Susanna Reid: ‘I had vivid nightmares during lockdown – I’d wake up screaming’

These are challenging times for the Good Morning Britain presenter, with three teenage boys at home – and having to work with Piers Morgan

Susanna Reid is walking down the garden path of the south London house where she’s going to be photographed for Stella magazine. She’s not scheduled to arrive for another 15 minutes. ‘I’m always early,’ she says brightly, as she steps inside.

It’s 10am, which – as she has spent most of the past 20 years getting up at 4am to host BBC Breakfast and, since 2014, Good Morning Britain – is already well past her lunchtime.

She’s wearing a knee-length denim dress by Sosandar, with her hair pulled up into a messy bun. Make-up free, she’s sporting 
a healthy glow from a recent Mediterranean holiday and a faint smell of tropical sun cream. This hip, relaxed 49-year-old mother of three teenage boys is as far from the perfectly coiffed and groomed GMB presenter as you can imagine. ‘This is why I hardly ever get recognised when I’m out and about,’ she laughs. ‘No one ever thinks, “There’s that woman from the telly,” because without the hair and the make-up I don’t really look like her.’

In the early days of lockdown, it was GMB, with Susanna and Piers at the helm, that became the standout news show, with ratings up 15 per cent. The show became a microcosm of everything happening in homes all over the country, and the team has been personally affected.

In March, the husband of Susanna’s good friend and GMB co-presenter, Kate Garraway, former lobbyist Derek Draper, went into a coma after contracting coronavirus, and remains hospitalised. Viewers and presenters alike have lived through this crisis with Garraway, seeing her wipe away tears as she clapped for the NHS outside her home, flanked by her two young children.

The past few months have clearly also 
taken their toll on Susanna. Later we talk about the devastation she feels for her friend, but for now I ask her how the Covid crisis and lockdown have affected her own life. ‘It was an anxious time for everybody, but those early days were very frightening. I started to have really vivid, terrifying nightmares where I would wake up screaming and crying even though I couldn’t quite remember what the nightmares were.’

Over the past two decades, Susanna Reid has evolved from the ‘Playmobil-haired’ (her words), serious BBC Breakfast presenter who suddenly caught the public’s attention when she was Strictly runner-up to Abbey Clancy in 2013. A high-profile defection to ITV’s Good Morning Britain (for a reputed 
£1 million) in 2014 immediately brought out the knives, with critics savaging her ‘stiff’ performance on the sofa. The following year GMB took a gamble by bringing in the opinionated motor-mouthed former tabloid editor Piers Morgan as her co-host.

Her reaction when she was told the news, a few minutes after she came off air, that he was being brought in permanently, was to unclip her microphone to make sure no one else would hear what she had to say, take her editor aside and ask him – in no uncertain terms – whether he had lost the plot. ‘And yes, it was difficult at first,’ she admits. But ratings soared as viewers tried to work out if they really hated each other, loved each 
other or whether his jibes and her eye-rolls were all just very cleverly scripted.

In January 2017, she recalls breaking down in tears for the first time in her television 
career, when she was blasted on Twitter for comments he made about Madonna hijacking the feminist movement, while she sat next to him without voicing her own opinion on what he had to say. Remaining neutral was at the core of her BBC training. ‘That really got to me,’ she says. ‘I was being blamed for the opinions of the man sitting next to me. I knew it couldn’t go on. I had to do something. So, I suggested we go and get drunk together.’