{"id":526009,"date":"2026-04-11T23:55:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T23:55:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/526009\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T23:55:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T23:55:12","slug":"i-wasnt-allowed-to-watch-television-until-i-was-16","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/526009\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I wasn\u2019t allowed to watch television until I was 16\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cathy Newman bumped her head on the way to our interview, which she says is typical. She had a breakfast meeting and collided with a shelf in the loos, raced across town and ran from the station in her trainers. Still, she looks cool and collected, in a cream silk shirt and patterned skirt, that halo of blonde curls neatly in place, though now the trainers feel wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI always want to change into heels,\u201d she says \u2014 the higher the better. She peers into the make-up artist\u2019s mirror and presses at an invisible bruise. \u201cOh God, it\u2019s bad. Can you do something?\u201d She has a tricky interview with the Russian ambassador this afternoon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For 20 years Newman, 51, has brought twin styles \u2014 the forensic and the empathetic \u2014 to Channel 4 News, first as a politics correspondent, then as a presenter and investigations editor. Since Times Radio\u2019s 2020 launch, she has done the same in its Friday drivetime slot.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last year Newman won every award going for her 2024 interview with Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, which prompted his resignation. It was the culmination of a seven-year investigation into John Smyth, a former barrister who abused dozens of boys at Christian camps in Zimbabwe. Welby had attended these camps in the UK and failed to act after seeing a report into his abuses in 2013, considering it a police matter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT000949433870\"Confronting the serial child abuser John Smyth in 2017Channel 4<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t quite believe it took so long to get some kind of transparency from the Church, but I\u2019ll carry on doing those kind of stories,\u201d Newman says. Her interview with Smyth\u2019s son PJ, a week after Welby\u2019s resignation, in which the 54-year-old recalled the garden shed where he was beaten by his father until he bled, was one of the most affecting half hours of TV I\u2019ve seen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some of her investigations begin with an old-fashioned tip-off, a letter in the post, and Newman believes in the long game. Before Channel 4 she spent ten years on newspapers, including the Financial Times. \u201cOne of my earliest contacts was David Cameron, and he was a PR at the time,\u201d she says. \u201cPeople who are entering journalism now approach stories very differently, whereas for me it\u2019s about people I\u2019ve spent a lot of time with. They come to me.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Now Newman is off to Sky News, to fill the 7pm politics slot vacated by Sophy Ridge, who has moved to breakfast, as well as to do podcasts and investigations. Why? Channel 4 News has the punchy outsider status she likes, as well as a bigger audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"ANewman presents the afternoon Drive show on Times Radio<\/p>\n

\u201cTwenty years is so long, isn\u2019t it?\u201d she replies, adding that \u201cthere\u2019s a liberation to building a show from scratch\u201d. If Newman minded not getting the lead presenter role for C4, when Jon Snow stepped down in 2021, she\u2019s not saying. (It went to Krishnan Guru-Murthy.)<\/p>\n

She has picked out the sofa, in squashy orange velvet, and talks excitedly about The Cathy Newman Show, which will have a rotating cast of MPs and peers and a \u201cchatty, podcasty\u201d feel, designed to be clipped on YouTube and TikTok. \u201cSky is the biggest UK news broadcaster on TikTok \u2014 ten million followers \u2014 and that\u2019s a huge audience,\u201d she says. \u201cMy kids [Newman has two daughters, aged 21 and 17] don\u2019t watch Channel 4 News. Their friends don\u2019t watch Channel 4 News. But they do get news on Instagram, TikTok and, increasingly, YouTube. So it\u2019s embracing that.\u201d These whizzy, three-minute takes will be balanced by long-form documentaries and deeper dives.<\/p>\n

Her husband, the writer John O\u2019Connell, and daughters came to her C4 leaving do in London and were surprised that her colleagues knew quite what a workaholic she is: they thought she kept it well hidden.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSo many people talked about my energy for a story. There was a sketch with someone playing me, running around. Afterwards our girls said, \u2018We thought we were the only ones who knew what you were really like.\u2019\u2005\u201d This makes her \u201cprobably quite exhausting\u201d to live with, Newman admits. \u201cI think the girls, if they\u2019re being charitable, would say it helps that I\u2019m very organised. But they all wish I\u2019d relax.\u201d Since the birth of their second daughter, O\u2019Connell has been the chief homemaker and preferred presence at school parents\u2019 evenings. Because Newman interrogates the teachers? \u201cYou\u2019ve hit it in a nutshell.\u201d Also, she adds, \u201cWriting doesn\u2019t pay the mortgage.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT000005051800\"Newman with the Channel 4 News co-presenters Krishnan Guru-Murthy, left, and Jon Snow, 2013Channel 4<\/p>\n

The traditional modes of political journalism are dying, she says, meaning the combative back-and-forth you get on most news shows. \u201cThat four-minute interview, where the politician is trying to get across their lines and I\u2019m trying to interrupt \u2014 I don\u2019t think that\u2019s served anybody very well. No one learns anything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Cathy Newman Show will be more relaxed. But does she have the step-inside-my-world warmth or slickness needed for the new age of personality-led broadcasting? Will she show her hand more on Sky? Newman answers a slightly different question, about format rather than personality, but says, \u201cI\u2019m not going to shoot my mouth off\u2026 People are still not going to know which way I vote, and rightly so.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\tTimes Radio\t\t\t<\/p>\n

Cathy Newman presents the Drive show on Fridays at 4pm-7pm<\/p>\n

The consensus among colleagues is that Newman is very good at her job but sometimes appears too efficient, too professionally steely. As a child she got up at 5.30am to do her homework so that she could practise violin in the evening, and that determination to be across everything has not left her. \u201cYou can never overprepare,\u201d she tells me, and worries that I am not taking enough notes: what if my two recorders fail?\u00a0<\/p>\n

The one exception to this preparedness was Newman\u2019s 2018 interview with the psychologist and polemicist Jordan Peterson, in which she lost her cool and even her thread halfway through a debate about the self-sabotaging \u201cagreeableness\u201d of women and Peterson\u2019s right to offend. \u201cHa, gotcha,\u201d Peterson said, and Newman had to agree. The vicious response from his followers \u2014 the interview has been viewed 51 million times on YouTube \u2014 led to Channel 4 News calling in security experts for Newman\u2019s protection.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

She deflates when I mention Peterson \u2014 \u201cAncient history!\u201d \u2014 which is true except that the fallout still follows her: on social media, in the comments under anything she writes or says, though she was guilty of little more than losing an argument. The truth is that she was underprepared, she says now. A producer had given her Peterson\u2019s book 12 Rules for Life the day before and until then she had never heard of him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It must be frustrating to have your work picked apart by thousands of strangers, for years. \u201cBut is that about me or is it about them? Think how many interviews I\u2019ve done since. It\u2019s live TV and things don\u2019t always go the way you expect. You can\u2019t be haunted by the past.\u201d It wasn\u2019t the first time Newman had been threatened online: she has had persistent stalkers, and in 2014 a restraining order was taken out against a man who had sent her more than 100,000 messages on Twitter and turned up at the Channel 4 offices. She worries a lot about personal safety; she is private for a reason.<\/p>\n

Newman describes her childhood in Guildford as \u201cvery contented\u201d. Her parents were teachers, though her mother stopped working while she and her older sister were young. It was a conventional upbringing in many ways, unconventional in others: there was no TV until Newman was 16 and the girls were encouraged to follow their passions in a home environment inspired by Michael Deakin\u2019s 1972 book The Children on the Hill, about a mother who restricts outside influences in order to raise exceptional children.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT000429871815\"Newman as a schoolgirlCOURTESY OF CATHY NEWMAN<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a huge focus on teaching yourself. My mum was never given the chance to learn music, my dad neither. But it was, \u2018Ooh, you\u2019ve got a good ear \u2014 go, here\u2019s a violin.\u2019\u2005\u201d It worked, in that Newman became a voracious reader and keen violinist \u2014 she still plays, in a Westminster-based quartet called the Statutory Instruments that includes the politicians Baroness Debbonaire and Emily Benn. But it did mean that TV, when it came, had a eureka effect on her. Seeing Kate Adie in a flak jacket made her want to be a journalist.<\/p>\n

School was less happy \u2014 first a fee-paying girls\u2019 school (\u201clike Mean Girls: I had heavy NHS glasses, not cool\u201d) and then sixth form at Charterhouse in the early Nineties, where her father taught chemistry and she was one of very few girls. The boys would rank them out of ten as they passed, and in 2018 Newman revealed that a boy had unzipped his flies and put her hand on his penis in the canteen. Charterhouse reported this to the police, but Newman said she didn\u2019t want to criminalise someone so young at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It must have been a shock, after all her parents\u2019 gentle encouragement and pride at her full scholarship. \u201cI remember, and I can\u2019t believe I got so upset about it now, but on the first day a really scary boy in the upper sixth called me into his study and said, \u2018So what happened? Did your mum sleep with the milkman?\u2019 Because both my parents were brunette.\u201d By then, her mother had taken a secretarial job at the school. \u201cIt really freaked me out.\u201d But she did well anyway and went on to get a first in English from Oxford University.<\/p>\n

\"HouseThe parliamentary string quartet the Statutory Instruments; from left, Emily Benn, Newman, Thangam Debbonaire and Katherine ChibahPA<\/p>\n

In Newman\u2019s book The Ladder, a women\u2019s guide to success that draws on her weekly Times Radio interview of the same name, she recalls experiences as a young journalist that are both jaw-dropping and standard for the Nineties and Noughties: the editor who invited himself up to her hotel room, the colleague who literally chased her around the office, the peer who told her to wear the long boots he liked to lunch (she didn\u2019t).\u00a0<\/p>\n

While Newman laughs some of this off (\u201cit was having my bum pinched, totally low level\u201d) she draws a direct line between that period and investigations that have focused on abuses of power. \u201cIt\u2019s like the sexual assault at school. It puts you in a different box. If you\u2019re on the therapist\u2019s couch, as I slightly feel I am, it explains why I\u2019ve so often championed the outsider \u2014 because you\u2019re constantly made to feel that you don\u2019t belong. I think it\u2019s good, as a journalist, not to belong. You\u2019re looking at institutions and seeing how they are failing people.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

She believes the workplace is now \u201cdramatically better\u201d for female journalists, so the conversation gets sticky when I raise reports of discrimination at Channel 4 News. In 2022 the Observer reported that at least seven non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) had been issued by ITN, which runs Channel 4 News, between 2018 and 2021, after women there voiced concerns over equal pay and harassment. Two years later an independent report found \u201clow trust\u201d in ITN\u2019s complaints process and prompted an apology from its CEO, Rachel Corp. Some of those women have since said that Newman could have done more to support them. Newman blocked the former Channel 4 News producer Daisy Ayliffe on X after she asked her, \u201cWhat happens to women who say \u2018me too\u2019 in your own newsroom?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"CathyWith her husband, the writer John O\u2019Connell, in 2018Francesco Guidicini<\/p>\n

That period must, at the least, have been an unhappy time. Newman pauses. \u201cLiterally, that was above my pay grade and I had no role in all that. I know ITN doesn\u2019t use NDAs any more.\u201d Was she aware that some women felt they were treated unfairly? Newman talks about her own reporting on NDAs (\u201cin no way would I ever condone them\u201d) and tries to remember if there was a meeting to discuss them. What I\u2019m getting at, I say, is whether, as someone who is vocal about the need to speak up for female colleagues, she felt able to? It\u2019s not clear because Newman keeps referring me to her work (\u201cI hope the journalism I\u2019ve done speaks for itself\u201d) and her record as a mentor. \u201cI did what I could as a senior woman to help younger colleagues. But I can\u2019t be a spokesperson for the company.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

As her new Sky show approaches she can\u2019t wait to get back to Westminster, where everything and nothing has changed since she first became Channel 4\u2019s political correspondent. \u201cMy producer bought me a copy of The Times from my first day in 2006 and there\u2019s an energy crisis story, a story about Putin \u2014 a sense of history rhyming.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

She thinks Sir Keir Starmer will make it to the next general election. \u201cEverybody in government is expecting an absolute wipeout [in the local elections]. Angela Rayner is on manoeuvres. But the more people I speak to, the more I would bet on him still being in post.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The newsbeat is hard when the cycle is so apocalyptic, but Newman reminds her own children that \u201cthings felt bleak in the 1970s, [when] people were doing three-day weeks and eating by candlelight, and we got through that. If you get into the grand sweep of history, you can feel more positive about the future.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"CathyStuart McClymont for The Sunday Times Magazine<\/p>\n

\"NINTCHDBPICT001070832515\"Stuart McClymont for The Sunday Times Magazine<\/p>\n

She was pleased when both girls said in their Mother\u2019s Day cards that they valued her cheeriness \u2014 she has made a real effort \u201cnot to be the voice of doom when I walk through the door\u201d. Still, they wish she would slow down. The family live in south London and her idea of a relaxing weekend involves a modern Greek lesson (with homework) before catching up on the news, though she will no longer do a weekend TV shift.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her mind is on the Russian ambassador as she settles into the make-up artist\u2019s chair: will he just lie to her? When I watch the interview the next day, Newman lands her points on Iran, Ukraine and UK political interference, and that bump on her head is just beginning to show.
The Cathy Newman Show airs at 7pm on Sky News on weekdays and streams live on YouTube from next month<\/p>\n

Opening and shoot images: Stuart McClymont for The Sunday Times Magazine. Hair and make-up: Viorela Coman. Styling: Kate Barbour. Blue look: jacket by Reserved, dress by Forever New, shoes by River Island. Cream look: jacket by River Island, blouse by Jaki London, skirt, stylist\u2019s own, trainers by Nike. Pink look: top and trousers by Karen Millen, shoes by Dune<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cathy Newman bumped her head on the way to our interview, which she says is typical. She had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":526010,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[6491,96,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-526009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=526009"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/526009\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/526010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=526009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=526009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=526009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}