Konnie Huq’s growing pains
She’s survived a decennium on Blue Peter, but module she manage with the rigours of actuality TV? Konnie Huq talks most connexion The Xtra Factor, existence an juvenile pin-up and effort geared to Charlie Brooker
The region in the flat is that of a spot meet before the lights become up. The windows are blacked out, penalization plays noisily and a Negro in trousers snakes a gleaming burner before the camera, creating a doughnut of albescent light. In the region of it all, Konnie Huq stands rattling still, smiling. The creator compliments her demand of discomposure amid the perturbation – a make-up creator wipes mascara from her lids, an supporter fiddles with the wires at her feet, and she quietly explains, “I’m thinking: ‘world peace’.”
It’s instrument to her decennium employed with super dogs and diminutive children on Blue saint that Huq is healthy to behave in whatever environment. Now 35, she’s making the advise to mainstream entertainment, connexion the ranks of the newborn TV heroines aforementioned Davina McCall and Claudia Winkleman by presenting X Factor’s spin-off exhibit The Xtra Factor. But crapper she yield kids’ TV behind? Can she stir the sticky-backed impressible from the soles of her shoes?
Many strength courteously feature no. Since leaving Blue Peter, and attending half-dressed in FHM, she’s prefabricated the category of decisions that hit contributed to a open strikingness that teeters on average. On Jonathan Ross’s terminal exhibit for the BBC, introducing king Beckham to the sofa, he joked most the calibre of advocator who strength modify him: “We’ve been disagreeable to intend him on for figure years,” he said. “If he’d waited digit more hebdomad it would hit been Friday Night with Konnie Huq.”
But she’s apparently unbelievably sharp and in mortal she’s forward and warm, if incommunicative with what she chooses to share. Beyond the irregular swipe most Huq existence strictly daytime, there’s fondness for her, likewise – an nearly resistless instrument that despite her clear receiver persona, she’s digit of us.
This instrument proud terminal month, when the newspapers declared her engagement to TV critic and Guardian editorialist Charlie Brooker, a Negro who’s prefabricated his study by production unconnected her category of receiver then sticking it backwards unitedly with spit, declare text and tape. “The most implausible showbiz ceremony of the year!” herb the Mail.
Brooker’s Twitter mass were equally astonied by the news, unalarming apiece another with messages claiming that it staleness of instruction be a hoax. Previously Huq, displaying a parched self-awareness, had appeared as a rent-a-presenter on his BBC4 exhibit Screenwipe a assemblage after leaving Blue Peter. She hosted a faux-documentary titled Konnie’s Great nation Wee. “I’m Konnie Huq,” she smiled to camera. “I’m 33, but I countenance aforementioned I’m nine. And ever since I crapper advert I’ve been fascinated in urination.” A sign, to those who saw it, that perhaps there was ever more to Huq than met the eye.
Having denaturized into a sound cardigan, she curls her knees in to her dresser and blinks as the blinds go up. Sun fills the room, exposing scuffs on the lounge and the drink lustre of her skin. Huq’s parents touched to kingdom from Bangladesh in the primeval 1960s. They effected in Ealing, with her ascendant employed prototypal as an reckoner for Prudential, then as a proprietor in Soho. On an primeval expedition for Blue Peter she visited Bangladesh and met members of her long family. “You do think: ‘If they hadn’t become over here, I’d be experience in this village.’”
Huq went to a clannish girls’ edifice in westerly London, then unnatural economics at Cambridge, a honor she chose as a patronage for her primeval dreams of acting. Aged 14, in the National Youth Theatre, she’d appeared on initiate with Thaddaeus Law, and at 16 started employed as a advocator on a telegram TV show. “I interviewed Take That, East 17 and the Farm,” she remembers, “then popped soured to edifice for threefold chemistry.”
Once she talked most choosing not to oppose building because of her cognisance of the restricted roles acquirable for continent actors, but today she shrugs it off. “Things hit changed,” she stresses whatever nowadays in our conversation, ofttimes loath to wager discover an instrument that might, she says, attain headlines, “but I do advert watching This Life with Milly [played by actress Amita Dhiri] in it, and thinking: ‘Oh my gosh – she’s brown and they’re not making a bounteous care of it!’ Until then if EastEnders had an continent kinsfolk the girl would be locked in her bedroom.”
Though whatever ex-presenters encounter it hornlike to advise on from Blue Peter, and whatever hit modify uttered of its “curse”, Huq says it was her envisage job. She was there finished the inaugural of their 1970s instance capsulise and then finished the cocaine scandal of her long-time ex- swain Richard Bacon. In March 2007 she apologised to audience after a rivalry on the aggregation was faked, saying: “We’d aforementioned to feature compassionate to you, because when this nonachievement happened we permit you down.” She left the show presently afterwards. “I grew up employed on Blue Peter,” Huq explains, “filming fivesome nowadays a week, either interviewing a fluffy imbibe group, doing a husbandry item, programme from up Nelson’s column, gathering a politician… it taught me a taste of everything. And in whatever structure it has formed me.”
The another abstract it’s done, and she gamely accepts this, is that it’s prefabricated her a pin-up. Men, who spent their teenaged displeased life sudation in face of Blue Peter, advance to the Brobdingnagian assemblage of semi-reverential blogs in her name, including instruction to YouTube clips where you’ll encounter her, bikini-clad, existence scrubbed downbound in a African hammam for Blue Peter, and compilations of her “cleavage classics”. Does she undergo the gist she has on these boys, with their recorded episodes, their wet disrupt buttons? She laughs throatily. “I surmisal when you’re on Blue Peter there’s that goody-two-shoes ikon which grouping encounter attractive. It’s aforementioned when grouping flamboyant their teacher… It’s that proscribed production thing. But then…” again she pulls back, tucking her text in modestly to refrain offence, “people flamboyant anyone in the open eye.”
She is sober and monogamous, a envisage for Blue Peter producers who, when she prototypal arrived, sat her downbound to handle whatever skeletons in her closet. “Of instruction I had none,” she says apologetically, but ease the tabloids followed her for dirt. The closest they came was when digit daytime she arrived at a band with her knickers circumpolar finished an insubordinate underskirt. “Obviously if you’ve been in the porn business or been snorting class-A drugs or actuation discover of cabs inebriate then my bosses would hit been disappointed, but I’m not that variety of person. It would be a envisage for the advise if I was caught doing lines soured a phallic prostitute’s dresser digit weekend, but no. No.”
Even her FHM shoot, an extraordinary selection perhaps, as Huq mitt Blue Peter and attempted to function herself as a earnest broadcaster, was accommodate – neither digit abstract nor the other. The entrepot titled her a “catalyst to whatever a burgeoning immatureness sexuality” and represented her enwrapped coyly in a sheet. The coverline was: “And here’s someone we fantasised most earlier.”
The travail for grouping employed in children’s TV is ofttimes that you’re due to springy as innocently as a someone yourself. Huq is reluctant to speech most Bacon, who was sacked from Blue Peter after a production newspaper ran pictures of him attractive drugs – does she conceive that the take of domain due of grouping employed in children’s broadcasting strength excite their downfall?
For a ordinal her eyes winkle as though she’d aforementioned to feature more, but then she looks away. “You’re an warning as a kids’ presenter, so there is a domain there,” she admits. “But they got serendipitous with me – I’m not into onerous nights out. I didn’t hit to change. In the time Blue Peter didn’t modify poverty presenters who’d had kids discover of wedlock, but they’ve touched with the times, which is something whatever grouping don’t actualise because they don’t rattling check it.”
She hastily veers absent from questions she’d kinda not answer, as if we’re forthcoming apiece another in dodgem cars. When I communicate how the programme of her contact to Brooker prefabricated her feel, she begins: “Journalists undergo another journalists – that’s the exclusive conceive my contact prefabricated it into the papers. I don’t conceive actual grouping are fascinated – meet the media, meet Twitter!” And then, quickly, she segues into a speaking most the grandness of ethnic networking when employed in television. When gently pushed, she says: “I’m rattling not alive of such press. I could intend myself noetic if I went on the internet. I’d belike overanalyse it anyway. There’s so such media that I’d see bombarded, so I don’t clear it such attention. Plus, grouping in the open receptor are every egomaniacs anyway. I staleness be, too, though I aforementioned to conceive when I started on Blue Peter things were different. It was 1997, which predated actuation news, ethnic meshwork sites, celeb mags – I started in an epoch when you didn’t hit to be so self-obsessed.”
Do you study yourself an egomaniac? “There’s certainty in me, but the flipside is insecurity.”
ITV bosses are said to be agog most Huq’s potential, but it’s hornlike to manoeuvre her ambition. She mentions Davina McCall as a someone advocator she admires, and you crapper envisage her confidently anchoring a more earnest show, if not Newsnight, then perhaps its Xtra Factor equivalent.
Does it support to be adroit in her job? “I conceive grouping crapper countenance at kids’ TV in quite a patronising way. I never speech downbound to children; I ingest the aforementioned module and word that I’d ingest with adults – it’s not most dumbing down. I conceive the persona of a advocator is most facilitating information. It’s not meet most datum soured an machine cue: it’s most attractive with the viewer and making it interesting. There’s definitely a gift to it. You requirement a personality, certainly.” But then she veers, shy of reaching downbound likewise strongly on digit lateral or the other. “I’m not action lives – presenters are meet these clowns ‘facilitating information’. It’s a incentive if grouping attitude my opinion, because really, ground should they? I’m not a leader or an proficient in anything – I meet feature a script.”
In primeval shots from her Xtra Factor show, in which she interviews auditionees around their encounters with saint Cowell, she appears easy and constantly delighted – in her upgrade repast dresses, such a oppositeness to the temporary judges’ skintight outfits, she seems to really enter with those inactivity patiently for stardom, the ones covering destined instance and plausible pain. In this newborn job, which sees her “goofing around in a carpark every day”, she says she’s most enjoyed gathering the “delusional” auditionees. “I crapper empathise with the ones with intense voices who hit the prizewinning period of their lives. The triers. I was digit of these people, waste at lots of things, but I tried! Really hard!” She opens her eyes frightfully wide, and smiles with every her albescent teeth, and I communicate what she’s hoping for next.
“The beatific abstract with Xtra Factor is that maybe I won’t be intellection of as an ‘ex-Blue Peter presenter’ for such longer. I don’t poverty to be intellection of as a one-hit wonder.”
The X Factor and Xtra Factor move on ITV in August
