JULIE ETCHINGHAM: Red Leicester lass

The video libraries of TV history are littered with the on-air gaffes of people who didn’t know they could be heard. John Major roundly denouncing his Cabinet colleagues as bastards springs to mind, and the world is unlikely soon to forget “Yo, Blair”. But this may be small consolation to the Sky News presenter Julie Etchingham who has been caught out joking that the Conservative Party’s policy on immigration is “extermination”. (Sky described the remark, made while David Cameron was talking, as “regrettable” and not intended for broadcast.)

Etchingham, 37, has had a blameless career so far and must be kicking herself that her appearance on the front pages is for a blunder rather than her latest achievement: the coup of being poached to join Sir Trevor McDonald presenting the relaunched News at Ten next year.

Hers is the sort of career that makes the rest of us feel like flaky under-achievers. While still at school she worked weekends for BBC Radio Leicester, went on to read English at Cambridge and then won a place on the BBC’s graduate trainee scheme.

“I’d always enjoyed watching Newsround (the news programme for children) and keeping nerdy diaries as a child,” she has said, “and when I was about 14 my mother asked me whether I’d thought about becoming a journalist. She helped me fix up some work experience at the local BBC radio station and the local paper, and I was hooked.” In her spare time she read the Leicester Mercury every day, enjoyed watching Dallas and Dynasty – “the perfect escape from O levels” – and tackled the insomnia from which she still suffers by listening to the World Service through the night.

The logical career progression of many a TV presenter followed: a few years on a provincial programme, in her case Midlands Today, followed by the break into national TV in 1994 – presenting Newsround, where she met her husband, Nick.

In 2002 she moved to Sky to present first its breakfast programme and latterly its morning news programme. In 2005 she was also – Sky feels driven to point out – the first woman to host an election-night programme.

“The best thing about my job is that you meet amazing people and travel to extraordinary places,” she has said. “The worst is that it’s difficult to switch off mentally.”

Married with two sons, Etchingham could never be accused of being just a pretty face. She was picked to interview Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton and helped to anchor Sky’s coverage of the tsunami in Southeast Asia and the Beslan school siege. Her proudest moment, she once said, was when Newsround won an Emmy for a programme on Bosnian children.

“Live news,” she said, “has plenty of toe-curlers.” Now, poor girl, it has another.

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