Lorraine Kelly breaks silence on future of ITV show - 'it's really heartbreaking'

TV presenterLorraine Kelly has described the cuts to her show as “heartbreaking” as she opened up for the first time about her show being slashed. The star also vowed to continue on her self-titled programme amid previous speculation she was prepared to walk away.

She said: “I don’t see me going anywhere until people get fed up, you know? Until people say, I’ve had enough of that one.” Speaking about the cuts whichsees her show cut from an hour to 30 minutes and only airing for 30 weeks out of 52, she said her first thought was for her team affected.

She admits: “It’s really heartbreaking to split up the team, a lot of my team have been with me for more than 20 years and they’re my friends. I’ve grown up with them. They were babies when they started with me and now they’ve got babies of their own.”

The cuts formed part of a huge ITV Daytime overhaul with 220 out of 450 jobs in daytime at risk. This was despite the show’s reputation forground-breaking campaigns such as Change + Check, as well as recently amassing its highest ratings for four years under much-admired editor Victoria Kennedy.

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She said her first focus was to ensure that as many jobs were saved as possible. “To be totally honest with you, the main focus for me was to save as many jobs as possible. And I know that the spotlight is probably on the fact that all your shows are going to be shorter and it’s going to be less time. And that’s fine. But the main thing for me was how many jobs can we save?

Lorraine said she was pleased that a lot of the team had since been redeployed on other shows. She added: “It’s been difficult with the cuts, it’s been hard. I’m a lot happier about it now but it was honestly and genuinely all about the team. I wasn't annoyed or angry about this for me..it was about the team.”

But she said the plans have NOT accelerated any plans to retire. “Absolutely not. I am going to be toddling off that show in my Zimmer frame and even then, I’ll be coming in….I look at people like Janet Street Porter, Gloria Hunniford, still doing Loose Women, I mean, Gloria’s in her 80s, you look at Angela Rippon, you look at these astonishing women who are just getting into their stride in their 70s and 80s, and I look at them and I think, Yep, I’m still going to be there.”

However she said that she had an “inkling” that cuts were on the way. “It was kind of like, we sort of had an inkling that things were going to change,” she says. “Because we’ve made a lot of cuts, and we’ve been trying really hard to make sure that because we don’t have that much money, we actually punch way above our weight for the quality of guests that we get on. I mean, I’ve just been talking to George Clooney (for his new film Jay Kelly), for God’s sake. He wanted to talk to me.”

She said she was currently on a year’s contract - but denied reports she would leave at the end of it. “We’re all freelancers. We’re all just on a year’s contract," she said.