Early bird Victoria is a radio star

IT is six in the morning and radio presenter Victoria Derbyshire has already been up and about for two hours.

When most of us are still tucked up in bed Victoria is reading the morning papers and preparing herself for the BBC Radio 5 Live breakfast show.

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I caught up with her at BBC Television Centre in London during the award-winning show she co-presents with Julian Worricker.

She looks stunning in a simple fitted jumper and jeans, perfect hair and a winning smile -- a look most of us would struggle to achieve at 9am, never mind 4.30am, when Victoria starts her working day.

It is a day that begins at 10 to four in the morning and is run with military precision. "I have a shower the night before and lay all my clothes out so I'm ready to just step into them in the morning. My bag, and a banana for my breakfast, are ready to go".

She lives just 10 minutes from the studio, in Shepherd's Bush, "I deliberately looked at living somewhere near here so that if I overslept it wouldn't be too much of a problem".

A normal night would see 33-year-old Victoria in bed for around 9pm, but if a social occasion arises then she will not always refuse it, perhaps suffering a bit the day after for a later than usual night. "Once I get to work I'm fine, I'm too busy to feel tired".

When she has finished the show it is home for an hour and half sleep and after that Victoria starts her day.

She says: "I do all the usual things in the afternoon, like sorting out the dry-cleaning, doing the cleaning and the shopping, or I might meet friends for a coffee." Her favourite shopping haunt is Selfridges, "because I can buy my clothes and shopping in one place".

At the weekend she gets a lie-in, usually waking around 7am "that's a lie-in for me" and comes "home" to Bolton around every six weeks.

Victoria is still a Bolton girl at heart, misses her family dreadfully, and loves visiting the town, especially when she can fit in a visit to the Reebok Stadium to watch Bolton Wanderers.

Thankfully this season, with Wanderers' recent elevation to the Premier League, she can catch a number of matches in the London area.

She says: "I saw the Arsenal game at Highbury with friends from work who are Arsenal fans. I got seats in the Bolton end so they had to sit on their hands. It was a great result."

Victoria has been in London since starting at Radio 5 Live in 1998, and shares a home with her 29-year-old sister, Alex, who also works for the BBC.

Their brother, Nick, 31, also lives in the capital, which helps Victoria deal with being so far from her mum, Pauline and step-dad, Des.

She says: "I'm a real home-girl and I really love my mum and my step-dad. I speak to my mum on the phone nearly every day.

"I love being at home and seeing the two dogs and up until recently the two cats, but one has gone missing."

When she goes home Victoria sleeps in the old room she had at the family's Turton home, which they moved to, from Bury, when she was a teenager. "It looks just as it did when I was 15". She loves catching up on all the news from her home town and visiting her grandmother, 82-year-old Helen Mulrooney, who lives in a nursing home.

She finds Bolton folk "much more friendly than they are in London" and says that "you can have a chat with a shop assistant without thinking you have to be dressed up and that you don't speak in the right way".

Speaking "the right way" is not a problem for Victoria who does not have a trace of a Bolton accent. Her pleasant accent-less voice is obviously an asset for radio work.

"I feel I've got an accent, compared to people here. I remember when I first started at GMR I thought that if I talked really posh I'd be fine. People who knew me didn't recognise my voice at all."

On the radio Victoria has an obvious rapport with co-presenter Julian, but are they good friends off air? The whole breakfast show team, which includes sports' presenter Fergus Sweeney, who boasts a glorious Irish accent, appears to be just like one big happy family, but is that really the case?

"I love Julian and I love Fergus. I think it would be obvious, to people who know us, if we didn't get on."

Victoria believes her job is to inform the public of events that have happened "while they've been asleep" and events in Afghanistan have obviously been a focal point of recent programmes.

"I was on holiday when the planes hit the World Trade Centre and was called back to fly out to New York to present from there."

Victoria says that it is important to inform the public about the events however traumatic they might be, "of course people have to know about it", but she adds: "I believe there is a thirst for other stuff, I really do.

"I do think it's probably time to bring in other issues, like consumer issues as well."

That is the beauty of the breakfast show. Its varied content has made it a favourite with listeners of all ages. It is informative and newsy, but light-hearted issues are dealt with in the same, professional, way.

The show is informal and chatty, but an effort has been made to ensure the tone of the show is not too "inappropriate at a time like this".

There is, apparently, a fine balance between being light-hearted and being wholly inappropriate.

Victoria has to keep abreast of all the latest news, reads national newspapers, keeps Radio Five on all day and watches the television news to ensure she is never caught out by a breaking news story.

She has dabbled in television and enjoyed the experience, presenting a couple of public debate shows.

"It's different doing television because you've got to bother about things like what your hair looks like, but once you've got over that it's similar to radio because you're still talking to people."

She learned a lot from her television experiences, and would do things differently next time.

"I was asked to wear clothes from shops like Top Shop and Kookai, and lets face it I'm a bit old for that. "I was also asked to go blonde, but no one forced me. I did it because I wanted to, I thought it would be a good opportunity to have a change at someone else's expense. Next time I would just be me."

Will there be a next time and does Victoria have any plans to do more television work?

"I would love to combine both radio and television. I love radio, and I love the breakfast show, so I don't want to give that up, definitely not."

There is something looming on the television front, which sounds good, but Victoria can't reveal what it is just yet.

Victoria is at ease talking to just about anyone, and loves to deal with the public.

She has interviewed many famous people and has particular favourites, and those she would prefer never to meet in a radio studio again.

Comedienne Dawn French was " absolutely lovely, the nicest person I've interviewed", but the most impolite, she says, was, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Dawn's husband the comedian Lenny Henry.

"It was a shock because I thought he would be nice, particularly because Dawn French was so nice.

"He was rude and obnoxious until the red light went on and then he changed."

One of the worst people to interview is, she says, Chancellor Gordon Brown, "a typical politician who is just doing his job".

An exception to the general politicians' rule is Home Secretary David Blunkett who "is prepared to be a human being. He knows our style and he's really nice".

Victoria enjoys making "normal people" feel at ease. She says: "I like to be friendly with people who come on the radio. It can be quite a nerve-racking experience if they're never been in a radio studio."

Her talent at making people feel at ease must surely stem from the fact that she has not allowed her fame to change her.

There is no special person in her life at the moment. A long-term relationship ended last year "but we're still friends".

"I have a good circle of close friends, and I live with my sister, so I've plenty of people to turn to."

But is she too busy with her career to make time for romance?

She laughs, and says with a grin on her face: "There's always time for that, isn't there."

Victoria studied at Bury Grammar School before moving on to a degree course at the University of Liverpool which was when she decided on a career in journalism. She went on to do a post-graduate diploma in radio and TV journalism at the then Preston Polytechnic.

She has worked for BBC CWR (Coventry) and BRMB (Birmingham) before presenting and producing her own show, Victoria Derbyshire's lunchtime show on BBC CWR in 1994.

Victoria then returned north and listeners will no doubt remember her dulcet tones on the BBC GMR breakfast show which she hosted from 1995.

In 1998 she joined Five Live, which won the Sony Award for Best Breakfast programme in 1999 and the Radio Industries' Club Award Radio Programme in the same year.