Farewell Kay Burley, TV’s answer to Liz Truss
Farewell Kay Burley, who has announced her retirement from Sky News after 36 years on the beleaguered rolling news channel.
Some may say good riddance, but like her or loathe “Hurley Burley”, you can’t fault the 64 year old’s staying power.
Even after she was taken off air for six months having broken lockdown rules in December 2020 during her 60th birthday party, she re-emerged on the breakfast show with a typically self-effacing: “Hope you’re as happy as I am to be back.”
Credit: Sky News
Announcing her retirement on Wednesday, she humbly declared: “Let politicians of every party just rejoice at that news.”
As resilient as her facelift, part of Burley’s appeal was her imperviousness to criticism.
TV’s answer to Liz Truss, she let every gaffe wash over her like lettuce in a salad spinner.
From empty chairing then Conservative party chair, James Cleverly, despite him not actually being scheduled to appear on her show, to responding to the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015 with a picture of a dog with “sadness in her eyes” she embraced her Ron Burgundyisms with admirable gusto.
“I’ve always been something of a Wigan street fighter,” she once boasted, in the style of Lisa Nandy after six pints of lager and a packet of crisps.
And who could really disagree when she famously described a Scottish independence campaigner “a bit of a knob”?
Not always the most sisterly of journalists, in 2008, the twice divorced mother of one reportedly grabbed a female photographer by the throat after being hit in the face with a camera.
But hey, what’s wrong with a bit of healthy competition between female reporters? Just ask any woman who has ever worked with Sky News’ resident mother hen.
The bigger problem for Sky News, of course, is what this means for the channel’s dwindling viewership.
Is this heavyweight departure a reflection of the fact that even no nonsense Burley could no longer put up with the channel’s seemingly endless diet of biased Israel coverage and climate change scaremongering?
Or perhaps she simply couldn’t bear being repeatedly whipped in the ratings by arch rivals GB News?
Burley’s former Sky News colleague Adam Boulton once told Newsnight that regulator Ofcom should shut down GB News for disrupting Britain’s “broadcast ecology”.
Yet the late night BBC current affairs show has been forced to slim down to 30 minutes while last week, Sky News announced a move to premium content to face off its linear decline.
One of Britain’s broadcast ecology’s great oaks has been felled. But what if a tree falls and no one is there to hear it?