TV presenter Kay Burley talks working out, looking good and her new primetime slot

From 6am spinning to late-night karaoke, presenter Kay Burley never stops
Samuel Fishwick @Fish_o_wick24 September 2018

It’s midday, the top of the hour in the bustling Sky newsroom in Syon Lane, and Kay Burley is planning her last runout as a Sky News presenter.

Starting this week, she’ll be hosting her flagship slot, The Kay Burley Show, from 2pm to 5pm. “Expect more of the same, with bells on”, says Burley — music to the ears of the 80 million viewers she’s amassed globally, Monday to Thursday.

She’s been at Sky since its launch in 1989, clocked more live hours of TV than anyone else (“I like to say more than a million minutes”), skewered every serving Prime Minister since Thatcher, except May (“I don’t know if she’s scared”) and been the subject of hundreds of complaints to Ofcom (she once made Peter Andre cry on air).

“It’s always been the Kay Burley show here,” Sky’s head of news John Ryley is reported to have said when the programme was announced. “This just makes it official.”

But it’s not the afternoon’s running order that we’re fine-tuning now, nor even the scheduling or bookings for next week’s pilot. This is Friday night out we’re looking at, an essential ritual with her production team.

“Neil, are you sure you can’t come tomorrow night? I’ve put your name on the door. Stevie — we’ll move in a second, babe, just give me a sec. We’re all going to Archer Street tomorrow night. Have you ever been?” she says, turning to me. I haven’t. “COME ON,” she roars. “It’s amazing. It’s where they have people who are ... singers, and they ... dance on tables, and we ... drink. And then we go to Freedom.” She pauses at her mention of the iconic Soho gay club: “It’s go big or go home.”

Burley, 57, is a mile a minute from dawn until dusk. Yesterday evening was “girls’ night”: drinks at Soho House, then a mockney piano bar sing-a-long. It was business, as usual, this morning: up at 6am in Harrow, north-west London, when she wakes up to Radio 4’s Today programme “for the headlines” before snatching a few minutes of Sky’s Sunrise presenter Sarah-Jane Mee “to see what she’s up to”.

At 630am she likes to pick a couple of Twitter fights “just for the hell of it — if someone’s been rude to me or one of my female colleagues”. Then exercise: a 45-minute run, or 30 minutes of 5kg free weights, a spin workout and/or callisthenics.

We’re in one of the few quiet moments we can grab as she flits from rehearsals to planning meetings. “I can outrun most people. I’m as fit as a fiddle. I can do exercises that you couldn’t,” she says. There are a hundred “stand ups” in her morning routine, for instance: “lie down on the floor. Don’t use your hands. Fold one leg in front of the other. Then come up on to your toes.” I can’t even do one.

Burley’s routine is partly self-preservation. “Both my parents died really young. My mum died at my age. My dad was just a little bit older,” she says. “I want to be able to see [my son's children] grow up. Sadly, that’s not what my parents were able to do.”

But also: “I like looking good,” she says. Her breakfast is nuts, yoghurt and a banana with three “pint mugs” of Earl Grey tea “because I’m northern” and a Berocca. She cut out sugar and lost 20lb when she learnt Sky News was moving to a “glass box” set, where “people can see you from every angle” (although she treats herself to a hot chocolate at 3.30pm).

She was transparent, too, about the facelift she had on her 50th birthday. “I want to look good for as long as I can, and not just for the benefit of my profile on TV, but for me, when I go out and live my life to the full.”

Burley leaves home for work at 8.30am, firing off newsline suggestions to Assistant Editor Steve Sidebottom. At 11.30am they’re in back-to-back meetings (she’s off to the Labour Party conference on Saturday; in New York the following week; at the Tory conference the weekend after). May’s Chequers deal is on the agenda in Salzburg this afternoon, as is the “Croydon cat killer”, the new James Bond director, and Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s trip to Myanmar. Burley drops Hunt a text, reveals she “doesn’t like cats”, checks Twitter, jumps in to raise a point about a graphic, checks her phone again, always standing, sometimes nibbling on a bread roll.

She’s never off her phone for more than ten minutes during the working day (her iPhone background is a full-length portrait shot of herself “so that people know it’s mine when I leave it around the building”.) But she’s paying attention. She nods at a story about a successful HIV drug trial: “Spectacular.”

Her producer, Laura, wants to get Idris Elba on. “Remind him that I was in a movie with him!” Burley says. “In 100 Streets. I’m in a selfie with him. Just saying.” Burley doesn’t think he’ll be the next Bond. “Nah. Nah. Not having that. It’s going to be Richard Madden.” Which one’s that? someone whispers. “Richard Madden from Bodyguard! Phwoar!” says Burley.

Her son, Alexander, 25, is her only child, from her second marriage, with football agent Steve Kutner. There’s a rumoured boyfriend, Jonny Knowlson, a 30-year-old BA pilot “with whom she is regularly spotted gadding about town”.

“I’m not talking about my dating life to you, my darling,” she says. She’s “her own agent” (and rumoured to earn in excess of £400,000 a year). She’s also a self-proclaimed “flagbearer” for equality both in and outside Sky. That means she won’t “pit herself” against anchors such as the BBC’s Victoria Derbyshire at ceremonies such as the Royal Television Society awards.

“She came over and said, can we have a selfie, I’m your biggest fan. And I said, no no no, my girl crush is on you, sister. There are enough people wanting to bring down strong women. We don’t do it to each other.”

It’s work hard, play hard with Burley. She maxed out at an estimated 18-hour shift in 2005, covering Hurricane Katrina on site, and always carries her passport in case she has to “wake up in Australia”.

If politicians are “talking bollocks, I’ll tell them they’re talking bollocks,” she says but “they’re human beings, they bleed like we do”. She holidays with Richard Branson at his Ulusaba safari lodge. She went to interview the “quirky” Jacob Rees-Mogg in Somerset and ended up playing cricket with him and his boys. “I was quite upset on his behalf when those protestors were outside his house,” she says.

And Brexit is “a turn off. It, of course, affects people but we’ve got another six months to think about it.”

Her shows are “stories that people want to turn the sound up to, sitting at home at 4pm on a wet Wednesday in November”. And it’s a high bar. As I watch from the newsroom gallery at 3pm, Burley and Sidebottom are clearly a dream team. During a commercial break, Burley is the first to spot a story about an active shooter, via Twitter, in Maryland County, USA.

“Well done, KB,” says Sidebottom, over her in-ear mic. “There’s no one else in the world I’d rather work with doing breaking news,” he says to me. “She’s unflappable.” Other staff liken her to a duck on a pond. Serene on the surface with legs “going like crazy below”.

“I’d prefer a swan”, says Burley. And when things slip, you can see why. Another producer, in Sidebottom’s absence, leaves Burley with an awkward few seconds of silence before an ad break, unsure what’s going on. “You left me completely on my own there,” she snaps at the gallery. “It’s a fast-moving news programme.” Reputations are pricked. “If I get spoken to like that again I’m f***ing walking,” says the producer — but not to Burley.

“This will be my last job in television,” she says, after the show’s close at 6.30pm. Her brain “has gone” after three hours of “spinning plates” and “dancing on the head of a pin”.

What will she do afterwards? In the immediate — it’s a “school night” bedtime of 10.30pm. In the future? “Maybe swim the Atlantic. Maybe go to the Moon. I don’t know. I’ve still got four years left on my contract. I’ll be in my 60s by then.”

Forty years into her career, she says there’s no time to slow down, though. “Sky’s in my bones. News is in my blood. I’m addicted.”

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