ITV’s Lorraine is on borrowed time. For nearly 15 years its effusive host Lorraine Kelly has been smiling aggressively through fashion shows and diet tips and Hollywood gossip, but now, in a round of major cuts to its daytime productions, ITV bosses are axing it by half, giving 30 extra minutes to Good Morning Britain and getting rid of its off-season shows altogether. The remaining 30 minutes are surely not long for this world, and I’m afraid to say few will miss them.
Once upon a time, Lorraine was a banker for ITV; an easy, watchable combination of high and low, with some glamorous talking heads and an intelligent, sweetly spoken, popular host who had become a trusted institution after 17 years on GMTV. It was the perfect thing to bridge the gap between its newly launched breakfast programme Daybreak (which in 2014 would be replaced with GMB), and the triumphantly matchmade Holly and Phil, then just a year into what would be a long and infamous reign on This Morning.
In 2010, there was still bemused delight in the loopy variety of daytime TV. We were not yet slaves to the distractions and amateur life advice that now debilitate us via our smartphones, and its segments on showbiz, fashion and relationships satisfied us just about enough and were probably just the right length for our then only slightly fragmented attention spans.
In 2010, we were only months into David Cameron’s coalition government, the impact of its austerity policies was yet to come, we still had solvent high street shops, had never heard the word “Brexit”, and there was still a permissible innocence to the apolitical magazine show. In 2010 Kelly still had the energy to show up most of the time.
But cut to 2025 and Lorraine is woefully out of date. It is too brief and too busy to explore a subject in sufficient depth so ends up feeling disposable and surface-skimming, rather than what it should be: conversation-starting light journalism. It’s become little more than a weak interlude between the shouty punch of GMB and the necessarily muted This Morning (itself clinging on for dear life).
It’s not the conversation that’s the problem. People – to generalise quite liberally – are certainly still interested in couples’ therapy, neurodivergent kids, the pitfalls of buy now, pay later, floral co-ords, the Yorkshire Shepherdess, the storytelling of Kim Kardashian’s hair look and Pomeranians dressed as Diana Ross, all of which featured on the programme this week.
It’s just that now instead of sitting between breakfast news and chat show, Lorraine occupies the hinterland between one-minute TikTok video through which we now absorb masses of information and advice and 40-minute podcast that allows us to indulge our interests in nerdy depth.
The topics are the same – dieting, shopping, beauty, family, health – but we can access it ourselves elsewhere. We can binge on content directly from amateurs and experts, can attach ourselves to personalities in each of these worlds and follow their careers, and no longer need Kelly as a conduit, especially when she has to change topic or switch to an ad break just as things are getting juicy.
It’s not Kelly’s fault – it’s a format thing. She still possesses a singular unfazed, unabashed briskness, and an ability to feign interest in things that cannot possibly continue to stimulate her (though there has been a running online joke for years that she misses the programme more often than she presents it).
And she’s direct. This week she returned to the programme after time off for keyhole surgery to remove her ovaries and spoke with Doctor Hilary in commendable detail about the procedure. A lot of women fear they will be less of a woman after this, he ventured, surely acknowledging the complex feelings of many viewers with similar experiences. “That ship’s sailed for me, I’m 65” she replied – neither dismissing that concern nor displaying too much of her own vulnerability to risk her professionalism.
That’s always been her gift, whatever the subject (and she has been refreshingly open about the menopause for years). But nowadays we value emotion and authenticity in our celebrities, and Kelly’s nice, slick act can feel distant. Which is a shame, because you get the sense she’s pretty spiky when the cameras stop rolling. Which soon, they might, as daytime suffers yet more existential blows.
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Critics love to sneer at daytime TV, they mock its whiplash variety and call it brainless, lowest-common-denominator guff. Its defendants, meanwhile, take it far too seriously and claim that it is TV speaking to the nation’s actual concerns and reflecting the kinds of real, freewheeling conversation we have with our friends, on our level.
In fact, it serves one purpose – to keep its demographic of mostly women, mostly older, many working class, addicted to the TV. For decades, Lorraine has managed that by avoiding most of the tough stuff and promising to show us how to have longer lives, save more money, have better relationships and become happier. Unfortunately for ITV, bigger personalities, shorter attention spans and a lot more imagination mean we are addicted to our phones instead, leaving tired old formats like Lorraine feeling like a relic.
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