Lorraine Kelly: My unfinished business on Orkney

The Glasgow-born broadcaster, 66, regularly travels with her husband, cameraman Steve Smith, and says they encounter “the Scottish and Orcadian diaspora” wherever they go.

“Me and my husband go camping and put a tent on top of the jeep that we hire and tootle around – we’ve done Namibia, we did Zimbabwe last year, and that is an absolute joy,” she says.

“We’re very lucky, and when we were travelling in Zimbabwe we saw a sign, and it said ‘Orkney’. We did a bit of research, and it turned out there was a family, or a few families from Orkney who’d gone to South Africa and travelled up to Zimbabwe – I guess it would have been Rhodesia – or it might have been even before that – and they’d settled there.”

A similar thing happened when she went to South Georgia, an island in the South Atlantic Ocean, near Antarctica: “One of the ports is Stromness, and Stromness is one of the towns in Orkney. When I’m at the ends of the earth, or I’m in the middle of Africa – here are all these connections.”

Despite being born and raised on the mainland, Kelly has a particular soft spot for Orkney.

“Apart from the Covid years, I have been going every year since 1985, when I first went to Orkney as a reporter to cover the story of the shortest scheduled flight in the world, which goes from Westray,” she remembers.

“It takes a minute – and with the wind at your back, it can take 30 seconds, 45 seconds, it’s a quick one. I went there to do this, and all of a sudden I found this incredible place with these amazing people, and this extraordinary culture and amazing history.

“It pulls me back, it really does. It’s everything: it’s the people, it’s the scenery, it’s the history, it’s the culture, the food… It’s all sorts of things. I need my hit of Orkney at least once a year. I come back – I don’t know whether it’s the air or the beautiful lights or whatever it is, but I come back rejuvenated.”

Kelly began her journalism career on the East Kilbride News, before joining BBC Scotland as a researcher in 1983, then working at TV-am as an on-screen reporter covering Scottish news. Later, she began her presenting career on Good Morning Britain, before being given her own show.

Orkney is so dear to Kelly’s heart, it’s the setting of her first forays into fiction. The Island Swimmer was published in 2024, with its sequel, The Island Secret, out now.

The Island Secret sees Kelly return to the same cast of characters in Orkney: Evie, who has settled back into island life after years away, with her colourful friends and a somewhat strained relationship with her sister, Liv. Evie’s quiet life is disrupted by the arrival of a long-lost relative from America, Amelia – who looks exactly like her, but seems to have more sinister plans than her upbeat facade suggests.

“I had unfinished business with the characters,” Kelly says of writing the sequel. “In the first book, I didn’t want to do a story where everything was tied up in a nice bow at the end – because life’s not like that.”

Not that writing the second book was an easy task. “You’ve got more expectations of yourself, you may be questioning yourself a little bit more,” Kelly notes. “But in other ways it was easier, because you’d done the first one, so you know the process.”

Plus, Kelly found herself with a bit more time on her hands to write, due to recent changes in the ITV schedule. Her eponymous show, Lorraine, now airs 30 weeks a year, compared to the previous 52, and each show is 30 minutes instead of an hour (“so I’ve got much more time”, she says).

And the broadcaster had the help of fellow writers, saying: “That’s what I love about writing, the whole community of writers – especially the women. They’re so supportive, people like Marian Keyes, she’s so successful and she’s never pulled the ladder up.

“She helps aspiring writers, she helps established writers. When I said to her, ‘I’m really struggling with the second book, it’s just so hard’, she said, ‘Yes, of course – it’s supposed to be. Don’t you worry, it’ll be alright’.

“She was so supportive of me, she really was, and she is of everybody. I really love the fact that when women get to these positions of power or success that they don’t pull up the ladder… Because what is the point of amassing all this experience and knowledge when you don’t share it? It’s daft, it makes no sense at all.”

A major character in the series is Freya, a vibrant and caring individual who celebrates her 80th birthday in the latest book. “The least interesting thing about Freya is she happens to be trans… She’s just a lovely, lovely woman,” notes Kelly.

Freya is a multifaceted character whose gender identity is barely touched upon, until one moment in the book when she’s targeted by online hate for being a trans woman.

“I thought I needed to reflect the fact that trans people are having a bad time,” explains Kelly.

“We’ve got so polarised – I remember in the Seventies and Eighties, we had a trans woman who drove our bus, Jane. I think she found society more tolerant of her back in the Seventies and Eighties than she would now. And that’s terrible, isn’t it?

“While I understand where people are coming from, I just think we can be a bit more tolerant of one another, and stop – on both extremes – the really nasty stuff.”

She continues: “I wanted to reflect that a bit and show that actually the people that love Freya, that know Freya, they just know her as Freya… When she was a teenager, she happened to be a wee boy, but nobody’s bothered about that anymore. It really doesn’t matter.”

With the character of Freya, Kelly wanted to “show everybody we’re all the same, and just accept people for who they are”, she says.

“Every single person that goes onto my show gets treated exactly the same – I don’t care if you’re the king of Timbuktu, I don’t care who you are. You get treated with respect… Until you prove otherwise. I think that’s really important to have a bit of tolerance in this world – unfortunately, things have become very polarised, politically and culturally, and that’s a shame.

“But I have high hopes that the next generation – who are very good – that the pendulum will come back again.”

Kelly has a strong link to the next generation with her granddaughter, Billie, who was born in 2024 to Kelly’s daughter Rosie Kelly Smith, who earlier this year published her debut book, Mother To Mother – exploring motherhood through generations of women in her family.

Buckinghamshire-based Kelly lives a six minute walk away from Rosie and Billie and will be taking them to Orkney this summer, with the broadcaster joking that her “real job is being a babysitter. Then there’s the telly, then there’s the books”.

Another thing that gives Kelly hope is the World Cup – she travelled to Boston to see Scotland play Morocco.

“It’s so sad these days that we’re so divided – that’s why I’m loving the football. The whole nation has come together.”