Sally Magnusson: I need the stimulation of work but it has always been family first

BBC News

03-04-2025

Sally Magnusson has always maintained an air of calm authority and professional serenity during 27 years presenting Reporting Scotland.She has interviewed everyone from royalty to first ministers and high-profile celebrities on BBC Scotland's flagship TV news programme.There have been elections and referendums aplenty, human tragedies and national celebrations.But, as she steps down from the programme, she admits that juggling a hugely successful career with bringing up five children carried one great fear - blurting out a children's bedtime story at the most inopportune moment.
"Bedtime was like a military operation and all the children would be in bed by seven," she tells BBC Scotland's Scotcast."But I remember I would be sitting with one of the children singing Goodnight Darling and they would say, Mummy – do octopuses fart."You'd struggle with that and then the phone would ring downstairs and they'd say it's Breakfast TV here and we've got the chancellor of the exchequer on tomorrow."There would then be this list of financial facts and figures to get your head round and I would think – goodness, what kind of life have I got?"I was always afraid of going to a dinner and finding myself sitting next to the director general and asking if he'd like Mummy to cut his meat for him."So do octopuses fart? "I've never found the answer to that – I'll look it up!"
The journalist and author will present her final edition of Reporting Scotland on Friday, having joined the programme in 1998.Before that, her career in journalism began at The Scotsman newspaper in 1979.Her mother, Mamie Baird, was a newspaper journalist in Glasgow and her father, Magnus Magnusson, was a print journalist, historian and broadcaster best-known as the presenter of the BBC's Mastermind.She started in television on BBC Scotland's Current Account programme and then on network news programmes including Sixty Minutes and Breakfast.Then came her return to Scotland to present Reporting Scotland two days a week.Other television programmes she has fronted include Newsnight Scotland, Panorama and Songs of Praise as well as Sunday Mornings on BBC Radio Scotland. She anchored many major stories for the corporation, including the deaths of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth II.Family has always come first though."It has to," she says. "You don't go and have five children and commit to family if you don't put that first. I come from a big family myself and I always thought I would replicate that."I was doing Breakfast TV for the 10 years that I was having children."Of course it was knackering and I spent the entire time just dreaming of sleep. "But all young mothers, and older mothers, do that anyway so I don't think it would have been any worse for me."
Surely you can't put yourself under that kind of pressure without being hugely ambitious?"I don't think I am particularly ambitious and I often think I could have been more so," Sally says."I was once offered the BBC London Six O'clock News gig, which was the big one, and I turned it down because I wanted to be home for bathtime. I now think, really Sally?"But I turned down things without a huge deal of angst or anguish. I was just in that mode and that's what I did."But I found that I had to work. I found that as much as I adore my children – and had a great propensity for giving birth to them – I've always longed to be stimulated and have stuff going on with my brain. And that's what has driven me."Sally says getting the tone right while delivering different types of news stories has been "absolutely crucial" throughout her career."I've tended to use my own judgement and think, how am I reacting to this? And if I can trust that, I can let it be part of what I conduce to the viewer."I don't want to say this the wrong way but when Prince Philip died and we were doing that on Reporting Scotland, I remember thinking that he was an old man and he'd had a great life."He had reached his mid-90s and we can celebrate that."We don't need to have our faces tripping us and we can smile a bit."
Sally admits the closest she came to letting the human emotion of an event get to her was as she covered the aftermath of the Dunblane shootings in 1996, when 43-year-old Thomas Hamilton killed 16 pupils and a teacher."I don't think it is our job to be emotional," she says."I think we can convey the emotion of an occasion without actually giving in to it ourselves."But that was the nearest I came to not quite achieving that."As well as her TV presenting career, Sally has also turned her hand to making television documentaries. Her latest for BBC Scotland was Alzheimer's, a Cure and Me, about her mother having Alzheimer's, which aired last year.She is also an acclaimed author. Among her books is a biography of the Scottish runner and missionary Eric Liddell, an account of her mother's dementia, and three novels.She is the founder of the charity Playlist for Life, which promotes the use of music to help people with dementia. She was awarded an MBE in 2023 in recognition of her charity work.Gary Smith, head of news and current affairs at BBC Scotland, has paid tribute to Magnusson and her work on Reporting Scotland."Sally is an outstanding journalist, broadcaster and writer," he said."She has skilfully guided viewers through countless big and sometimes difficult stories and the teatime audience will miss her hugely - as will all of us who have worked with her over the years."