Work was my way of coping with loss

Aug 8 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Top broadcaster Gloria Hunniford is to open this year’s Southport Flower Show and Peter Elson finds that she’s neither shrinking violet nor fading rose

GLORIA HUNNIFORD has gathered many nicknames in her time, ranging from Terry Wogan calling her Gus Honeybun to “the middle of the road Empress of Blarney”.

It equates with her cosy image as the queen of daytime radio and telly, but there’s another darker, edgy side to the Honeybun which I must reveal.

While filling in for Terry Wogan, she conducted a ground-breaking live TV interview with Salman Rushdie, then in hiding after the Iranian fatwah, or death threat, declared over his novel The Satanic Verses. A shell-shocked Rushdie complained to a newspaper that her tough interview meant he’d been “annihilated by everyone from Ayatollah Khomeini – to Gloria Hunniford.”

In an effort to reassert her softer image, I compliment her on her marvellous legs, often effectively deployed in the screen foreground, only to be hit with another startling revelation.

When she attended a publisher’s launch party for a book by the south London madame, Cynthia Payne, a journalist enquired what it was like to feature in this tome.

“What? Me? From Northern Ireland in Cynthia Payne’s book?” Gloria gasped. “Apparently, she used to put all of her older men, rooted to the spot in their wheelchairs, to watch Sunday Sunday,” she explains about her 1980s ITV chat show.

“A lot of these men had a shoe fetish and they used to watch my legs to see what shoes I was wearing. It was hysterical.”

Gloria is of course the original fire-proof blonde. Nothing fazes her on air and she attributes her unflappability to working in Ulster television’s news programmes through the era of “bombs, bullets and barricades”.

The big blonde 1980s hair is more tamed these days (“Peter, it was of its period – not that I’m making excuses. I’ve always had fairly big hair”).

But Glo’s glossy image masks a terrific, first-rate journalist. She never let that savvy old political stager, the Rev Ian Paisley, off the hook, and refused to allow Kirk Douglas to use his star status to evade questions about his wives’ reactions to his adultery.

And in spite of recent BBC ageism accusations, following the ditching of Moira Stewart and Nick Ross, Gloria, herself 67, splutters at the suggestion she may be ready to retire.

“No, in a word,” she says firmly. Which is why she’s doing Southport – which opens next week – that and her love of gardening.

“I adore doing these flower shows. Not only the new blooms and species, but I think the artefacts are things you never see at your local garden centre,” she says. “I bought a tree house at one of those shows and I say to my husband ‘See you for a gin and tonic in the apple tree at six’. I love gardening, as it’s so peaceful. We have an acre in Sevenoaks which is just enough. What I know about gardening my dad Charles taught me, so I’m good at identifying species.”

Her daughter Caron Keating, who died from cancer, had a rose named after her at Chelsea Flower Show. Gloria and her husband, hairdressing entrepreneur Stephen Way, are busy adding some of these to her garden when I call.

“Maybe I’ve filled my head too much with work, as it was my way of coping with the loss of Caron,” says Gloria, referring to her busy schedule.

“I’ve worked since I was eight singing. I’ve a very strong Northern Irish work ethic which was knocked into me when I was growing up and it’s hard to let that go. I love doing the Heaven & Earth Show interviews, but that finishes in September. I’ve started doing A Castle in the Country with John Craven and some Cash in the Attics. You’ve got to be realistic you’re not going to be always on at peak times and be willing to branch out.”

Gloria’s big break came in 1982 after she impressed BBC Radio 2 bosses with a two-week stint filling in for Jimmy Young. She was invited over to be the station’s first female DJ. A few months later, she was offered the Sunday Sunday job on ITV.

“I thought it was a joke when my secretary Ann at the BBC in Belfast told me they wanted me in London,” she recalls.

Gloria joined BBC Ulster in 1969 as a production assistant after her father spotted a newspaper advert.

He worked in newspapers by day and was an amateur magician by night. Gloria remembers: “It was in pre-television Northern Ireland, shock horror that long ago, and home-spun entertainment was huge. We had a Mid-Ulster Variety Group and from eight I sang. I used to sing into the Bakelite radio believing if I could hear them they could hear me.

“I thought I’d be discovered and they’d say, ‘You standing on that chair singing Buttons and Bows we want to hear you’.”

In a sense, this is exactly what happened to Gloria. “I was from a Protestant family, living in Portadown, Co Armagh, the Catholics went to school and church at one end, we the other. Nether the twain met.

“My mother May gave me the worst telling off one day because I was playing tennis in the local park with trainee priests and this was a shocking thing to do.

“Then I did the worst thing imaginable by marrying a Catholic, Don Keating. I remember saying to my dad, ‘but Don’s an English Catholic not an Irish one. There is a difference.’

“As an Orangeman, he wasn’t very happy. My parents didn’t come to the wedding. My uncle gave me away and the rest of the family came. It was a very happy day. My father didn’t come on principle and my mother did what her husband did, as happened in those days in Ireland. In a weird way, I understand his principles and I knew that I was going against the grain. But my father said that if you do marry this man he will be like a son to me, and so it was.

“Coming to England was a marvellous move for me,” Gloria continues. “Caron was already at Bristol University, my elder son Paul was at Guildford doing estate management and my youngest Michael was finishing primary school. I was over here taking on a big challenge and could see the children at weekends.”

Ironically, as she was offered the BBC job in London, her husband Don, a television producer, was offered a six-month contract in South Africa.

“It was absolutely bizarre. We’d never been apart during our marriage for more than a week. We both decided that we’d have a shot at it. Our lives went apart. It was culture shock coming to London as I knew nobody.

“Wogan teased me incessantly during our handovers on air. Although I’d already had a good 12 years under my belt in Northern Ireland, it was thanks to Terry’s teasing that he made my name known, so I owe him a lot.”

* THE Southport Flower Show runs from August 16-19. For more details, visit www.southportflowershow.co.uk

Losing Caron

GLORIA HUNNIFORD found herself going from being the journalist to being the story with the premature death of her daughter, the Blue Peter presenter Caron Keating, from cancer.

“The reality is you’re never the same person again,” says Gloria of the time. “I’m not undermining anyone else’s grief, but having lost my parents and my former husband, I believe losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to you. There’s no getting over it, if anything the gap gets worse as you get older. It’s not in the right order of life. Speaking as a wom- an, you cannot give birth to a child and lose that child at any stage without it be- ing the biggest gap in your life and there’s no way you’d want to fill it. My faith has seen me through. I’ve got to believe I’ll see her again, or I’d go mental.”

Gloria’s agony continued as newspapers dissected her supposed reactions to Caron’s husband Ross’s subsequent remarriage.

“I’ve never given an interview about that and a lot of it was fabricated. I’ve a very good relationship with Ross and I see the boys all the time, which is the most important thing.”

Gloria has taken solace in setting up the Caron Keating Foundation, which raises money for cancer charities nationwide.

“Someone wrote saying you’ve got to make sense of something that makes no sense at all, which was an inspiration to do this. Caron would be proud of what we’re doing in her name.

“When I watch my grandson Charlie strum his guitar and sing his own song on his birthday and I thought how much Caron would have loved to see that. (When I saw) my youngest grandson Gabriel dance in his local theatre school, I turned to Ross and said ‘Wouldn’t Caron have adored this?’

“Research shows it’s when children move into their teens, that’s when the loss really kicks in. I try and talk constructively about Caron, not in a heavy way, but say how their mum would have been proud of something they’ve done.

“On Charlie’s birthday this year, we went to a restaurant and among some books was one I’d written about Caron, Next to You, which also included her diaries. It was like a sign. I opened the book and found the part relating to his birth and he read it there on his 13th birthday. It was very, very poignant.”

Gloria has raised more than £1m to date for the foundation distributing it to various cancer charities. “We don’t do bricks and mortar, but donate to anything. In Northern Ireland, we pay for a radiographer to screen young girls for the years the NHS don’t screen.

“It can be a few thousand pounds or £25,000, but even small things make a difference to people’s lives. I administrate it and read every letter. I hope it makes people’s lives more bearable, because it makes it more bearable for me, thinking I’m doing something positive. I just miss Caron so much.”

* THE Caron Keating Foundation, is at PO Box 122, Sevenoaks, Kent, TN13 1UB.