Lorraine Kelly says she ‘worried about existing’ after losing her high-profile job at GMTV while she was on maternity leave.
Kelly was among a rotating team of presenters on the daily breakfast show before welcoming daughter Rosie, her only child with husband Steve Smith, in June 1992.
But the presenter, 66, was blindsided after ITV bosses told her she was being replaced, little more than a week before her scheduled return.
Reflecting on her departure with Pete Wicks during an appearance on his Man Made podcast, Kelly said her status as a freelancer left her in a precarious financial state during those early months of motherhood.
She said: ‘The kind of job I do, I’m a freelancer, I’m a taxi for hire and I don’t take anything for granted, I certainly don’t.
‘After I had my daughter, that was a really dark time; just after having a baby you’re all over the place, and I got sacked, or didn’t get my contract renewed – virtually the same thing – and that was a very dark time, that was a really, really dark time because everything’s just taken away from you, and you’re like, “What the hell am I gonna do?”
Lorraine Kelly says she ‘worried about existing’ after losing her high-profile job at GMTV while she was on maternity leave
Much like Kelly, the presenter’s cameraman husband also worked as a freelancer, and their combined lack of job security left the couple struggle to pay their mortgage.
‘I basically lived from contract to contract, I really did,’ she recalled. ‘You might get a year’s contract, or you might get two years if you’re lucky.
‘It would have actually been really nice is someone had told me in 40 years you’re gonna still be doing it, because every time that contract was up you get the washing machine stomach, you get the dread, you get the fear, you get all the worry, you know.
‘Especially after I’d had my daughter and you’re worrying about just existing; that was always a worry, so I had that. You could never quite relax or take things for granted, which I never do.’
Kelly now faces an equally uncertain future as ITV make sweeping cutbacks across its daytime TV schedule, with her daily breakfast show’s year-round one hour slot now slashed to just thirty minutes a day.
But the presenter says the birth of her granddaughter Billie has changed her outlook, and made her appreciate the present.
‘Even now, I don’t know what’s going to happen, no-one does,’ she said. ‘but certainly since I became a granny I have been able to live in the now, because [Billie} does.
‘She’s not even two yet, but I will take fifteen minutes to look at a puddle, and it’s fantastic, and I will blow bubbles for hours, and the first bubble is as exciting for her, and for me, as the one hundredth bubble.’
Kelly previously emphasised the need for better representation of working-class voices in the media because “if you’re only going to hear elite opinions we’re never going to get anywhere”.
The daytime host appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs last November, where she also discussed the ITV cutbacks which will see her eponymous show reduced to 30-minute episodes that will be shown for just 30 weeks a year from 2026.
Kelly, who has appeared on national TV since the mid-1980s, told the programme: ‘Things have to change. I have been through so many regime changes in my life. For me this is just another one, but it’s seismic.’
Kelly was among a rotating team of presenters on the daily breakfast show before welcoming daughter Rosie, her only child with husband Steve Smith , in June 1992 (pictured in 1993)
Reflecting on her departure with Pete Wicks during an appearance on his Man Made podcast, Kelly said her status as a freelancer left her in a precarious financial state
She said the part of the reorganisation that upsets her most is breaking up the “great team” that she works with.
‘We’re hoping that we can save as many jobs as we can, that’s the aim right now,’ she said. ‘But you know what, it’s just the world we live in.’
Kelly, who grew up in Glasgow before moving to East Kilbride in her early teens, said she was “crushed” when told she would not get a job at the BBC due to her “working-class Scottish accent”.
She was eventually hired for TV-am by an Australian who did not recognise her accent.
She told Desert Island Discs presenter Lauren Laverne: ‘I really worry about working-class people not being given the opportunity that I had.
‘We talk about diversity quite rightly, but there’s a whole raft of working-class people of all colours, all creeds, all religions, who are being left behind.
‘And that all comes down to money because these kids cannot afford to come to London, to live in London, because it’s impossible for them to do that. And therefore they can’t get the jobs that they absolutely should be allowed to do.
‘You have to hear these voices, because that’s what our country is made up of, and if you’re only going to hear elite opinions we’re never going to get anywhere – or whoever can shout the loudest on social media – we end up in an appalling state.’
The presenter says the birth of her granddaughter Billie has changed her outlook, and made her appreciate the present (pictured with Billie and daughter Rosie in 2026)
Kelly said at the start of her career she “applied for every single job at the BBC”.
‘I applied for farming correspondent at BBC Aberdeen,’ she recalled. ‘I mean I wouldn’t have known one end of a cow from another.’
The presenter also admitted that becoming a mother had ‘made me so much better at my job.’
‘You have so much more empathy, you have so much more understanding. It definitely, definitely made me better,’ she said.
Asked about her on-air persona, she told Laverne: ‘I am very much myself, but it’s a version of myself.
‘I mean if I was really myself, I’d be taken off the air.’
