Interview: Penny Smithg, TV presenter

“I’d been blonde since I was 28,’ says the irrepressibly cheerful Smith, who celebrated her 53rd birthday last week but could easily pass for being a decade younger, “and I’ve always fancied having red hair. I tried dyeing it red myself once, when I was 15 and about to go on a date with the captain of the school football team. On that occasion it went disastrously wrong: I left it on too long and the colour leaked on to my face – I ended up looking like an orangutan and tried to scrub it off with Vim, which resulted in terrible blisters.

“My hair stayed a nice mousey colour till I got into television and then I became a regulation TV blonde. At one stage I had it dyed a different colour, but as soon as my boss saw it he ordered me to go blonde again – so, of course, I did as I was told.”

And so just a couple of weeks ago, while enduring the “terrible, two-and-a-half-hour ennui” of having her blonde highlights retouched at the salon, it dawned on Smith that she was no longer under any professional obligation to keep her flaxen locks. Quite spontaneously, she decided to turn not quite as red as Rihanna, but certainly as russet as Rita Hayworth.

Any immediate regrets this time round? “No – I love it,” she says. “I’ve dyed half my clothes different colours to go with it, too – purple, burlesque red, sage green and navy blue, they all look really good with bracken-coloured hair.” As part of this flurry of reinvention, Smith has also had her shortsightedness treated with laser eye-surgery, “Twenty minutes after being lasered, I sent my first ever text without wearing glasses. There’s no stopping me now,” she jokes.

Since the GMTV sofa was consigned to a skip in June 2010, it’s fair to say Smith has not wasted any time on reflection or regrets. Whether or not there was a night of the long knives over the scrapping of ITV’s rather stale breakfast format, the twinkly-eyed presenter has sensibly kept her own counsel and maintained the breezy countenance for which she’s renowned. On Twitter, she simply thanked well-wishers for their comments and tweeted, “I’m planning a lot of lie-ins. Let the partying commence”.

This lightness of touch is what has kept Smith buoyant in the popularity stakes – she does a nice line in self-mocking humour, which does nothing to disguise the fact that she’s a whip-smart journalist who trained in the newsroom, grafted hard and rose steadily through the ranks. Smith is both approachable and attractive, garnering equal numbers of male and female fans among her audiences. Her deftness in switching between hard news, daytime TV shows and highbrow arts coverage – holding her own with the likes of Steven Berkoff, Mark Ravenhill and Murray Lachlan Young – is not to be underestimated.

Penny Smith made the switch from print to broadcasting in 1984, when she joined Radio Trent, then went on to her first TV job at Central Television before moving north to Border TV (of which more later). She was a member of the team that launched Sky News in 1989, then became a GMTV presenter in 1993.

Should we try to elicit her opinion of GMTV’s replacement, Daybreak, and its much-hyped anchors Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, Smith can body-swerve any awkwardness by honestly saying that she never sees it, because these days she doesn’t get out of bed at her west London home much before 10am. “One of the things I enjoy about my new life every single morning is getting up very late. I’d like to say I’ve turned into one of those women that drifts about in a negligée, but actually I slop about in my pyjamas. I try to book any meetings for 11am at the earliest.”

With the alarm clock no longer set for 4am, Smith can now fully indulge her love of West End theatre and opera. The opera obsession dates back to her childhood and was inherited from her mother and father (an engineer), who raised Nottinghamshire-born Penny and her three siblings in Rutland.

“I’ve always loved it – I was one of those 11-year-olds who’d say ‘Oh yeah, I love David Bowie’ to my school friends, then go home and listen to Joan Sutherland’s The Art of the Prima Donna, which I know inside out. If I heard three notes in a row from it, I could probably tell you exactly where they appear on the album. And then came Aida, which my dad used to put on the record-player to get us all out of bed on a Sunday. The rest of them would shoot out like scalded cats, while I’d just lie there, happily humming along.”

She now makes the most of being able to dine late at The Ivy with her partner of ten years, actor Vince Leigh, or watch their friend Alfie Boe singing on stage in Les Miserables without “dashing home to bed before the applause finishes”. Smith has a lot of friends in showbiz and the media – former boyfriends include Paul McKenna and Rory Bremner, one of the more surprising contestants in this year’s Strictly Come Dancing – but in typical down-to-earth style insists that she travels home at 2am on the night bus. Despite all this, it sounds as though her new existence comprises rather more work than it does socialising.

“I haven’t had to go looking for work, thankfully, because I’ve had a lot of offers. In the past year I’ve appeared in Monte Carlo Or Bust (a competitive celebrity travel jaunt across France, shown on ITV), co-presented Market Kitchen with Matt Tebbutt on the Good Food channel, and fronted a BBC Radio 2 talent-search for a new opera star. I’ve been presenting the Friday night arts show on R2, while Claudia Winkleman’s off on maternity leave… oh, and I write opera reviews for The Lady magazine every week as well.” Somehow, Penny Smith has also found time amid this whirlwind of duties to write her third novel.

Smith will appear at Wigtown on Friday to discuss her latest book, Summer Holiday, a frothy, witty, fast-paced adventure about middle-aged divorcee Miranda Blake, whose fling with a sexy young eco-warrior is sabotaged by her disapproving daughter. Retreating to the Costa del Sol to nurse her broken heart, Miranda is unwittingly drawn in to a circle of strangers who hide a sinister agenda towards her.

The setting is a departure from Smith’s first two darkly funny novels, Coming Up Next (2008) and After the Break (2009), about Katie Fisher, a fictional female breakfast TV presenter hung out to dry by the insecure, backstabbing industry. Written while she was still at GMTV, the novels offer irresistible insight into the world behind the cameras – and Smith, who began her media career as a cub reporter on the Peterborough Evening Telegraph aged 18, clearly had no shortage of experience to draw on. She has admitted in the past “sailing quite close to the wind” with some of the situations included in her novels, but is emphatic that her characters are not portraits of particular individuals but merely “types”, partly invention and partly inspired by the media darlings she has encountered over many years.

Fond memories of her early TV career are prominent as she prepares for Wigtown. In the mid-1980s Smith spent a year on the early evening news at the then Carlisle-based Border TV, whose coverage included the south-west of Scotland. “That was a really great time in my career – we reporters all loved being sent on jobs to Dumfries and Galloway,” she says. “I still adore that drive through the Scottish Borders,” she says. “The countryside is just stunning.

“I’m so excited about the Wigtown Book Festival,” she continues. “Sadly, I can only stay for a day because of work commitments, but it sounds a fantastic place – they’ve got hiking and canoeing!” It should be noted that, along with opera, exploring the countryside is another of Smith’s beloved pursuits.

“Yes, I do love hiking. Funnily enough, I was in Dumfries and Galloway only a couple of weeks ago, but up in the northern part where it joins with Ayrshire. It poured with rain – a typically lovely Scottish summer day – and of course I got bitten by midges.”

Smith was on a short break in Ayrshire with longtime friend Mariella Frostrup, plus a houseful of friends and relatives. “We hiked south, to Bruce’s Stone [the granite boulder that commemorates Robert the Bruce’s 1307 victory] and my new red hair gave me fantastic camouflage in the heather.”

Other gigs have seen her zoom in and out of Scotland in recent weeks for this year’s Edinburgh International TV festival, and for the Borders, Books & Bikes festival at Traquair. “To be honest, I don’t know how I managed having a full-time job,” she says. “There’s just always so much to do.”

Penny Smith appears at Wigtown Book Festival (01988 403222), Friday, 6pm, £8, www.wigtownbookfestival.com