Lorraine Kelly reprises Masked Singer owl performance in 40th anniversary show

By Casey Cooper-Fiske, PA Entertainment Reporter

TV presenter Lorraine Kelly repeated her Masked Singer performance of Kylie Minogue’s Padam Padam while dressed as an owl in a special episode of daytime talk show Lorraine to celebrate her 40th year in television.

The 64-year-old was surprised by a brass band and presenters Ranvir Singh and Christine Lampard outside her dressing room at the start of the show, and led into the studio where she was surrounded by family and friends wearing T-shirts with her face on.

An array of guests appeared on the show, including Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Holly Johnson, Kelly’s favourite singer, former GMTV colleague Kate Garraway, and Lorraine’s brother Graham Kelly, whom she said she was “horrible to” as a child.

Speaking about the special episode and an upcoming documentary about her career, the Scottish presenter said: “This is going to be so lovely to show Billy (her granddaughter), when she’s old enough I can do that as well as the documentary tonight.

“I can actually show her, it’ll be like the most amazing photo album, it just feels like it’s gone by in a flash.

“I’ve been so incredibly lucky, because mainly with the people that I work with, all of these incredible people, my great team, it’s a joy to go into work every morning, an absolute joy.”

As the show came to a close, Kelly ran off set early to put her owl costume on, before returning to sing the song she performed on the ITV singing show, which she described as a “career highlight”, while laughing, jumping up and down and hooting.

It came after Kelly’s brother had said she was “full of energy” as a child.

He said: “I remember, she was always on the go, just full of energy, whether it was going to ballet lessons when she was younger, whether it was later on as the school prefect.

“There’s a lot of pictures that you’ll see and, yeah, cracking pictures, some of them are famous in her book, where she looks a little bit demonic, but that was very unusual.”

She added: “I was horrible to you, because you were just an angel.

“I was six when Graham came along, and I was a spoiled princess, and then he came along, and he was the most beautiful baby you’ve ever seen in your life, big blue eyes, chubby cheeks you wanted to bite, and I think I did, badly.”

Interviews with friends and colleagues were interspersed with clips of Kelly presenting through the decades, including the various breast cancer campaigns she has fronted, which she described as one of the things she was “most proud” of in her career.

Women who had been impacted by the campaigns were then brought out, with one named Charlotte telling Kelly: “You saved my life.”

 

The Glasgow-born broadcaster was also joined by Garraway, who spoke about how Kelly had helped her on GMTV, where the pair worked together between 2000 and 2010, despite being “messy” while sharing a dressing room.

She told Kelly: “I remember being a massive fan of Lorraine. It was one of the most exciting things for my mum when I joined, then I found out I was sharing her dressing room, I was so excited.

“I remember one time when I was pregnant with Darcey, you came into the dressing room, and I was lying on the floor because I had a gap while you were on air before a meeting, and you were like, for goodness sake, this is ridiculous.

“And I thought, because I’m making that place even more of a mess, you were worried about me and you organised a sofa to go into our shared dressing room. It was tiny.

“You said, ‘if you ever need to lie down’, and that’s the thing she’s so professional, but also just like you see on the screen, just always looking after everybody else and I’ve never forgotten that.”

Other humorous moments in the show saw Ben Shephard speak about jokingly inviting Kelly to join him in bed on a live link, and Kelly recalling the time her daughter Rosie Kelly-Smith would not let go of Westlife singer Brian McFadden during an interview.

She 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 today, while this morning’s episode of Lorraine will also celebrate her career from 9am.