Selina Scott

Selina Mary Scott (born 13 May 1951) is an English television presenter who co-hosted the first dedicated breakfast television programme in the UK before crossing the Atlantic to join West 57th, a prime-time current-affairs show broadcast from New York.

Scott continues to write, and run her lifestyle brand Naturally Selina Scott.

Scott was born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, in 1951.

Her secondary education was at Laurence Jackson School in Guisborough, North Yorkshire where she became Head Girl.

She read English and American studies at the University of East Anglia.

Scott trained in Dundee, Scotland on D. C. Thomson's The Sunday Post newspaper, before becoming press officer for the Highlands and Islands Tourist board on the Isle of Bute.

She made her television debut on the weeknightly news programme for the regional ITV station Grampian Television, North Tonight in Aberdeen at the height of the North Sea oil boom.

Several months after North Tonight began, Scott, aged 29, moved to national TV, appearing as a newsreader on ITN's News at Ten.

CBS in the United States hired her for their news show West 57th, which on one assignment took her to Kenya.

For CBS, Scott gained exclusive access and revealing interviews with, amongst others, George Harrison, Prince Charles, Bono of U2 and the world chess champion Garry Kasparov.

Whilst in America, Scott interviewed Donald Trump.

In 1982, at the outbreak of the Falklands War, Scott became the Forces' pin-up.

Eighteen months after she first anchored ITV's News at Ten, she was poached by the BBC to launch Breakfast Time in January 1983.

In contrast to Alastair Burnet and Sandy Gall, who had welcomed her at ITN, she presented the new show with an adversarial Frank Bough.

When she left Breakfast Time, she accepted the role as presenter of the BBC's The Clothes Show (1986–1988), and was guest host on the chat show Wogan.

Here she interviewed, amongst many others, Ginger Rogers and Prince Andrew.

In connection with interviewing Andrew, she says he asked her out, but she managed to ignore it.

It was at this time that Albert Broccoli, the producer of the James Bond films, auditioned Scott for the role of Miss Moneypenny in The Living Daylights.

There she co-anchored its 1992 election-night coverage with David Frost.

Scott has also produced independent documentaries on the Royals in Europe including A Prince Among Islands, a profile of Prince Charles which achieved 14 million viewers, the first in-depth interview with King Juan Carlos of Spain, The Year of Spain (which also achieved record viewing figures for a documentary in Spain) and The Return of the King, returning to Greece with King Constantine and his family after 25 years of exile to which the Greek government reacted, menacing their journey by boat through the Greek islands with gunboats and aircraft.

This dramatic intervention led not only to national headlines in the UK and Greece but ultimately to King Constantine appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to stop the Greek Government confiscating his passport and his Athens property.

A settlement was eventually reached.

Her 1995 documentary for ITV about Trump was the first investigation into his honesty.

Owing to a technical issue with the camera, Scott interviewed Trump twice, the programme intercut them.

When it aired on ITV, Trump was shocked by its critical tone and threatened Scott with legal action and sent her numerous angry threatening letters, an issue which partly became public knowledge at the time.

Trump warned ITV that if they sold the rights to any of the American television stations that were bidding for it, he would tie them up in the courts.

ITV complied, meaning the US press and public were unable to see the documentary.

It also started a long-running feud between Trump and Scott.

Shortly after the interview with Trump, Scott signed a deal reportedly worth $200,000 to host her own talk show, The Selina Scott Show for NBC Super Channel.

By 1997, she was back in the UK, signing a contract with Sky reputedly for £1,000,000.

In 2007, she took part in the BBC Two series: The Underdog Show to highlight the Dogs Trust Charity for rescued animals.

After six weeks of intensive training she was voted the winner with an abandoned wolfhound cross Chump, beating singer Huey Morgan and actress Julia Sawalha in the final.

In October 2008, Scott presented a four-part series for the Sky Arts channel and ITV, Edward Seago — The Forgotten Painter, and included interviews with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh; who described how he and Seago explored a pristine Antarctic abroad HMY Britannia soon after the first official royal tour to Australia.

"He sat me on a high stool so he and his producer could get a good eyeful," Scott told The Lady in 2013.

Scott appeared on Britain's first government-authorised satellite service, BSB, before moving to Rupert Murdoch's Sky when the two companies merged.

In 2018 Scott appeared in 4 episodes of the BBC's The Real Marigold Hotel, shot in Rajasthan, which she had always wanted to visit as her great-great-grandfather (a soldier surgeon) survived the Siege of Lucknow.

In December 2021, Scott was one of the four walkers travelling with the BBC's 360 degree camera, in the first series of BBC Four's Winter Walks.

Scott's episode featured a walk through Wharfedale in the Yorkshire Dales.

In a 2020 interview Scott said that Bough would deliberately undermine her by interrupting mid-question and in other ways; when she attempted to complain she said that senior management simply wasn't interested: "they seemed to have no emotional intelligence, and they let men like Frank Bough roam the BBC without any check on them".

She said that there was a very sexist atmosphere at the BBC, "this malevolence".