The Sunday Times Magazine • 13Jones’s roster of clubs, and continued their
romance at Soho Farmhouse, which Jones
opened in 2015. Young and Jones were
invited to the wedding in 2018 — Young was
covering it for the BBC and Jones attended
with one of his daughters. It was Young’s
last live gig before she had to stop work.
On the Megxit that followed just two
years later, Young says: “It seemed like a
quick decision. It could have been a great
opportunity to do something meaningful in
a different way and that was lost, but clearly
they felt incredibly strongly and did it for
reasons that were personal to them. There’s
lots of complexity that surrounds the rest
of it, which I don’t ... I’m sometimes at a loss
to understand, but I’m not in their shoes.”
In 2019 Harry and Meghan asked Young
to be a trustee of their charitable foundation,
Sussex Royal. “I was quite surprised,” she
says, but they knew she had been the
president of Unicef UK from 2016 to 2018.
The foundation “never really ... it got off the
ground, it was about to start and then was
disbanded”. Is she still in touch with Harry
and Meghan? “Not really, no,” she says.Y
oung’s broadcasting
career began at the age
of 21 at BBC Radio
Scotland, but her big
break came presenting
Channel 5 news in the late
1990s. Reading her script
while perched on the desk, she kicked
off a broadcasting revolution. “It was a
slightly less poker-up-the-arse way of
communicating,” she says. Predictably
there was a “snotty reaction, then, six
months later, they’re all round the front
of the desk. It was good, it was satisfying —
we were this little pipsqueak bunch of
fighters at this scrappy little channel.”
From there she shrewdly bounced
between broadcasters, commanding ever
greater salaries and by 2008, while at the
helm of Desert Island Discs, she was also
presenting Crimewatch.
The critics have not always been
enthusiastic. After she took over Desert
Island Discs, one claimed she didn’t have
the “killer touch” of her predecessor, Sue
Lawley. “You take that on the chin,” Young
says. “I was being well remunerated and
I’m pretty robust. I’ve got quite a good
strong core.” Yet her audience figures far
outstripped those of the final days of
Lawley’s reign and the naysayers were
forced to recant.
Of all her castaways she most admires
Bryan Stevenson, the American death row
lawyer, although in terms of favourites
“nobody even comes close to Sir David
Attenborough. All hail the mighty Sir
David. He’s a laugh, he is something of a
flirt.” Looking back now, she cites “all the
Barrys” as the trickier guests. “Barry
Humphries is a fascinating, off-the-wall
guy and I didn’t reach first base with him.I don’t know why. Sometimes that’s just what
happens. Barry Manilow sat in the studio
with a huge Puffa coat and sunglasses on
through the entire interview. We weren’t
shooting the breeze, me and Barry.”
Although she supported the BBC’s
decision to appoint Lauren Laverne as her
cover, she hasn’t listened to her show. “It
was a very personal job to me. I’m sure Sue
Lawley never listened to me when I took it.
You hand it on and you’re, like, ‘that’s done
now’. Also, because there was a degree of
sadness when I stepped away — I don’t
want to overstate that or be melodramatic
about it but that’s how it felt — it was, like,
‘I’m sad I’m not doing my job right now’,
so it would’ve been uncomfortable to listen.Then I got into the swing of not listening
to it, so I don’t listen to it.”
Young is aware of the hoo-ha following
Laverne’s appointment — critics have
described her as lightweight and lacking
the incisiveness of her predecessors —
but Young believes that is partly down to
a resistance to change (perhaps recalling
the frosty reception she also experienced
when she took over the show). “I don’t
like change. I like to hear the voices I’m
going to hear. There is a habitual nature
to radio that is an intensely personal
experience. The criticism of change was
part of it, probably.”
Young was born in 1968 in East Kilbride.
Her father, Joe Jackson, was a policeman
and moved out of the home when she was
a few weeks old. “My mum had a difficult
marriage and so decided not to put up with
that,” she says. Her mother, Catherine, who
worked as a sales rep and then a personal
assistant, raised Kirsty and her older sister,
Laura, alone until she remarried when
Kirsty was almost three. Her new husband
was John Young, a newsagent and then
store manager, and they went on to have a
son, Iain. John is the man Kirsty calls Dad.
“I feel a sense of deep connection and
loyalty to my dad, who’s always been there,”
she says. “He did the runs to Brownies,
the learning to ride the bike stuff and the
picking me up from parties stuff. I remember
him building us sledges.” The family moved
to Stirling when she was eight years old.
At Stirling High School, her deep voice
garnered her the nickname Ol’ Man River.
She wrote for the school newspaper and
liked “the cut and thrust” of debating.
“I didn’t particularly feel nervous about it.
I’ve always had a steady voice.” She left
school at 17, skipping university, opting to
work as an au pair in Switzerland instead.
On Desert Island Discs Young was always
fascinated by what brought about the first
stirrings of success in her guests, and she
likes to talk about the grit in the oyster that
determines character. Was the rift with
her biological father a driver of her success?
“I would be kidding myself if I didn’t think
that was a factor,” she says. “There are a lot
of people who’ve chosen the slightly
suspect career path that I have, who’ve
been abandoned. It’s not a coincidence.
I must also have had a kind of ‘look at me,
I exist’ thing going on, and that makes
me squirm because I don’t want to be that
person. I don’t need to be that shallow.
Also, I’m the middle child, so we’re all a bit
‘can you see me?’ ”
She met her “bio dad” once when
she was a teenager but says she felt no
emotional connection. Did he offer her
an apology? “No, no, no. It wasn’t that
kind of conversation. It was cursory,
fleeting. It wasn’t a moment of any
kind of significance in terms of either
reconciliation or discussion. I was a
16-year-old. It would be different now.”“DESERT ISLAND
DISCS WAS
THE MOST
INTERESTING
JOB I EVER HAD.”
SHE HASN’T
LISTENED TO IT
SINCE LEAVING
From top: pioneering an informal
style of newsreading in the 1990s;
with Sir David Attenborough, 2016