SCOTTISH TV presenter Lorraine Kelly has said she thought nothing would be “as bad” as covering the Lockerbie bombing until she reported on the Dunblane massacre.
Kelly, 64, was speaking on ITV’s Good Morning Britain to celebrate 40 years in television when she said that as a parent, the Dunblane gun attack, which saw 16 children and one teacher killed and 15 others injured at Dunblane Primary School in 1996, “hit particularly hard”.
She went on to say that when she covered the Lockerbie terror attack in 1988 she told herself that “somehow it wasn’t real” in order to avoid becoming too emotional.
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A total of 270 people died when Pan Am Flight 103 was brought down by a terrorist bomb in the Scottish borders town on December 21, 1988.
Asked about how those incidents had affected her early career, Kelly (below) said: “I think Lockerbie, I was very young and very inexperienced, and the only way I think anybody got through that was thinking that somehow it wasn’t real, and you had to almost close everything off and just be very focused on the story you were trying to tell.
“And the reason that I love doing what I do so much, is we’re allowed to have emotions, we’re allowed to somehow try and tell everyone what it was like to be there on a story like that.
“I thought when I did Lockerbie, ‘nothing will be as bad as that’, the worst terrorist atrocity in Europe that there has ever been, and I thought, ‘nothing will be as bad as that’.
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“Then Dunblane happened, and I think because Rosie (her daughter) was about two then, and I think when you’re a parent, it hit everybody hard, but when you’re a parent it hit particularly (hard).”
Kelly began her journalism career on the East Kilbride News, turning down a university place to study English and Russian to join the newspaper, before joining BBC Scotland as a researcher in 1983.
In 1984, she joined TV-am as an on-screen reporter covering Scottish news, and in 1990 she began her presenting career on Good Morning Britain, before getting her own show,
Lorraine, in 2010. A special documentary on her career, Lorraine Kelly: 40 Unforgettable Years, will air on ITV1 at 9pm on Wednesday.
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