Spending an hour in the company of Margaret Thatcher still ranks as the most nerve-wracking moment of Kaye Adams’ career.
After working for Central Television where she obtained her Thatcher scoop Kaye returned to her home country, where she was as a reporter for Scotland Today.
She was one of the first journalists on the scene when the Lockerbie disaster occurred in December 1988. “I had been at another job quite nearby and we went there as soon as the first reports came in.
“Early reports were saying a military jet crashed into a hill near Lockerbie, but as we were driving it became apparent it was a commercial plane and it had landed on Lockerbie.
“The scene was completely outside anything I and I think anyone else at the scene had ever encountered before. As a reporter you’re used to coping with some horrible scenes, murders and child abductions, but this was off everyone’s radar.”
Despite her background in hard news, Kaye is best known as a chat show host, but the departure of Sheena McDonald from the magazine show Scottish Women was what prompted the unexpected change of career.Career”I don’t think many journalists plan out their careers, everything just unfolds in quite a higgledy-piggledy way. When Sheena left they weren’t sure whether to find a replacement or just can the show altogether.
“I was asked if I might be interested and thought, why not?”
Kaye spent six years fronting the show, which won a number of awards. Since then, she’s presented ITV Weekend Live, Central Weekend Live and This Morning, where she reported on the first series of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.
In 1999 she became the lead anchor on a new television show, Loose Women. The lunchtime show features a panel of four women who discuss topical issues ranging from daily politics and current affairs to celebrity gossip.
“I loved working for Loose Women,” she says. “It wasn’t always plain sailing and there were some shows, especially early on, that were a bit of a dog’s breakfast, but you always got the feeling it was a good format and it would come good.”
Kaye left the show to have her second child and, after a brief return, finally left for good over a dispute about money. She and her long-term partner, tennis coach Ian Campbell, have two children, Charlie (8) and Bonnie (4).
“With Ian being a tennis coach I used to play a lot. With having children and everything I’ve let it slip over the last few years, but I’m planning to get back into it this summer.”
Since March last year, Kaye has presented her own morning call-in show. Call Kaye is on weekday mornings from 8.50-10.30am. “I really enjoy doing a radio show,” she says.
“Radio’s not all that much different from doing television. Really, it’s the listeners who shape the debates all I do is frame them.
“I enjoy the variety of topics. We talk about things that affect people’s life. So after the awful events in Japan, we discussed the pros and cons of nuclear power.
“This morning we were chatting about how much privacy you should give teenagers. It’s all things that are relevant to people’s lives.”
The former Loose Women presenter and current Radio Scotland host was fresh out of journalism school and, quite naturally, felt a little overwhelmed by the Iron Lady.
“I never expected she’d agree to an interview,” she says, “so it was all a bit of a surprise. I was working for Central News at the time and had suggested doing a programme on the low number of women in Parliament.
“It was a bit of a scandal at the time. I can’t remember the exact figure all these years later, but I think it was something like only 4% of people in Parliament were women.
“So I wanted to find some women who had done well at Westminster … and Mrs Thatcher was the most obvious choice.”
The interview was held in Downing Street and the Iron Lady answered the door herself. “She ushered us in and brushed down my shoulders so I wouldn’t have fluff on them when my mum saw me on TV.
“To this day I still have no idea if that was a genuine gesture of affection, born out of her maternal instincts, or if that was her way of putting this cheeky young pup in her place by treating her as a cheeky young pup.”
Whatever the reason, the interview was a terrific coup for the young reporter. “I’ve no illusions that it was a great interview. I was only 24 and still very green, but it was a great opportunity.
“She achieved a lot, although I wouldn’t say she did much for women’s rights they did refer to her as the best man in the cabinet, after all.”
Kaye (48) was born in Grangemouth and her parents ran a road haulage business. She went to St George’s School for Girls in Edinburgh and then to Edinburgh University.
“I initially wanted to be a lawyer, but I didn’t get accepted to study law. They suggested I take a social science degree, so I studied economics and politics. I took a couple of law courses, but very quickly decided it looked too much like hard work.”NewspaperInstead, Kaye began working on one of the university’s student newspapers and quickly realised she’d found the occupation she wanted. “When I graduated I applied to all the journalism training courses there were this was back in the day when quite a few companies still did them.
“I applied to DC Thomson, I applied to loads of radio stations and I applied to television stations. When Central Television offered to take me on their training course in Birmingham it was a fantastic opportunity, so off I went.
“It was a one-year course and it was run in conjunction with ITN, so you were being taught by some of the most senior reporters in the country, people I’d watched on the news when I was growing up. They were really generous with their experience and their expertise.”
The training course saw Kaye gain experience of all aspects of television news and included some fairly unlikely outposts. “I wrote weather reports and would regularly have them sent back for being 10 seconds long instead of eight.
“For a while I presented a children’s news programme called News Hound, where my co-presenter was an Irish Wolfhound called Oscar.”