Interview: Jackie Bird on 25 years of Reporting Scotland

It’s the most familiar face in Scotland’s TV news but half of it isn’t quite ready.

“I’m so sorry,” says Jackie Bird. “They always start with my eyes and then do the rest. So they haven’t done my bottom half, I hope it doesn’t look too bad.”

Frankly it looks fine and the reason Reporting Scotland’s anchorwoman has dashed out of make-up is to chat about a milestone moment. Come Thursday it will be exactly 25 years since an eager twentysomething overcame her nerves and faced the country for the first time.

In the past quarter of a century she has brought the news of unspeakable tragedies and magical triumphs. The job has given her “a ringside seat of Scottish life”.

There have been moments of heart-pounding pride and gut-wrenching despair, but Jackie says there has only been one time she couldn’t take it.

“We have the 6 O’clock News on in the studio before we go on air,” says Jackie, 52. “The only time I’ve asked for the TVs to be turned away was during the James Bulger trial. The evidence was so horrific and so upsetting I just couldn’t listen to it and still go on. It wasn’t because I was a mum, just a human being.

“The one story that’s head and shoulders above others was Dunblane. There’s no words to describe how much of an impact that made but my overwhelming feeling was just, ‘Don’t mess up something so important’.

“I was out covering it but it was only later that night when I was driving home that the emotion caught up with me. They had a roll call of the children and the teacher. I had to pull over and cry.”

Names from other stories come readily to her mind. Amanda Duffy, the student from Jackie’s home town of Hamilton murdered more than 20 years ago and whose family still await justice.

Although she just missed the Lockerbie terror attack, Jackie covered every aspect of it since, anniversaries, the trial and commemorations.

It’s at times like those that the mum-of-two she has a daughter Claudia and son Jacob admits she has to pinch herself as she’s spent half her life in a job she never imagined could be for her.

She started her career at DC Thomson favourite Jackie “Hi, I’m Jackie from Jackie” she says with practised ease before writing to every TV station in the country offering to work for free.

Only TVS took up her offer and it was while there she saw a report in The Sunday Post that Viv Lumsden was leaving to join STV. Jackie approached BBC Scotland again and finally got the call.

“I was in Kent and remember screaming down the phone to my parents,” says Jackie. “My mum was an assistant in an old folks’ home and my dad was a school janitor. I wasn’t on the scene here at all and when they were telling friends, ‘My daughter’s going to be on the telly tonight” they were asking what I’d done.

“My mum was on a back shift and the old people were probably roaming the streets because she had all the assistants gathered round the TV. It was a dream come true but I had always seen myself as a reporter, not a presenter.

“I just thought that people from a council house in Hamilton do not present Reporting Scotland. Lovely Mary Marquis gliding through the programme did that. So it was thrilling but absolutely terrifying.”

Jackie admits that by the very nature of news, her working life has a grim element.

“It’s my job to say, ‘Good evening’ and then spend the next half hour telling people why it really isn’t.”

Despite that, viewers took the flame-haired presenter to their hearts.

“If the attention bothered you then you’d never put yourself forward to present and 99.9% of the time it’s fine,” she insists. Sometimes when people stare when you’re not looking your best or are in the middle of a domestic it can be a bit of a drawback.

“But no one ever came up to me and said, ‘I can’t stand you’ although I’m sure they’ve thought it!

“One of my proudest moments was when I was covering Celtic’s UEFA Cup Final in Seville. I was doing a piece to camera and 10,000 guys in the sqaure behind me started singing ‘There’s only one Jackie Bird’. Forget any achievement in journalism; that was brilliant.”

The viewers’ warmth was never more evident than when she almost died in November 2012 when she was struck down by a twisted bowel. She was hours from death after complications set in. Her family were told to say their goodbyes.

Remarkably, she fought back to be on screens a few weeks later and was stunned by the reaction. Letters of support flooded in, she got bunches of flowers from total strangers and even hand-knitted scarfs to keep her warm during her recovery.

“It was like being in Little House on the Prairie. People were giving me cuddles in supermarkets, holding my hand and just wishing me well. It was so humbling.”

Despite the fact that she’s been an ever-present for quarter of a century, Jackie says her position has never been certain.

“I was a freelance until this year,” she adds. “Every single year with a month to go until my contract renewal I’d be thinking ‘This is it, I’m out!’

“I honestly believed that and it’s taken 25 bleedin’ years for them to say I can stay!”