BBC icon Fiona Bruce has been a staple of our screens for years, presenting Antiques Roadshow and Question Time week in, week out. She joined the corporation back in 1989 as a researcher on Panorama, and was the first ever female newsreader on BBC News at Ten. But years before, she had a very different career.
Fiona actually started out as a model. While she was still a student at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College, Fiona headed out to find work and landed a role in teenage magazine Jackie, where she appeared in the Photo Love feature. The comic-strip style feature included black and white snaps of Fiona with other models overlaid with speech bubbles, depicting typical teenage problems.
Fiona was just 15 years old when she landed her job. She explained: “I’d been looking for a Saturday job as my mum had told me to get off my backside. At the time, £3 an hour was riches.”
That’s a stark contrast to her salary at the Beeb now, which is between £410,000 and £414,999 per year.
She reached out to the boys she “fancied” at school to take part in the photographs with her, admitting to giving the male roles to boys she “wanted to snog”. But she’d often be forced to bend her knees to get a good snap, as she was usually taller than her male counterparts.
Fiona told The Guardian that looks also played a part in her getting a job as a newsreader, admitting: “What I actually think is you can’t look like the back end of a bus, and you do have to scrub up quite well.
“But do you have to be a beauty? No. Do you have to pay more attention to your appearance than the blokes do? Yes. If you look like the back end of the bus, as a woman you won’t get the job. If you look like the back end of a bus as a bloke, you might get the job.”
