and he’s always saying we must tour,’ she laughs. ‘We do mostly cover versions, such as Tina Turner songs and the theme tune from Friends. Let’s just say, we were OK. They didn’t start pelting us with beer bottles.’
While she figures out what comes next, she has decided to teach herself to be a better cook – thanks to the influence of her second husband, fund manager Robin Weir, 52, whom she wed in 2007.
For someone renowned for being a keep-fit fanatic – she once famously said that ‘exercise is better than sex any day’ – she drops the bombshell that her regular snack on returning home from work was a cheese sandwich and a packet of crisps, washed down with a large glass of wine – if her husband was out.
‘I’m going to try to be more domesticated,’ she enthuses. ‘I’ve not had the inclination to do that before.’
Throwing herself into her new role, the icon whose reassuring tones have guided us through Brexit and some of the nation’s biggest stories, cheerily goes off to finish weeding her patio.