For some odd reason — or is this just me? — our better-known female
newsreaders often go by names that have one picturing them as heroines in
works of literature. Kirsty Young, for example, is an excellent soubriquet
for the focus of a chick-lit novel; Katie Derham sounds like she spent a
good few years cleaning out coal scuttles in a Catherine Cookson book.
Natasha Kaplinsky could have died consumptively in something by Tolstoy;
Jackie Bird is a yet-to-be-written children’s book, possibly concerning a
gawky grinning creature with synthetic orange fur, if that description does
not trespass too much on the actual reality.
Isla Traquair, meanwhile — shortly to replace Kaplinsky, the UK’s highest-paid
newsreader, during her maternity leave from Five — well, Traquair is
straight from the Clearance novels of Iain Crichton Smith and Neil Gunn,
she’s a young, lustrous-haired wife in a shawl watching the steam ships
leave for Canada with a tear in her green eye. There’s something doomed and
noble about the name, the hint of a piper in the gloaming and a cad of a
factor offering all the rolled oats in Sutherlandshire for one night alone
with her: “Miss Traquair, I mean to have you, by fair means or foul!”
At the very least, the name has an antiquity that sits awkwardly with the
plasma-screen-and-comfy-sofa milieu in which Traquair plies her trade. “It
was particularly cruel of my parents, I think, to give me a name that’s
constantly mistaken for Isla St Clair, who used to be on The Generation
Game,” she says, “but I’ve had it in a hundred varieties: Tractor,
Trisquare, Trucker, you name it. My mum was once called Mrs Tranquilizer by
a pupil.”
While we’re on such subjects, we may as well get out of the way the other
obvious thing about Traquair. She really, really does look like Kirsty
Young, more so in the flesh than on screen, and particularly so since her
hair was truncated into one of those glassy, ear-hugging bobs. It’s
groaningly reductive, of course, to discuss telly women in terms of their
looks, more so if somebody has set up a Facebook group titled How Fit Is
Isla Traquair. At the same time, if the BBC weatherman were the dead spit of
Jeremy Paxman, it’d be bizarre for the fact not to be remarked upon. The
comparisons are compounded by Traquair’s CV. Like Young, she took in a stint
at Scottish television, then graduated to London and Five. There’s also the
voice; it doesn’t quite achieve the basso, stern-headmistress depth of
Young’s, but it’s getting there.
Traquair, 28, is stoical on the subject.The resemblance, she sighs, is neither
help nor hindrance, an immaterial quirk of genetics. There are important
differences, though. Whereas Young fell upwards, from the fishing reports on
Radio Scotland to commercial daytime magazine television then the news,
Traquair since her teenage days has been one of those single-minded, Lois
Lane-like journalistic keenies, getting the spelling of town councillors’
names correct and giving her all for the deadline; when she was in
newspapers she became, she says, the “death-knock queen of Aberdeen”.
Raised in Westhill, she scored a front-page story, concerning the BSE crisis,
in the Scottish edition of The Sun when she was 15 and on a work placement
(“Me and mad cows next to a picture of Pamela Anderson; my mother still
keeps that issue at home,” she says), then spent several years as a court
reporter on the Press and Journal. The screen followed with a presenting
role on Grampian’s North Tonight. She produced, but didn’t appear in, three
series of Unsolved, a set of Scottish Television true-crime investigations,
hosted by Alex Norton of Taggart; typical STV budget restrictions meant
murder victims were played by Traquair’s friends and family: “All my female
friends were prostitutes for week,” she remembers. “My mum, who's 58, had to
do a bed scene with a sound man in his early twenties.”
Traquair’s mother, incidentally, spent her career in teaching, her father
designs software for tracking systems and, oddly, as is surprisingly common
in Aberdeenshire, doubles as a baron. Traquair discovered his
semi-aristocratic status only when she found his business card at her local
optician. “I had to go home and say, dad, are you a baron? I have three
brothers and our parents hadn’t told any of us. He doesn’t really do
baron-type things around the house.” She is separated from her husband, NeilMcIntosh,
the financial director of an Aberdeenshire civil engineering firm: “I was
with Neil for 10 years and we’re still great friends,” she says. “We had —
if you can call it this — a happy separation, though it was heart-breaking.
I’m not one of those women who’s so obsessed with her career that she
wouldn’t have children, I love children.” Traquair considers this:
“Actually, I suppose I am a career-driven so-and-so. But I’d never allow it
to influence my lifestyle.”
After a fallout with STV, when the company wouldn’t allow her to go to ITN on
secondment, Traquair moved to ITN anyway then was poached by Five, on the
same sofas vacated by her older doppelganger. Blithely, and mainly because
it’s easy to find television the most glamorous and scintillating profession
on earth, I’d assumed people in Traquair’s position were coached rigorously
by their employers on handling the pitfalls in being an eye-catching woman
who’s broadcast into several million homes each evening. But apart from a
brief lecture on how to handle the Kirsty Young question, they’ve declined
to do so. Maintaining the just-a-humble-hack line, Traquair says she isn’t
bothered, but this doesn’t prevent the attention coming. When she was at
Grampian, she says, one particularly dedicated admirer sailed to Aberdeen
from the Hebrides to deliver her a box of Milk Tray. She notes, fretfully,
that she’s a mainstay of a website that sweatily captures screen-grabs of
female newsreaders, a website that, according to his recent retrial, was
visited frequently by Barry George, the convicted killer of Jill Dando.
“I used to get some very strange mail when I was at ITN,” she recalls. “They
usually started off saying they thought I was very professional, they
enjoyed my reports and that was always lovely. You send them a signed photo.
And then more letters come back full of . . . unsavoury suggestions. Most
newreaders don’t open their own mail for that reason. It’s best you don’t
know what some viewers are thinking.”
She’s still getting accustomed to this London business. It took her four
months until she could dispense with her car’s sat-nav system for the short
drive from the flat she shares with two female Australian friends in Stoke
Newington to the Five offices on Long Acre.
We meet at The Wolseley restaurant on Piccadilly because I assume it’s
precisely the kind of starry showbiz canteen in which television presenters
all but live. Traquair has never heard of it.
The previous day, though, Traquair had been covering the launch of the Mamma
Mia! movie, interviewing her hero Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba, and discussing wind
machines with Meryl Streep. (“My dear, every woman should have her own
personal wind machine for getting her picture taken,” the actress told her.)
Until Kaplinsky departs to give birth and Traquair replaces her for anything
up to a year — sadly, she says, she doesn’t receive Kaplinsky’s
annual £1m salary pro rata in her absence — Traquair is still on the
daily round of news coverage, the medical breakthroughs, celeb-safaris and
sudden deaths of mainstream general interest.
For the latter, her death-knock skills of old still come in useful: “I’ve been
in homes hours after someone has lost a loved one,” she says, “and it’s like
watching a movie but really close-up. For some of them it’s a therapy,
they want to talk about their loved ones, they want to say how wonderful
that person was. I often was welcomed with open arms, there are still a few
I keep in touch with.
“Sometimes, I think, they find media interest a bit like standing up in
church. And it’s deep privilege to have them allow me into their lives.”
