Breakfast marked a busy morning in Salford on May 19 as Sally Nugent and Jon Kay told viewers that Carol Kirkwood had been shortlisted in the National Television Awards longlist, less than a month after she left the programme. Kirkwood, who ended her Breakfast run on April 1 after 28 years with the broadcaster, is up for Best TV Presenter, a nod that recognises more than 25 years on television.
Nugent said Kirkwood had “switched off the alarm clock” one month earlier, but the longlist news showed how quickly her name has stayed in the conversation. Kay added that Breakfast was also represented, with two documentaries from the team nominated in the Authored Documentary category and the programme itself listed in Daytime. The ceremony is due to take place in September.
The segment turned into a brief on-air salute to one of the show’s most familiar faces. Kirkwood announced in January that she would leave Breakfast so she could travel and spend more time with her husband, Steve Randall, and her last show on April 1 ended with a farewell speech live on air. On May 19, the praise came back the other way, with Nugent saying that if Kirkwood were in the studio she would correct the description of her career as “more than 25 years” and insist it is 28.
Kay joked about “25 years of commitment to umbrellas, wet weather gear,” a nod to the weather forecasts that made Kirkwood a fixture for viewers across the country. Kirkwood responded in her farewell message by thanking colleagues “past and present” for trusting her to tell them about heatwaves, snow and the everyday question of whether they needed a brolly. She said the team had been her “safety net” and, often, her family, adding that she would not change a second of it.
The documentaries named on the same morning underlined the wider reach of the Breakfast team beyond the studio. Our Girls: The Southport Families, a one-hour film hearing from the parents of Alice da Silva Aguiar, Elsie Dot Stancombe and Bebe King, was nominated in the Authored Documentary category, while Sir Chris Hoy: Cancer, Courage and Me, filmed with the cyclist and his family, was also listed in the same section. That gave Breakfast more than one reason to talk up its longlist haul, even as it adjusted to life without Kirkwood.
For Kirkwood, the nomination is a public reminder that she has not disappeared from viewers’ minds just because she has stepped away from the studio. For Breakfast, it is an early sign that one of its biggest names has left a gap, but not a shadow big enough to block the show’s next chapter.
