It says a lot about Kirsty Wark's controlled professional persona that the
first time she weeps on camera makes headlines. The Newsnight presenter
broke down while learning about the fate of her great-uncle, Sergeant James
Alan Wark, during the First World War for the BBC One Remembrance series My
Family at War.
Sgt Wark enlisted after Lord Kitchener called men to arms in 1914, won a
bravery medal, but died of Spanish flu in a French field hospital 18 days
after the Armistice in 1918, at the age of 24. “My earnest hope is that you
will not sorrow too deeply should I be lost to you,” he wrote to his
parents, as he anticipated going over the top. “Now, my dearest and most
beloved, my poor pencil can not express the deep love for you ...Think that
I will die cheerfully in the hope of meeting you all in the Heaven above.”
“I have a very powerful sense of family”
The passage moved Wark to tears. “I was very shocked at myself; I'm still not
sure I want to see the programme,” she says. “It was not just about his
experience. My dad had gone into battle [shortly after] D-Day. He got his
Military Cross that day, was badly wounded and never talked about it. I
suppose it resonated for me that all sorts of people in my family had been
in a war. I think that's why I cried.
“With losing my mum this year, and I have a very powerful sense of family, the
idea of belonging, the idea of a thread, is very important to me and that's
what probably upset me.”
Wark was shaken by the stark contrast between her great-uncle's warm letters
home and the horror of his life on the front line - he led a team running a
machinegun that could kill a German with a three-second burst of fire. “It
was very difficult to reconcile what he was doing with the letters,” she
says. “He separated off that part of himself. He was thinking his way back
into what was a very loving and close family. He didn't want to announce to
them that he was having a horrible time.”
Her son James was with her in northern France as she filmed the final episode
of the four-part series, which commemorates the end of the First World War.
He saw her break down. “Of course, being 16 he said, ‘That's the money shot,
Mum. That's what they're looking for'.” She laughs.
“If I didn't do my homework I'd be caught”
Such is Wark's kudos as a Newsnight presenter and uncompromising interrogator
that the press likes to dub her the most influential woman in Scotland, a
fixer hobnobbing with Gordon and his Scottish cronies, presiding over salons
in her Glasgow home. The salon idea is nonsense, she says: when people come
to dinner they bring their own pudding.
She could, more accurately, be viewed as a matriarch whose core is unashamedly
in her family - her husband, TV producer Alan Clements, and their children;
daughter Caitlin, 17, and son James. Her commitments to present Newsnight 55
times a year and Newsnight Review, a weekly cultural spin-off programme, for
a further 30, make it sensible to have a central London flat and this, a
two-bedroom contemporary crash pad with stunning views, is where we meet.
She is running 30 minutes late and insists (she can be very bossy) that I
get the keys from the concierge and let myself in. This is weird. I look,
but don't snoop (honest), noting the gleaming surfaces and the bits of
surface mess that tell of a busy life with a focus elsewhere.
She arrives, pours herself a glass of wine and drinks it quickly, which she
later admits is a reaction to being late. She has just recorded four
back-to-back episodes of BBC Four's Book Quiz and will do another four the
next day, so it is generous of her - and possibly slightly batty - to do an
interview in the evening. She is clearly driven, and keen to support
Remembrance Day: “It should be mandatory to go to northern France, people
must remember.”
Before she sits down, she wonders what to do with the flowers she has been
sent by a production team (Newsnight is far too prosaic to engage in such
luxury, so they are a treat), beats herself up about the chocolate she ate
to keep herself going, and decides to keep her TV make-up on for the
pictures because she's rubbish at doing it herself. Then she tucks her legs
under her on the sofa and asks about my family to try to establish whether
we are related. Not as far as we can tell, though we may have a
nineteenth-century connection in Glasgow.
She is impressive for many reasons, not least because she has gravitas without
seeming remote. Bypassing celebrity is a deliberate choice, and makes good
professional sense because it means she isn't hurtling towards the
age-related trap encountered by some TV women. So we won't be treated to her
doing the paso doble on Strictly Come Dancing? Regrettably, no. They asked
and she declined.
“It probably wasn't a good idea. Once you do that you open yourself up to all
sorts of scrutiny. I don't court that thing about being on the red carpet,
of getting featured in that way. I'm a working journalist and I want to be
respected for what I do, not what I look like. I do spend lots of money on
clothes [Louis Vuitton, Moschino and Agnès B], but not to distract
[attention] from what I'm doing. The over-riding concern is being good at
your job. If I didn't do my homework I'd get caught out. I'm too scared.”
She is scathing about the tabloids' response to a solitary comment from a
viewer about an above-knee skirt she wore when presenting from Cannes. “Do
they have nothing else to write about?” The press also picked up on Jonathan
Ross and Russell Brand's misbehaviour, I point out. “Yes, I think their
attitude to women leaves a lot to be desired though,” she says, carefully.
“That's been dealt with.”
“I like the fact that I look like my parents”
We return to the unPC subject of her appearance. She will not be having Botox,
she declares. What about any other cosmetic surgery? “No.” She is 53 and
points to her face. “Where would you start? I probably don't mind ageing. I
like the laughter lines. I'm not going to have Botox, that's for sure. When
I was in America last week I was horrified: every second or third woman I
saw on the street had altered her face to the point where you think ‘how can
you know what you originally looked like? How does that feel? Where do you
get your identity from?' I like the fact that I look like my parents, that
my nose is slightly wonky like my dad's and I've got dark eyebrows like my
mum. This is part of who I am. If you iron it out, what are you left with?”
She might have surgery on her nose, she says, because she has broken it twice,
once when fixing shelves in her first flat, then when her son was a toddler
he head-butted her while she read him a story. “I'm not going to have it
done until it's impossible to breathe from one nostril. I've just had a
general anaesthetic for a tennis injury to my knee - I had a lateral tear in
my cartilage and had keyhole surgery. I don't like anaesthetics very much.”
She plays tennis every Sunday at 9.15am, and sees a personal trainer once a
week. She tries to eat carefully too, but fails when she is busy at work.
For lunch, she has a salad and at Newsnight she eats a takeaway as she
writes scripts at her desk. “Probably unhealthy. I'm about five pounds
overweight and it's harder to shift as you get older. You feel it in your
clothes, the way you're carrying yourself. I can't drink as much as I used
to. Three glasses and you're not going to sleep as well. If I'm at home I'm
in bed by 11pm. I'll be watching Newsnight and I'll fall asleep - nothing to
do with the quality of the programme, I hasten to add. I like getting up
early in the morning, 7am tomorrow.
“I'm lucky that I've got a lot of energy. The adrenalin keeps you going but
sometimes I get to a point where I go boomf, and have to go to bed at 9pm. I
always go to bed with paper and a pencil because if I wake up in the middle
of the night and think of an idea or a phrase, if I don't write it down I
don't remember it.”
It sounds as though she never stops working, though she plays that down. Her
therapy is cooking, especially baking. “One of the biggest treats is not to
leave the house for a whole day, you know, you ground yourself back in the
house, in the kitchen. I often do that.”
Tonight she will eat late, pasta she thinks. But first she must be
photographed. She steals my poppy. “Armistice. That's what this is all
about.” The remembrance roses she ordered for her garden have just arrived
in Glasgow.
My Family at War, BBC One, November 11, 9pm, www.bbc.co.uk/remembrance
Making headlines
1976 Joined BBC Radio Scotland as a graduate researcher
1983 Moved to television as a producer on Reporting Scotland
1989 Married producer Alan Clements
1990 Made headlines after a probing interview with Margaret Thatcher,
then Prime Minister
1993 Joined BBC Two's Newsnight as a presenter, named Journalist of the
Year by Bafta Scotland
1997 Named Best Television Presenter by Bafta Scotland
2000 Nominated for the Richard Dimbleby Award for Best Television
Presenter in the Baftas
2001 Started presenting Newsnight Review
2003 Wark was a witness in the Fraser inquiry into spiralling costs and
delays over the building of the Scottish Parliament
2005: Wark and her husband sold stakes in TV production company IWC
Media Ltd, reportedly making almost £2 million
2008 A viewer complains about her “completely inappropriate” miniskirt
on Newsnight Review
