Post by Di on Jul 28, 2005 11:37:14 GMT -5
Not sure what magazine this was in, as was sent via e-mail.
'Ice maiden? I'm the opposite'
(Filed: 15/04/2005)
Sophie Raworth may be the star of BBC major-events broadcasting but she's no media darling, and she's not bothered how she looks, finds Jan Moir
Let's be honest, there are far too many Sophies in the world today. Everywhere you look, there is another Sophie, flicking shiny, well-cut hair over dandruff-free shoulders as she buys a pair of shoes from LK Bennett and a box of sushi for her working lunch while elbowing you out of the queue.
Planet Sophie: she's not bothered how she looks
Yes, Sophies are always smiling and gracious but, underneath the charm, the average Soph is deadlier than a poison-tipped, mid-brown eyebrow pencil. You bet! How else to explain the social and professional ubiquity of the serial Sophies, those girls who always seem to be marrying rich bankers, or writing slim but well-received novels, or being models and estate agents, or launching companies to import French linens, or overtaking you on the career ladder in their polite but purposeful way, or even reading the evening news while…
"Hello," says Sophie Raworth in a deep voice. "Here I am." It is true. There she is. In a meeting room at the BBC, Raworth slides back a frosted glass door and glides inside to take a seat on one of the leather couches. Our time together is short. She has to get into make-up and prepare to read the three o'clock bulletin, then get her scripts ready for the main evening broadcast.
The funny thing is that, when reading the Six O'Clock News on television, she sometimes looks washed out and a bit ovoid, like a talking boiled egg. Yet in the flesh, Raworth gleams with the wholesome sexiness that is characteristic of a Sophie and, in her tight jeans and boots, she is actually a bit of a babe. I'm not the only one to have noticed this. When interviewing the crowds gathered in Windsor for Charles and Camilla's wedding last Saturday, Raworth was accosted by a woman who told her, "Oh, you've got a rather nice face and that's nice, because you look so plain on television." How did Sophie feel about that?
"Great! Charming! It did make me laugh," she says, although she adds that it is probably the rudest thing anyone has ever said to her, which makes me think she must have led an extraordinarily sheltered Sophie-type of life. Certainly, growing up in an idyllic Georgian house in Surrey with a florist mother and businessman father, then attending St Paul's school with contemporaries such as Petronella Wyatt seems to have held few perils, although she has her rocky moments now. On the night before the royal wedding, perhaps Raworth wasn't the only blonde to awake in the small hours thinking: what am I getting myself into?
"I was terrified, absolutely terrified. I woke up at 1am fretting. But then you get there and just get on with it and it was fine," she says. Even when a wedding guest mortifyingly turned up in the same outfit as her - a mint-green Caroline Charles number - our anchor didn't turn a freshly blow-dried hair.
"I don't think I ever make much of a glamour statement," she says, and that's certainly true. She was given a make-over by fashion bullies Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall a few years ago and practically had to be hog-tied into a pink Ben de Lisi gown (like any self-respecting Sophie, she prefers black for evening). Recently, a friend asked her to come shopping to help accessorise an outfit and our girl was thunderstruck because she had no idea that women did things like that, but surely she's being ingenuous?
No, she says. She's only wearing a glass necklace today because she picked it out of the bowl by the till at the hairdressers after getting her highlights done. Pure Sophie! So we've got one thing established so far: she does dive into Whistles now and again, but she's not bothered about clothes or how she looks. Which is probably why, I ponder aloud in an unguarded moment, she always looks so boring.
In the studio: she doesn't want to be famous
"I would say simple rather than boring," she says, almost sharply, revealing that maybe she's not that relaxed about it after all.
Perhaps classic was the word I was looking for, I say. And then we move on.
Sophie Raworth isn't exactly a mystery wrapped up in an enigma wrapped up in a puzzle, but that is certainly what she'd like to be. In her ideal world, she would come in, read the news, go home to her husband and baby and have nothing to do with the media world until her next bulletin was due. More importantly, no one would write a single word about her because she doesn't want to be, you know, famous. "I have a life at work that I love, but I like to take it off like a uniform, like wiping off my make-up. I like to keep the two things very separate," she says.
Certainly, she's not ambitious in the fretful way that her colleague Natasha Kaplinsky so obviously is, but despite this coolness, the BBC seems absolutely determined to make her a star regardless. Raworth rightly bristles when her family connections to the Corporation are mentioned, but it cannot be denied that Greg d**e lives in the same street and knows her parents or that family friend Ron Neil, the former director of news and current affairs, used to "goad me on and say that if I wanted to be a journalist I shouldn't be going on holiday, I should be working in a radio station". So she has been groomed from an early age.
After stints for the Corporation in Brussels, Manchester, Blackpool and Leeds, Raworth spent six years on the BBC Breakfast sofa with Jeremy Bowen before being moved up to the prestigious Six O'Clock slot. Next week, she will be out and about on the BBC Election Bus and she has also been earmarked to host major set-piece broadcasts, including the State Opening of Parliament and the VE Day commemoration in July.
Although perfectly lovely in person and perfectly at home reading a script behind a newsdesk, it must be said that Raworth has no obvious warmth or empathy as the kind of broadcaster who must engage with events and the public. At least she doesn't try to fake it - which is admirable - but she always does seem a little distant, as if she can't wait to get back home to her own fireside. It's no surprise to me (although it is to her) that when she worked at the BBC in Manchester, she was known as the Ice Maiden.
"Well, I haven't heard that nickname before! I'm not an ice maiden at all, I am quite the opposite, I think. It was my first proper job, I was probably quite daunted by what I was doing and coped by getting my head down and getting on with it.
"No," she repeats. "I am not an ice maiden at all, the complete opposite! I'm far too open and keep myself in check most of the time." The ice cracked in a revealing few passages in Piers Morgan's recent autobiography, The Insider, which detail two boozy lunches he had with Raworth and Bowen when they were both still on breakfast television. Morgan claims they all got "hammered" together on both occasions and that the last lunch, at the Ivy, lasted for eight hours.
"I couldn't believe that he had written it, but now I think it is funny. It's true, of course, and I can remember most of the lunch, I wasn't that drunk! And Jeremy wasn't carried into a taxi, either," she says.
But despite the flowing alcohol, self-contained, controlled Sophie was still on her guard.
"I made a point of not giving anything away, certainly nothing that I wouldn't want repeated."
These days, as a working mother, such sybaritic afternoons are only a hazy memory from the past. Raworth has had three major boyfriends in her life, and friends say she was always known as a bit of a heartbreaker. Some of them find it "psychologically interesting" that she eventually married the only boyfriend who had once dumped her, estate agent Richard Winter.
After knowing each other for five years, their romance was back on in 2003, when he proposed to her on holiday on the Amalfi coast on her 35th birthday: a totally Sophie moment. The couple now have a one-year-old daughter, Ella, who sits up straight when she hears the BBC news theme tune and turns towards the television to see her mummy.
"Part of me feels really awful about that," Raworth says. "She sits there and waves. But the thing about having a baby is that it gives you something to smile about before eight in the morning. I love it, I absolutely love it. Being a mother has made me more confident and I have a set purpose in that I have to look after her. Its not that life didn't make sense before, my job always gave me a lot of satisfaction, but now it is so wonderful."
Initially, she found it very difficult to come back to work. "I am very glad that I did, but I found leaving her after six months really hard. The weeks beforehand were very difficult and on the day I returned to work I was really upset. I thought: what I am doing? I've got a baby." So why did she come back?
"Because I wanted to. It would be silly to throw it all away. And I've got such great hours here. And a wonderful nanny."
Raworth and her husband recently took the baby to Morocco on holiday and she says that travelling is her passion and only indulgence. She likes to relax, she says, by trawling the internet looking at holidays and hotels, and dreaming of booking them. The rest of the time, her life is pretty simple. She can't cook much, only vegetables and maybe a roast chicken, and tonight, after the news, she will be going to the pub with her husband to watch Chelsea FC play. Totally Sophie.
'Ice maiden? I'm the opposite'
(Filed: 15/04/2005)
Sophie Raworth may be the star of BBC major-events broadcasting but she's no media darling, and she's not bothered how she looks, finds Jan Moir
Let's be honest, there are far too many Sophies in the world today. Everywhere you look, there is another Sophie, flicking shiny, well-cut hair over dandruff-free shoulders as she buys a pair of shoes from LK Bennett and a box of sushi for her working lunch while elbowing you out of the queue.
Planet Sophie: she's not bothered how she looks
Yes, Sophies are always smiling and gracious but, underneath the charm, the average Soph is deadlier than a poison-tipped, mid-brown eyebrow pencil. You bet! How else to explain the social and professional ubiquity of the serial Sophies, those girls who always seem to be marrying rich bankers, or writing slim but well-received novels, or being models and estate agents, or launching companies to import French linens, or overtaking you on the career ladder in their polite but purposeful way, or even reading the evening news while…
"Hello," says Sophie Raworth in a deep voice. "Here I am." It is true. There she is. In a meeting room at the BBC, Raworth slides back a frosted glass door and glides inside to take a seat on one of the leather couches. Our time together is short. She has to get into make-up and prepare to read the three o'clock bulletin, then get her scripts ready for the main evening broadcast.
The funny thing is that, when reading the Six O'Clock News on television, she sometimes looks washed out and a bit ovoid, like a talking boiled egg. Yet in the flesh, Raworth gleams with the wholesome sexiness that is characteristic of a Sophie and, in her tight jeans and boots, she is actually a bit of a babe. I'm not the only one to have noticed this. When interviewing the crowds gathered in Windsor for Charles and Camilla's wedding last Saturday, Raworth was accosted by a woman who told her, "Oh, you've got a rather nice face and that's nice, because you look so plain on television." How did Sophie feel about that?
"Great! Charming! It did make me laugh," she says, although she adds that it is probably the rudest thing anyone has ever said to her, which makes me think she must have led an extraordinarily sheltered Sophie-type of life. Certainly, growing up in an idyllic Georgian house in Surrey with a florist mother and businessman father, then attending St Paul's school with contemporaries such as Petronella Wyatt seems to have held few perils, although she has her rocky moments now. On the night before the royal wedding, perhaps Raworth wasn't the only blonde to awake in the small hours thinking: what am I getting myself into?
"I was terrified, absolutely terrified. I woke up at 1am fretting. But then you get there and just get on with it and it was fine," she says. Even when a wedding guest mortifyingly turned up in the same outfit as her - a mint-green Caroline Charles number - our anchor didn't turn a freshly blow-dried hair.
"I don't think I ever make much of a glamour statement," she says, and that's certainly true. She was given a make-over by fashion bullies Susannah Constantine and Trinny Woodall a few years ago and practically had to be hog-tied into a pink Ben de Lisi gown (like any self-respecting Sophie, she prefers black for evening). Recently, a friend asked her to come shopping to help accessorise an outfit and our girl was thunderstruck because she had no idea that women did things like that, but surely she's being ingenuous?
No, she says. She's only wearing a glass necklace today because she picked it out of the bowl by the till at the hairdressers after getting her highlights done. Pure Sophie! So we've got one thing established so far: she does dive into Whistles now and again, but she's not bothered about clothes or how she looks. Which is probably why, I ponder aloud in an unguarded moment, she always looks so boring.
In the studio: she doesn't want to be famous
"I would say simple rather than boring," she says, almost sharply, revealing that maybe she's not that relaxed about it after all.
Perhaps classic was the word I was looking for, I say. And then we move on.
Sophie Raworth isn't exactly a mystery wrapped up in an enigma wrapped up in a puzzle, but that is certainly what she'd like to be. In her ideal world, she would come in, read the news, go home to her husband and baby and have nothing to do with the media world until her next bulletin was due. More importantly, no one would write a single word about her because she doesn't want to be, you know, famous. "I have a life at work that I love, but I like to take it off like a uniform, like wiping off my make-up. I like to keep the two things very separate," she says.
Certainly, she's not ambitious in the fretful way that her colleague Natasha Kaplinsky so obviously is, but despite this coolness, the BBC seems absolutely determined to make her a star regardless. Raworth rightly bristles when her family connections to the Corporation are mentioned, but it cannot be denied that Greg d**e lives in the same street and knows her parents or that family friend Ron Neil, the former director of news and current affairs, used to "goad me on and say that if I wanted to be a journalist I shouldn't be going on holiday, I should be working in a radio station". So she has been groomed from an early age.
After stints for the Corporation in Brussels, Manchester, Blackpool and Leeds, Raworth spent six years on the BBC Breakfast sofa with Jeremy Bowen before being moved up to the prestigious Six O'Clock slot. Next week, she will be out and about on the BBC Election Bus and she has also been earmarked to host major set-piece broadcasts, including the State Opening of Parliament and the VE Day commemoration in July.
Although perfectly lovely in person and perfectly at home reading a script behind a newsdesk, it must be said that Raworth has no obvious warmth or empathy as the kind of broadcaster who must engage with events and the public. At least she doesn't try to fake it - which is admirable - but she always does seem a little distant, as if she can't wait to get back home to her own fireside. It's no surprise to me (although it is to her) that when she worked at the BBC in Manchester, she was known as the Ice Maiden.
"Well, I haven't heard that nickname before! I'm not an ice maiden at all, I am quite the opposite, I think. It was my first proper job, I was probably quite daunted by what I was doing and coped by getting my head down and getting on with it.
"No," she repeats. "I am not an ice maiden at all, the complete opposite! I'm far too open and keep myself in check most of the time." The ice cracked in a revealing few passages in Piers Morgan's recent autobiography, The Insider, which detail two boozy lunches he had with Raworth and Bowen when they were both still on breakfast television. Morgan claims they all got "hammered" together on both occasions and that the last lunch, at the Ivy, lasted for eight hours.
"I couldn't believe that he had written it, but now I think it is funny. It's true, of course, and I can remember most of the lunch, I wasn't that drunk! And Jeremy wasn't carried into a taxi, either," she says.
But despite the flowing alcohol, self-contained, controlled Sophie was still on her guard.
"I made a point of not giving anything away, certainly nothing that I wouldn't want repeated."
These days, as a working mother, such sybaritic afternoons are only a hazy memory from the past. Raworth has had three major boyfriends in her life, and friends say she was always known as a bit of a heartbreaker. Some of them find it "psychologically interesting" that she eventually married the only boyfriend who had once dumped her, estate agent Richard Winter.
After knowing each other for five years, their romance was back on in 2003, when he proposed to her on holiday on the Amalfi coast on her 35th birthday: a totally Sophie moment. The couple now have a one-year-old daughter, Ella, who sits up straight when she hears the BBC news theme tune and turns towards the television to see her mummy.
"Part of me feels really awful about that," Raworth says. "She sits there and waves. But the thing about having a baby is that it gives you something to smile about before eight in the morning. I love it, I absolutely love it. Being a mother has made me more confident and I have a set purpose in that I have to look after her. Its not that life didn't make sense before, my job always gave me a lot of satisfaction, but now it is so wonderful."
Initially, she found it very difficult to come back to work. "I am very glad that I did, but I found leaving her after six months really hard. The weeks beforehand were very difficult and on the day I returned to work I was really upset. I thought: what I am doing? I've got a baby." So why did she come back?
"Because I wanted to. It would be silly to throw it all away. And I've got such great hours here. And a wonderful nanny."
Raworth and her husband recently took the baby to Morocco on holiday and she says that travelling is her passion and only indulgence. She likes to relax, she says, by trawling the internet looking at holidays and hotels, and dreaming of booking them. The rest of the time, her life is pretty simple. She can't cook much, only vegetables and maybe a roast chicken, and tonight, after the news, she will be going to the pub with her husband to watch Chelsea FC play. Totally Sophie.