Even if you’re the lofty sort who claims never to have watched daytime television, you’re bound to know Kaye Adams. Scotland’s breeziest chat show host pops up all over the place — on quizzes, reality television, Question Time, makeover shows, motoring programmes, politics debates, even Have I Got News for You.
She’s instantly recognisable crossing Glasgow’s Byres Road — pink denim jacket, cowboy boots, and those confident looks and wryly world-weary eyes giving the message: life’s too short not to have a bit of a laugh along the way. Today, however, there’s also a hint of something unfamiliar on the Adams visage: trepidation, perhaps? “I’m the archetypal swan,” she admits over a coffee and bagel in her local west end cafe. “Serene on the surface, frantically paddling under the water.” The 42-year-old interviewer from Loose Women, Sex Wars and Kaye has never much liked having the questions turned on her. But if she’s paddling faster than usual this week, it’s also because she’s just launched into the uncharted waters of international development as the first Unicef ambassador for Scotland.
“It’s all pretty new, to be honest,” says Adams, who will be making a field trip to Malawi this winter. “First off I’m trying to become a bit more educated about the issues.” The invitation to join existing Unicef UK ambassadors such as Ewan McGregor, Sir Alex Ferguson, Robbie Williams and Jemima Khan in a profile-raising position created specifically for Scotland came out of the blue earlier this year. After all, as Adams explains: “They didn’t just want somebody they could stick on their letterhead. They wanted a level of commitment.”
The Make Poverty History campaign surrounding the G8 summit was the ideal launch pad and Adams found herself drafted into compering on the main stage at last weekend’s peaceful protest march in Edinburgh. “Professionally it was the scariest thing I’ve done in ages,” she admits. “You get into a bit of a comfort zone in your day job, and the truth is I don’t get very nervous any more. But that day I was bricking it.
“I was very glad I did it, thanks to (the singer-songwriter) Billy Bragg, who must be one of the nicest men in the world. I told him how nervous I was and he put a hand on each shoulder and gave me a real pep talk.”
What finally quashed her reservations about celebrity ambassadors was attending Unicef’s C8 children’s conference in Dunblane on Tuesday. Children from Bhutan, Bolivia, Cambodia, France, Germany, Guinea, Italy, Lesotho, Moldova, Russia, Sierra Leone, the UK and Yemen had gathered to put forward recommendations for G8 leaders on subjects such as war, poverty and the rise of HIV/Aids.
“Given the usual discussions about how demotivated the current generation is, I was just really impressed by their level of energy and passion,” she says. “There was a complete absence of cynicism.”
In appointing Adams, Unicef chiefs had done their homework. Currently best known for what she calls “softer” television, her much harder-nosed news background makes her something of an all-rounder. Raised in Grangemouth, she showed her curiosity early. “I’ve always been somebody who asked questions about other people, even when I was a kid — though I’ve never been particularly keen to reveal information about myself.”
Having studied economics and politics at Edinburgh University, she launched her journalistic career by landing an hour-long interview with Margaret Thatcher. “It would be churlish to say she wasn’t an incredibly impressive and formidable woman,” recalls Adams, who ranks the experience as one of her most terrifying moments. “Unfortunately she was playing for the other side.”
After this early coup, the graduate cut her teeth in news and current affairs at Central Television, but disliked the reception she received in the male world of political journalism. “It felt very clubby, self-satisfied, complacent. I can distinctly remember nobody being particularly eager to help you out — in fact they loved catching you out. So I’d say something politically naive and immediately some 50-year-old man would take delight in telling me I was a plonker. I thought: I just don’t enjoy this.”
After a few years of television news — “ambulance chasing, big stories, School for Santa” — her big break came in the form of Scottish Women, a long-running flagship discussion programme whose outgoing presenter, Sheena McDonald, left a vacancy that Adams ably filled. “That’s when I first thought: this is what I want to do.”
For more than a decade she’s honed the skills she gained there on a variety of shows — including several series of ITV’s Loose Women, which begins filming again next month. It has all the elements on which Adams thrives: live, topical and unpredictable, a mix of interviews and banter and off-the-script witticisms. In an often cut-throat industry she has a reputation as a hard-grafting pro who’s a pleasure to work with. Just don’t get her started on the snobs who scorn daytime television and women’s talk shows as journalistic fluff.
“When people get a bit sniffy, I just think: sod you,” she says bluntly. “I’m fairly confident that I could do as hard a political interview as anybody else. But what I do is sit on live television and hold an audience in an unstructured forum. I don’t see why there’s any less skill involved in that. It’s about communication, about reaching people.”
Occasionally, of course, even she finds herself incredulous at the caravanning fanatics, trainspotters or compulsive soul-barers who turn up on your average chat show — at which point her reaction is usually to laugh. “For a while I tried to be what I thought a TV person should be like, but I never felt happy with that,” she admits. “So when I got Scottish Women I decided I just had to be myself. It’s too confusing to put on an act and be someone else.”
Consequently, she’s relaxed about being stopped in the street, usually with her three-year-old daughter, Charly. “I like to chat — it’s a very natural thing. Though I think Charly is going to have a very strange view of life. Lots of complete strangers already know her name, and she thinks that’s normal.”
Having a child seems to have had much the same effect on Adams’s private life as her young friends at Unicef had on her public one: reminding her what was important. She spends less time filming in London, and gets the sleeper home to share childcare with her long-time boyfriend, Ian Campbell, who is a tennis coach.
“I’m different from the way I was in my late twenties and early thirties — I’m still ambitious in the way I like to do things well. But I’ve got a nice home, a very good relationship, a daughter I love, I make enough money, my work’s pretty good at the moment. I’ve got enough confidence in myself that I’ll always be able to make a living. If I can do some good in the world in the process, so much the better.”
