'Highland beaches are like Barbados,' says Carol Kirkwood

While Kirkwood, 62, would bat away such lofty praise (she is far too self-effacing to blow her own trumpet in that respect), her popularity among stalwart fans of the show speaks volumes.

Key to that appeal is her breezily efficient, down-to-earth and sunny demeanour, the perfect antidote to a bleak or gloomy forecast. How does it feel to be an integral part of daily life for so many viewers?

“It is nice of you to say that,” says Kirkwood, with a bashful chuckle. “I don’t feel that I’m an integral part of people’s lives in the morning; I just do my job to the best of my ability.

Carol Kirkwood in her role as a weather presenter (Image: free)

“I love it when I’m out and about and I meet people who will come up and talk to me. That is the biggest compliment you can have, that anybody would spend their time chatting to you because they feel they know you. I do genuinely like that because I like meeting the audience.”

A quick scroll through social media reveals myriad posts and column inches devoted to her on-air outfits. Mentioning this prompts another typically demure response from Kirkwood, who swiftly plays down any suggestion of her as a style icon.

“More often than not I’m thinking, ‘I wish I had done my ironing last night’ or ‘Why did I not plan what I am going to wear?’ I’m just the same as everyone else in that respect,” she insists.

When you interview someone in the public eye, the first thing anybody asks is: are they as nice in real life? This can prove a tricky question to answer diplomatically. Thankfully when it comes to Kirkwood, there is no such quandary: she is genuinely lovely.

It is a Tuesday teatime in mid-June when we speak and Kirkwood is en route to Salford Quays, Greater Manchester, where she is due to present at the BBC studios the following morning.

Despite an afternoon of train cancellations and travel delays, she is in a cheerful mood as we settle down to chat about her other full-time job: best-selling author.

Kirkwood’s fourth book, Once Upon a Time in Venice, comes out this week. The glamour-packed romance novel is set against a backdrop of the titular Italian city, where the worlds of a Hollywood actor, an opera star and an enigmatic masked stranger collide in dramatic fashion.

Publisher HarperCollins describes her “signature brand of escapist fiction” as “Mamma Mia meets Jackie Collins”. What drew Kirkwood to this particular location for her latest offering?

“I have been there and I love it,” she says. “Venice is a romantic place to visit. There is so much to see. Casanova used to live there. It has the Biennale, the masked balls and little, windy streets where you can get lost. There are lots of places where you can hide secrets.”

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Venice holds a special place in her heart. “My husband Steve took me there for my 60th birthday and it was amazing. We had visited before. I’d also visited with friends. So, I have been to Venice quite a few times and it is beautiful. I never tire of it.

“What I like is glamour and Venice is a glamorous place. The hotel [in her book], where a lot of the action takes place, is based on the Hotel Cipriani, which I have never stayed in, but I have visited. It is such a fabulous hotel. That is what I wanted to create.”

Despite the fact that romance is consistently one of literature’s biggest genres, second only to crime and thrillers in terms of book sales, there remains a lingering snobbery about it in some quarters.

Kirkwood, though, pays no heed to those who may turn their noses up at her chosen subject matter. “It is escapism and everybody loves a happily ever after,” she asserts. “I love romance myself. I’m a born romantic.”

Her novels reflect a life-long fascination with glitzy settings. “Hollywood, to me, is glamour. You think of the movies that are made there. The actors and actresses. The award ceremonies. How glamorous everybody looks at the Oscars.

“I want to capture that in my books because it is what I always loved when I was growing up. If you think about the Grace Kelly movies. She was such a beautiful lady, a fabulous actress and then a princess. She lived the little girl dream.”

In the opening pages of Once Upon a Time in Venice, a young woman plots escaping her home in a sleepy, Italian mountain village for the hustle and bustle of the city - a theme that will resonate with many readers.

I wonder if Kirkwood, who grew up in Morar, near Mallaig, drew from the adventure-seeking aspirations of her own formative years?

“I was brought up in what was a hamlet at the time - it is now a village - and it was tiny,” she says. “I loved living there and I love going back and I do still go back.

“It is almost like when you are a wee girl, the bright lights of another place that you may read about, it sounds so exciting - all the possibilities and opportunities that it might proffer to you should you go there.”

Carol Kirkwood. Picture: Paul Stuart (Image: free)

The third youngest of eight children, Kirkwood speaks fondly about her childhood in the Rough Bounds. “The beaches, oh my goodness, they are like Barbados,” she says. “If it is a sunny day, they are spectacular. And the sand dunes at Camusdarach are just gorgeous.”

Her mother was a primary teacher, who then helped run the Morar Hotel alongside Kirkwood’s father for many years until they sold it.

“They are both deceased, sadly,” says Kirkwood, when asked about her remaining family ties to the area. “I have cousins there. A lot of my family live in Edinburgh, so I tend to go to Edinburgh now that mum and dad are both gone.

“But I still go up to the Highlands a couple of times a year to see my cousins. It is nice to go back. I still call it home, even though I haven’t lived there for donkey’s years. I left home when I was 18. But I still call it home, because it always will be home.”

Kirkwood attended Lochaber High School in Fort William, before going on to study at Napier College (now Edinburgh Napier University), where she gained a BA in Commerce. She began her BBC career as part of the secretarial reserve in London.

In 1993, Kirkwood joined the BBC’s television training department at Elstree as a presenter. When the UK operation of The Weather Channel launched in 1996, she did a stint working on satellite and cable TV, as well as Talk Radio.

This coupled with her Met Office training led to a job with the BBC Weather Centre team in 1998. She has been a regular on our screens ever since, although Kirkwood would be the first to admit that she never expected to enjoy such longevity in her current role.

“I didn’t even want to do the weather when I first started and was asked if I would go for an interview. [BBC] Breakfast, to me, is the best job in the world and I did not think I would still be doing it. Not at this age for sure and not for as long.

“I’m the longest-serving [BBC] Breakfast presenter full stop ever and hopefully I’ll be there for a few years yet.”

As a youngster, Kirkwood set her sights on becoming a Blue Peter presenter. While that didn’t happen, life has a funny way of panning out. “The irony of that is I ended up in the Blue Peter garden presenting the weather for about 12 years,” she says.

Carol Kirkwood in Strictly Come Dancing (Image: free)

There were early signs of a future path as an author too. Kirkwood recounts how she was always scribbling down ideas for stories.

“I had a really brilliant English teacher at secondary school. His name was Mr Cox. I don’t know if he is still alive. He would set us an essay to write, maybe one every couple of weeks, and I would be churning out six, 10, because I loved it.

“He was so encouraging every single time. He would mark them and say, ‘maybe try writing one that is twice this long’ or ‘maybe put a few more characters and a bit more guts into it.’”

As the years passed, Kirkwood continued to tap into that creativity and imagination. “Having so many brothers and sisters, I have loads of nieces and nephews, so when they were little, I would make up fairy stories about them and their friends, you know, bedtime stories.

“My nephew Rory, his dad is a vet, and he loved anything to do with animals. So, I would be talking about Highland cows on skateboards overtaking the cars and he would be in awe. I loved doing that. I would be killing myself laughing at the ridiculousness of it.”

These days, she is based in Berkshire. Her husband Steve, 48, is a police officer (the couple got married in December last year). Kirkwood is fiercely private and protective when it comes to discussing him or their life together.

“I never put anybody in the limelight who doesn’t want to be there,” she says. “So, I never talk about my family in that way either because I have chosen this career; they haven’t.”

The weather is a universal obsession and a subject we all love to chew the fat on, whether it is politely conversing with a neighbour or making small talk in a supermarket queue.

Kirkwood’s forecasts are beamed into millions of homes. People sit in front of their TVs each morning and think, “Right, where’s Carol? What is she going to tell us today?”

As the old adage goes, don’t shoot the messenger. To that end, Kirkwood often has banter with her fellow BBC Breakfast presenters who jokingly blame her for spoiling their weekend plans when she reveals that inclement weather is on the way.

This level of scrutiny intensifies during big events, such as Wimbledon in the past fortnight. Lest we forget, Kirkwood doesn’t actually control the weather; she only reports on it.

“Often, if it starts to rain, everybody wants to know how long it is going to rain for and if it is a shower, it is really hard to say,” she says. “You are looking at the radar picture, thinking, ‘Is it going to last more than five minutes? Will it be 15 minutes?’

“There is a lot of pressure. But, as you rightly said, I don’t make the weather, I just report on it and it is going to be, what it is going to be, whatever I say.

Carol Kirkwood grew up in Morar (Image: free)

“I remember a line from the movie Good Morning, Vietnam where somebody asks, ‘What is the weather going to be like?’ and the other guy says, ‘You’ve got a window. Open it.’ That made me laugh.”

Live TV has its share of challenges, not least when it comes to the potential for on-air bloopers or gaffes.

Last summer, Kirkwood was mid-forecast at Wimbledon when her canine co-star for the day decided to disappear off screen, taking the presenter with him. A near-identical incident happened with another dog at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2021.

“I love animals, but it has happened twice,” she says, laughing. “At the Chelsea Flower Show, it was Monday morning, the gardens were pristine, nobody had been in yet. I had a guide dog puppy called Flash, only six months old, with me.

“She was as good as gold and sat with me while I delivered the weather. I stroked her head and was down on my hunkers beside her. But then she saw her trainer and she was off.

“I had the lead and thought, ‘I can’t let her go because she might get into one of the gardens and start digging it up and I will be for the high jump if that happens …’ So, I held onto her. And she was so strong, she pulled me over.”

Giving further credence to the TV proverb “never work with children or animals”, Kirkwood found herself in a similar predicament at Wimbledon last year.

“The handler was behind the camera with a tennis ball,” she recalls. “He was holding the tennis ball in the air. The police dog, a wee spaniel, was so good, looking at the ball the whole time.

“Then the handler thought I had finished because I had stopped talking. The presenters were talking to me, but he couldn’t hear that. So, he put his hand down and the dog went, ‘whoosh’ and off. Sadly, I was attached to him at that point.

“I’ve had all sorts happen, dogs doing whoopsies behind me live on air. It is always dogs. What is it about dogs?”

Which brings us neatly to another nugget of telly gold involving Kirkwood. During a live broadcast from Greenwich Park, London, in 2020, she meant to talk about seeing “dog walkers and joggers” enjoying the sunshine, but instead muddled the two phrases and said “doggers”.

It is a moment that still makes her cringe. “Oh, gosh,” says Kirkwood. “Do you know what happened there? I was with a different cameraman, who hadn’t done the weather before. Because we don’t have monitors, he wanted to rehearse, which is absolutely a wise idea.

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“We rehearsed the whole thing and he said, ‘Can we do it again?’ and I replied, ‘Of course, we can.’ In rehearsal, I was saying we had been watching dog walkers and joggers all morning. But when it came to the live, I mixed up my words.”

Kirkwood groans audibly at the memory. “I was mortified. I thought, ‘I’m going to be in such big trouble …’ But I wasn’t, because it was obviously a genuine mistake. I looked so shocked. And then you are trying not to laugh.

“We had security with us that day because you often get quite a big crowd. The security guy was doubled over. Oh, deary me. There are so many things that have gone wrong in broadcasting when you are doing it live.”

Away from work, travel is a huge passion for Kirkwood. What places are on her wish list? “I would love to jump in the car, go under the tunnel to France and follow my nose with Steve to go wherever we fancy,” she says.

“We’d go across France, then perhaps along the coast of Spain and over to the Balearics. Then Corsica and Sardinia, into Italy and up through Switzerland and back towards home. I would love to do that whenever it is that we retire - goodness knows when that will be.”

It is an odyssey that would certainly spark inspiration for her writing, although Kirkwood is rarely short on ideas. “I can’t believe I have four books on the go, I really can’t,” she says. “I’m writing the fifth one as we speak. I never in my wildest dreams thought this would ever happen.”

Once Upon a Time in Venice by Carol Kirkwood (HarperCollins, £16.99), is published on July 18