BRITAIN'S MOST WANTED COVER STORY COVER STORY FROM DESK-EDGE TV NEWS

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Jan 13, 2008 | by VICKY ALLAN

THE voice is the first thing you notice. Kirsty Young is seated on a BBC dressing room sofa, booted feet curled casually underneath her, mid-phone interview. The trademark blonde hair, once jawlength and clipped, is now long, glossy Charlie's Angels. But that voice remains the same: a smoothroast blend of smart, knowing Stirling and husky calm. Direct and precise, she knows when and how to laugh: wide-mouthed, showing all her teeth.

Everything about her manner seems well-judged.

Listening to her, it seems unlikely she would be associated with anything involving the word dumb.

Yet dumb is one of two little words that the Desert Island Discs presenter can't seem to shake off. The other is blonde.

The accusation of "dumbing down" was first levelled in 1997, when Channel 5 launched its hallmark informal news programme with Young as the relaxed-looking anchor, perched informally on the edge of her desk. It popped up again when she was announced as successor to Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs, having seen off stiff competition from intellectual heavyweights such as Andrew Marr and Martha Kearney. Then, just when the criticism seemed finally to have been laid to rest, there it was again: this time in relation to her appointment as Crimewatch presenter. Nick Ross had left amid talk of BBC ageism, and now Young found herself having to point out that, far from some 22-year-old "leggy, pouty bird", she was 39 of the same generation as Ross's co-presenter, Fiona Bruce.

Bring on a blonde, whether natural or fake, and however high or low-brow the programme, it will inevitably be accused of dumbing down. It doesn't matter that far from being an autocuereading ventriloquist dummy this particular blonde has a rare knack for combining clear-thinking intelligence with empathy; that when she found herself on air during 9/11, she delivered five hours of well- judged live television.

But all this appears to be irrelevant. When Young first took over Desert Island Discs, one critic claimed she lacked Lawley's "killer touch"; another that the lush eroticism of her voice meant he had "to rush off for a cold shower every few minutes".

She has proved, however, that she can put the difficult questions: she asked Gloria Hunniford how she felt on the night her daughter, Caron Keating, died and, earlier this month, wondered whether John Humphrys found having an office romance "tricky".

Young says she pays little attention to her critics. "I think when people in the media write about other people in the media there's a very particular attitude. In my case they're writing about somebody who does essentially the same job as them. I'm a jobbing journalist but the things I do are high-profile and pretty well paid. Now that's quite a little cocktail isn't it? That's quite a Molotov cocktail." The cocktail does indeed have some heady ingredients. There was her GBP500,000-a-year salary at Channel 5. There is her millionaire hotelier husband, Nick Jones, who owns Soho House and has connections with a host of celebrities from David Bowie to Nicole Kidman. There was her string of semi-glamorous boyfriends, from Kenny Logan to Dominik Diamond. There was her neat career move from Channel 5 to ITN after the birth of her first child, Freya, then back to the rebranded Five when she felt she was "squashed into a different box that didn't quite fit".

Until last year, it might have been possible to caricature Young, as some newspapers did, as a calculating and ruthless opportunist, jumping between jobs in search of the most money. Then she did something unexpected. She left Five last spring with seemingly no other employment apart from her weekly Desert Island Discs slot. Having given birth to her second child, Iona, had she decided to step back from work? Or, given her past career history, was she secretly plotting to line up something new?

In fact, she says now, there were no deals on the table. "People were saying to me, 'Go on, what are you going to do?' And I'd say, 'I really don't know.'" Always passionate about newscasting, Young had begun to fall out of love with it. "It's very much a machine. You jump on the hamster wheel and you do it, and sometimes it's fascinating and sometimes it's not so fascinating. It's not like when you are personally involved in a programme, do your own research and spend time with a subject, as I have done with Desert Island Discs." In some ways, that long-running Radio 4 show was the turning point. When Desert Island Discs guest John Humphrys described news-presenting as "not a job for a grown man, I'm afraid, or a grown woman", there was not even a flinch from the woman whose past 15 years have revolved around the autocue. It was as if Young knew in researching and presenting this show that she had already grown up. "It's very different from any interviewing I've done before. You are wrestling with people who have egos and personalities and histories." Part of the problem with news had been the workload. With two young children and two jobs, Young had found herself stretched. When something unexpected came up if one of her children came down with a cold there was no wriggleroom; something else had to be squeezed out. She was frequently grumpy. Approaching her 40th birthday, she had started pondering things she describes as more "esoteric". "I felt, suddenly, that soon my daughter would not want me to read her a bedtime story every night. Suddenly she'd be 12 and the moment would be gone. All those preoccupations. What is it about life that's important?" In the months following her departure from Five news, her time revolved around her family and Desert Island Discs. Home life suited her. "I felt great, " she says. "Poor, but great. Well, not poor, but no income. I liked doing the things I hadn't had time to do. I liked doing bathtime. I liked walking Freya to school every day. I'm quite boring. I find a great comfort in all those domestic rituals." So why go back to work? Her husband is a wealthy man; she could, surely, have taken a lengthy maternal career break? "I've always worked and I think I would always need to. Nick does fine financially, but I'm not mentally a lady of leisure.