Jackie Brambles has come a long way since she made the tea as a junior reporter on Ayr’s Radio WestSound. If you’ve watched her these past few years over your cornflakes, interviewing the likes of Brad Pitt on GMTV, you will know that it is all champagne and Hollywood glamour for our Jackie from Arran these days.
Tom Hanks, Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, George Clooney — Brambles, 37, has done them all. And the glitter has rubbed off. When she takes to the red carpet tonight to cover her seventh Oscars, Brambles will no doubt be as beautifully turned out as some of the stars she is covering.
From the cornflakes bowl, it looks like the dream job. Why then has the former DJ just announced that she is sacrificing Hollywood for a return to GMTV’s London office? Brambles, a regular visitor to Arran where her parents still live, is obviously disenchanted with the movie star glitz.
“It’s all smoke and mirrors,” she says. “I don’t know that Hollywood has lost its sparkle exactly but I have seen its sparkle from every conceivable angle several times now. I’ve had a fantastic time but I’ve nothing more to learn here.”
What she’s looking forward to, she says, is a greater breadth of stories back in London and, by implication, something very much more substantial in the way of work. She covered last year’s US presidential election for GMTV and plainly hankers after more serious news. She is an avid consumer of political journalism, an avenue that has been largely denied her over most of the years on the West Coast.
For all the glamour of this evening’s event, being in Hollywood is not all its cracked up to be, she reckons. Among the stars she’s noted a deal of unhappiness and loneliness over the years. “They sometimes lose it, they end up believing the hype. That’s very easy to do when you are surrounded by luxury and nobody ever says no to you,” she says.
What has surprised her most is the sheer size of the Hollywood machine, whirring away day and night behind the stars with the megawatt smiles that front the movie business. “When you become aware of that then you see the more cynical side of the town,” she says. “You realise everything is manufactured. It’s about image and looks, so the obsession with appearance is understandable. It is not just vanity. It is business.
“When you go for a job, your looks sell before your talent. That’s why everyone is always talking about a fantastic new diet, or the latest personal trainer or personal cook.
“As Teri Hatcher said in her speech at the Globes she was a washed-up 40-year-old until Desperate Housewives came along. After 40, women in Hollywood have to scramble around to maintain their status.”
You might suspect that Brambles, currently single and deaf to any ticking of the biological clock, might be beginning to feel the pressure that Hollywood applies to women of a certain age. “You can’t be immune to it,” she admits. “But I decided very early on that the best thing to be was an interested spectator.”
After this acerbic analysis of her current circumstances, it’s easy to take Brambles at her word when she says that she would prefer to spend more time in Scotland with her mum and dad. While the island life of Arran brings the pressures of a very visible existence in a tiny community, nothing compares to the vicious scrutiny that Hollywood uses to lacerate its inhabitants.
“I went to America looking for adventure and I got it,” she says. “But it has meant I haven’t spent as much time as I would like with the people who mean most to me on the planet. When you get a bit older you get a sense of time running out. Leaving after a visit home was getting harder.
“And I am happiest when I am in my wellies on Arran. It’s a beautiful place. I don’t wear a scrap of make-up there. I’m sure the neighbours must think I should make more of an effort.”
Scotland claims Brambles for its own, but in fact she moved to Arran from Harlow in Essex when she was four, and lived there until she was 20. Then, a year after moving to London, she became the youngest female DJ to have a prime-time show on Radio 1. But despite the starry trajectory of her career, and the cities where she has made her name, Brambles says she still considers Arran home. “Everyone gives me such a slagging (on Arran), so I never get uppity,” she says.
Likewise, among the famous names she encounters, she is drawn to those she can respect. She cites Angelina Jolie for her passionate commitment to her UN campaigning. Last week Jolie turned up at an event to support the film Hotel Rwanda. She isn’t in the movie but its subject, the genocide, plainly matters to her.
“She was doing the whole movie star thing,” says Brambles. “You know, talking about the film, and then I asked her about Darfur. And then she was off about peacekeeping forces in Africa and policy issues. She is very knowledgeable.”
Elton John is another favourite.
“I like him for the same reason as I like Jolie,” she says. “He is very straightforward. I recently spent a day with him on the set of his new video. David Furnish was also there. He’s very smart and very protective of Elton.”
Not everybody among her panoply of stars is charming. But Brambles won’t name the names of the disreputable — up pops the hand that feeds again and, of course, it feeds not just Brambles but GMTV. A long time ago, when she was young and less diplomatic, Brambles complained that Madonna was pretty unpleasant to interview. But she thinks Madonna has changed. “I interviewed her briefly again, about three years ago,” she says. “She was with Guy Ritchie and she was a different person.”
Maybe it was Guy, or the kids, or Kabbalah that was responsible for the transformation. Brambles suspects it might have something to do with a realisation the long-term famous reach: that, at the end of the day, it’s all just business.
Nothing is personal, not the adulation at the height of fame, nor the eventual, almost inevitable, rejection at the end.
If you watch her tomorrow morning on television reporting from the Oscars, remember to look past her sparkly dress. Try to peak behind the smiles of the stars and glimpse that cynical Hollywood machine. If you still think you are missing something, remember Brambles seems to mean it when she says she would rather be off the west coast of Scotland in her Wellington boots.
