Much fun has been made of Lorraine Kelly’s claim that she is essentially a theatrical artist who appears on television as a character called Lorraine Kelly. Because, clearly, that was just an absurd punt designed to help her escape a million-pound tax bill. Right?
Wrong. This week, Kelly demonstrated exactly how committed she is to maintaining the aesthetic distance between performer and role. Because this week, clad in a comfy sweater embroidered with the words “Silver Linings”, she chose to unveil what can only be described as Lorraine Kelly’s gritty reboot. To paraphrase Taylor Swift: the old Kelly can’t come to the phone right now because she’s dead. In her place stands the new and improved Dark Universe Lorraine Kelly.
Usually, at the end of Good Morning Britain, Piers Morgan and Susanna Reid throw over to Kelly’s cosy little aftershow segment with well-versed chumminess. “What have you got coming up after the break?” they will chortle. “Ooh, we’ve got lovely scrummy Alexander Armstrong on to talk about his new hot-air balloon documentary,” she will coo in response. “All that, plus the six best handbags for under a pound. Don’t go away.” It is friendly. It is comforting. It is Lorraine.
And now it is gone. This week, when Morgan and Reid tried to pull the same shtick after wrapping up an interview with potential Boris destroyer Jennifer Arcuri, Kelly went rogue and blew up the formula. “God, that was crazy, wasn’t it?” she growled, Goggleboxing the bejesus out of her own show while it was still in progress.
At this juncture, it is important to make the distinction between just how Scottish the Old and New Lorraines are. Old Lorraine was Scottish like a shortbread tin or Mrs Doubtfire or Shrek. It was a sing-song Scottishness. A happy-to-see you Scottishness. Not New Lorraine, though. New Lorraine is Scottish like Buckfast. Almost incomprehensible with rage over what she took as Arcuri’s substandard performance, she spat out: “What’s the point? Come down, not answering any questions. Point of that?” in the form of what appeared to be a single elongated word.
Arcuri, fresh from yet another performance as a deepfake video of Jennifer Lawrence starring in Fatal Attraction, was baffled. “I’m sorry?” she began. So Kelly briefly transformed into a surly teen version of Old Lorraine, repeating the question slowly to clarify that she hated Arcuri and everything she stood for. It was staggering in its intensity. And then, 10 seconds later, it was over and Kelly had become the nation’s newest hero.
Obviously, we know who to thank for The Unleashing of the Kelly, and that’s her one-time GMTV colleague Esther McVey, who appeared on Good Morning Britain in June. “Do you remember Esther?” trilled Reid, to which Kelly could only respond with a “Yeah” so tight and repressed that it plainly broke something deep inside her. There was an entire galaxy of fury hidden inside that “Yeah”, and now it can be contained no longer.
There is no saying what she will do now. Untethered from the obsequiousness of the handover, perhaps Kelly will next take an axe to the cookery segment, swiping every untouched meal to the floor like a bored cat. Perhaps she will fall asleep during a celebrity interview. Perhaps she will crane her neck around a model during a fashion segment and stage whisper: “This is all a bit crap, though, isn’t it?” Directly to camera.
For those of us who have quietly nursed a benign crush on her for the last 25 years, the sudden Howard Beale-ification of Lorraine Kelly has been a thing to behold. It has given her a thrilling new edge. It’s like learning that Jet from Gladiators is secretly an undercover vigilante, or that Nigella Lawson has been out supergluing herself to the tops of trains in the name of Extinction Rebellion. The woman is a national treasure no matter what, but discovering that there is some sand in the Vaseline has perked up breakfast telly no end.
Kelly turns 60 next week. She has been presenting what is basically the same episode of television over and over again, five times a week, for a quarter of a century. She is one of the highest-paid women in British television. Everyone has their limit, and it looks as if she has burst right through hers. What are they going to do, fire her? She’s Lorraine Kelly, for God’s sake. Just try it.
The emergence of Gritty Kelly could be read in several ways. You could be angered that a once impartial broadcaster has now cheapened herself enough to get into the ugly world of opinion. You could be sad that the Lorraine Kelly you used to know has been banished in favour of this angrier version. However, I choose to take comfort in the emergence of New Lorraine. Things are bad. The world is a miserable place, constantly spinning from new low to new low. And, of course, it gets to you.
And then you see Kelly, twitching in her seat and crackling with fury, and you realise that it has got to her, too. The world is so terrible that it has even pierced the armour of the world’s sunniest woman. Not even she could be saved. The ship might be going down, but at least we get to go down with Lorraine Kelly. Silver linings.
The perfect role for Julia Roberts? Er …
Connoisseurs of bad movie-studio ideas will always have their favourite. The guy who asked to rename Back to the Future as Space Man From Pluto. The man who wanted to explain the events of Groundhog Day with an early scene where Bill Murray gets cursed by a Gypsy. Steven Spielberg, who wanted to smush the entire Harry Potter saga into a single animated film.
All of them, however, pale into insignificance now that the latest doozy has come to light. In 1994, when Gregory Allen Howard was shopping around his script for a Harriet Tubman biopic, one executive apparently responded by saying: “This is a great script. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.” When told by Howard that Tubman was black, he replied: “It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.”
And that, frankly, is indefensible. Tubman’s race was the defining aspect of her entire life. She was born into slavery. She was repeatedly beaten just for being black. She made it her life’s mission to help hundreds of other slaves to safety, to spare them the agony of an existence chosen for them by a white ruling class. Suggesting that she should be played by Roberts – a woman of exclusively north-European descent – is one of the most insulting things you will ever hear.
Why stop there? Why not set the film in the present day? Why not make it a movie in which, rather than freeing slaves, Roberts just goes on a nebulous quest to free herself of an intangible spiritual ennui? That’s the same thing as the Underground Railroad, isn’t it? Eat Slave Love, you could call it.
But, still, this was 25 years ago. Thankfully, things have changed. Of course nobody would ever choose Roberts to play Tubman now. That would be both absurd and insulting. It’s 2019, for crying out loud. Society has moved on.
They’d choose Scarlett Johansson instead.
