Fiona Bruce, the new anchor of Question Time, is now the most senior front-of-camera woman at the BBC, but the broadcaster is in a completely different place to when she started her career there in 1988. “If the six o’clock [news] had a story they didn’t want the one o’clock [news] to know about, they wouldn’t put it in the running order,” she tells Gold. “It was a terrible atmosphere – dog-eat-dog, bitchy, not a nice place to be.”
When asking for a “desultory” pay rise during the early years, her boss’s response was, “Do you really need it? What does your boyfriend do? You live with him, don’t you? Doesn’t he pay for most things?” Bruce replied, “Well, I do the supermarket shopping, so I need to pay for that.” Now, with the confidence of years, she says to Gold, “How ludicrous is that?”
When Bruce was offered Question Time, she didn’t hesitate. “You don’t have doubts when you get offered Question Time,” she shares. “You think, thank you very much. But I did have doubts about how I’m going to fit everything in. Because I’m still doing news, though less of it, and Fake or Fortune?, and Antiques Roadshow will start in May. Accompanying the thrill of being asked was: ‘Oh my God, how am I going to make all that work?’ And you know, I still haven’t quite… resolved it.”
Bruce might have proved her mettle over the years, but she still gets nervous. “It was rather an unpleasant shock,” she comments on her Question Time debut. “For the first 10 minutes I thought, what is happening?” She usually loves the drama of live broadcast. “It’s a sort of joke amongst my colleagues that if it’s been a really hairy programme I will come off with a big smile on my face, because I love that,” she continues.
Bruce watched the inaugural show, which she took over from David Dimbleby, with her two children and her husband, former advertising executive Nigel Sharrocks. “My children are 17 and 21 – I am the least cool person they know,” she smiles. “The fact they all stayed to be there for me, it just meant everything.”
Read the full interview in the May issue of British Vogue, which hits newsstands on April 5
