Susanna Reid: ‘People come up and say, “How on earth do you deal with Piers Morgan?”’

With a 4am alarm and a confrontational co-host, how does the Good Morning Britain presenter keep her cool?

Everything is thrown into the melting pot of breakfast TV. Presenting a show like Good Morning Britain, as Susanna Reid has done since 2014, means juggling breaking news, slippery politicians and the victims of awful tragedies, along with celebrity interviews, recipes and what to wear this autumn, all the while judging the right level of openness and distance. On the sofa, Reid has a carefully cultivated air of being “just like us”. She’ll share selfies before and after the TV makeup has gone on, and she’s been known to well up during particularly harrowing stories. She also has the deeply efficient air of a woman who has presented live TV and radio for the last three decades. She beams professional warmth, but she’s briskly no-nonsense. She is often on the receiving end of slobbering reporting over what she’s wearing, or whether she’s been flirting with her interviewees. The pinned tweet on her Twitter page seems to address her critics: “You know that feeling when you feel like you need more men telling you how to do your feminism right? No, me neither.”

We meet in a studio near where Reid lives in south London. She is here to talk about The Murder Of Becky Watts, a one-off documentary she’s made for ITV about the police investigation into the disappearance of the Bristol teenager in 2015. It’s the first time Reid has made a stand-alone documentary for ITV, though she says there will be more. She had met Becky’s father and stepmother while doing Good Morning Britain. “I already had a relationship with them, so there was an element of trust there,” she explains. But Reid is not used to being interviewed herself, and seems a little unsure about being on the other side. She is dressed smartly casual, in jeans and a crisp white T-shirt that she borrowed from one of her sons. Her smile has a degree of elasticity that tightens when she’s not keen on giving an answer, and loosens when she’s enthusiastic about a point. She asks as many questions as she receives. She’s never sat down to talk about herself for this long, she says. “I’m not the story,” she shrugs, simply.

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from The Guardian http://ift.tt/2h32vAv