10. Gabby Logan MBE
I was sitting watching the end of ‘Pointless’ after a long first day back at work after New Year, when an e-mail arrived to say that Gabby Logan had agreed to talk with me. I had barely recovered from what was a lovely surprise when I turned over to BBC2 to see that Gabby was one of the contestants on Richard Osman’s excellent show ‘House of Games’.
Shortly before Friday’s episode, I had the chance to spend almost an hour in the virtual company of one of television’s most recognisable and finest presenters. There were so many thoughtful or insightful questions with which I could have opened the conversation, but true to form, I ignored them all…
Had Gabby used the fondue set she won as a daily prize on ‘House of Games’?
Gabby laughed … which I have to say was a relief.
“No, I haven’t used the fondue set yet. I recorded the show in July, so I’ve had it for a while. I thought that maybe when we got to winter time I could do a chocolate fondue or something, but actually the kids must have forgotten we had it … so, no I haven’t used it yet; but I will!
“I think it’s the kind of thing you’ve got to do when you’re entertaining friends, and obviously there’s not been a lot of that going on; so maybe in this lock down, I will look up the ingredients for a chocolate fondue and surprise the kids!”
Back in 2018, I ruined many an early evening when I appeared on an episode of ‘The Chase’. So many people said Bradley Walsh was as nice is ‘real life’ as he appeared on the screen (and they were right); and Richard Osman seems every bit as much a likeable bloke – he’s certainly a fantastic presenter.
“Richard’s amazing,” Gabby agreed. “I can’t tell you how brilliant he is in that show. As someone who does the same kind of job, he’s so effortless. There are five shows recorded in a day and you obviously do them in sequence, but his energy is the same throughout the day. Also, his knowledge of the shows is incredible, because he genuinely doesn’t know what’s coming next and he never uses autocues; he explains the games brilliantly, never has to do pick-ups – he’s masterful at it, and so much fun.”
Time to change direction and go back to Gabby’s childhood: when did she realise that her father was a well-known footballer?
(Gabby’s father Terry Yorath played for Leeds United and Coventry City in a playing career that spanned six clubs and almost two decades. He also made 59 international appearances for Wales before a lengthy managerial career during which he also took charge of his home nation’s side.)
“Probably quite young actually. The thing about footballers is you generally tend to live in or near the city where you play, so if you’re living somewhere like Coventry which is nothing like London, the football team is really important to that city; and the boys and girls and parents who see your Dad pick you up from school know what he does. I’d see the older kids and parents talking to him, and people were always approaching him in public, so quite early on I might have asked him why that man was talking to you. And also you’d have newspapers round the house – we used to have newspapers then! – and you’d often see e a picture of your Dad in the paper…
“I’ve got a very large family, and if we went to big family gatherings, maybe at my Mum’s in Leeds with all her siblings and their kids, there was always a lot of fuss around Dad, and a lot of people wanting his time and energy. Add to that the fact that he was always home around half-past two or three o’clock every afternoon, when a lot of other Dads weren’t; and he was away at the weekend when other Dads weren’t, so yes from being little, I probably was quite aware that he did something a bit different.”
As well as that level of recognition, Terry Yorath was little different to the overwhelming majority of professional footballers in that he was transferred from club to club a number of times during his career. At such a young age, did Gabby find moving house, city, and even country on one occasion unsettling?
“We moved from Leeds to Coventry, from Coventry to Vancouver then back to Leeds, but Mum always made it a kind of adventure. Dad also joined Tottenham during the time, but we didn’t move in the end, because my Mum didn’t want to give up her nice big house and garden in Coventry for a town house in London … footballers weren’t earning the money they earn now!
“Eventually when we got back to Leeds, Mum said she wanted to put down some roots, so that we didn’t have to keep moving schools; because it was getting to a critical point in our education. So it was quite peripatetic, but also exciting. There was always new people to meet and things to do. At this point my little brother Jordan hadn’t been born, but there was this little gang of us, the three older kids who were quite close in age, and we all had each other. Also my parents were quite young; they were only in their early 20s when they had me, so there was always a lot of energy and positivity.”
One thing I’ve found chatting to athletes who excel in a particular field, is that they often tend to be quite gifted at a range of sports. Gabby would earn international recognition as a rhythmic gymnast in her teens, but were there any sports that she particularly enjoyed?
“My first love really was tennis. When we went to live in Vancouver, it was really easy to play tennis. It didn’t cost much, it wasn’t an elite sport, there were tennis courts everywhere; and the facilities were also great for indoor sport because obviously Canada gets very cold winters.
“So I absolutely loved it, I was about eight and that’s what I wanted to do. We came back to Coventry, and luckily an indoor racket centre had just been built in the city. Again it was cheap and easily accessible and I had about six or seven months in Coventry when I could keep my tennis up … I really enjoyed it, and was quite good at it.
“Then we moved back to Leeds, which didn’t have an indoor tennis centre. There was a private club that had one court and it cost a couple of thousand pounds a year or something like that. There was no way I was going to be able to join and that was basically the end of it. It was the middle of October, so I couldn’t really play outside, so I started going along to gymnastics with my sister, Louise.
“We’d both always done a lot of gymnastics – she’d done a bit more than me – and I just followed her until I ‘found my sport’. Obviously it was an after school thing; I was in the school netball team, and I also did a lot of athletics, and was quite good at the high jump.
“But the hours I was spending on gymnastics slowly started to creep up, and although I had a real love for the sport, it wasn’t necessarily my first choice; and if I could go back, maybe I would have been physically better off in other sports. That said when you find your tribe, or your happy place, you’re very lucky and gymnastics was definitely a passion.”
Gabby was selected to represent Wales in the rhythmic gymnastics competition at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland. Quite a trek, over 11,000 miles … was that the first time Gabby had been away from her family for any length of time?
“Yes, and it was my first time in the southern hemisphere, although we’d travelled a lot with my Dad. Obviously we’d lived in Vancouver, but my parents always liked to go on nice holidays, often to unusual places, but I’d never travelled that far without my family.
“I think I was just the right age tough. I was nearly 17, I was quite independent, quite good at looking after myself, and I suppose it was a perfect rite of passage and just a wonderful experience. I had three weeks living like a professional athlete … living the dream! I was training every day, doing the thing that I loved in an amazing country – I absolutely love New Zealand – so even though it’s a long time ago now, I still have clear and vivid memories of that experience.”
Given the successful career that her father had enjoyed, did Gabby ever feel (or put herself) under any pressure to succeed in her chosen sport?
“My Dad didn’t really understand why we were doing a sport that didn’t have a professional career,” Gabby explained. “He’d left his home in Cardiff at 15 to become a footballer at Leeds United. For him, it was a chance for a better life, and he couldn’t understand why we were spending all these hours on a sport that was never going to be professional. I think if we’d played tennis, he’d have been able to see that it could lead somewhere…
“So there was no pressure from him in that respect, but I always put pressure on myself to do as well as I could, and be the best I could be. I’ve always had quite a competitive instinct but rhythmic gymnastics is not a sport where you can go out on the mat and be as ferocious as you can; it’s not like rugby or football. It doesn’t help you to have that temperament; it’s all about the training really, all the hours and hours you’ve put in before, so that you can go out and create something on the day that is the best of all those hours.
“I was quite hard on myself with the training, I never missed a session, and I’d actually do ballet and other conditioning exercises at home as well. My parents attitude was always that if you do something, you do it to the best of your ability, you don’t waste people’s time; if coaches are giving up their time for you, it’s only right that you respect that and give back…
“Grass roots sport survives on that kind of relationship. My husband [Kenny Logan, a former rugby union international, capped 70 times for Scotland] sometimes coaches my son’s local rugby team and I’ve seen him read the riot act to the kids … ‘if I’m giving up my Sunday morning, getting out of bed and coming down here, then you’re going to bloody listen!’
“My son Reuben is in the under-16s now and incredibly, his club can still field three teams in that age group … and bless them they still all come in for a bollocking on a Sunday morning!”
I was struck at just how relaxed and natural Gabby was, chatting away so easily and openly to someone she had never met before – she really was genuinely lovely company. Unfortunately, I was my usual anxious self … I know what I want to say, but so often the words just don’t come or flow. Gabby couldn’t have been nicer, and I will keep trying to get better…
Was Gabby a natural performer? Note to self, keep the questions short.
“No I think I really had to work hard at the sport,” Gabby admitted. “As I alluded to earlier, rhythmic gymnastics probably wasn’t the right sport for me; I was a bit of a square peg in a round hole. The girls who went to the Olympics two years later were physically much more likely to succeed, and I really had to fight my body type to keep as flexible as I could. I’m flexible compared to the ‘average Joe’, but in terms of rhythmic gymnastics, I wasn’t hyper-flexible and not a natural by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I’ve learned how to be able to put on a performance.”
Gabby’s gymnastic career came to a rather abrupt end while she was still in her teens. The cause was sciatica … I’ve had it; it is incredibly painful. I was about to find out just how painful…
“I still get bouts of it; I had one before Christmas, which was horrendous, and it does rear its head about once a year. I’ve said it before, I’ve given birth to two children in sixteen minutes and to me, severe sciatica is that level of pain – the only thing is you don’t get to have a baby at the end of it … that euphoric moment.”
How did Gabby cope with the realisation that her sport had effectively been taken away from her?
“I struggled massively with purpose, because when you spend as much time, energy, focus, mental time on something and suddenly it’s gone then you have all these extra hours to fill. I’d been coping very well with my ‘A’ levels and school work whilst doing all that training, so it wasn’t like I could focus much more on my ‘A’ levels. I needed something … I didn’t know what it was, but in the year that followed I’d go swimming and time myself thinking I could be a swimmer, and the same with running.
“I probably could have found another sport if we’d done the Talent ID that we do now with athletes when they change sports. I was only 17, so I was still young; but maybe I wasn’t looking in the right areas. So yes, it did give me some dark moments, feeling quite low about where I was going to get that buzz in life, where was I going to find that joy, sense of achievement and purpose again?”
Gabby and her family had been affected by two separate, different, yet unbelievably tragic events between the mid-80s and the early 90s; firstly the Bradford fire in 1985 (Gabby had been in the crowd for the game and her father was the club’s assistant coach) and then in 1992 the sudden passing of her younger brother Daniel, who was on the verge of following in his father’s footsteps and joining Leeds United.
I asked two questions; how did Gabby deal with two such terrible tragedies, and did those events somehow shape the adult she has become?
“I’ve been writing a book recently, and I came to the realisation that after going through Bradford at 13, then losing my brother at 19, no one ever said to me or my siblings do you think you’d like some counselling?
“To go through the Bradford fire and to be in that stadium was traumatic and obviously what happened with Daniel … I found my own kind of therapy if you like in my 20s; but I think it shows just how much those conversations have changed now, and what support is more readily available…
“We dealt with it just how people dealt with things back then. With grief, you can’t say today you’ll feel like this and tomorrow you’ll feel like that, so everybody in the family dealt with Daniel’s death very differently.
“With Bradford, what was apparent as a family was that Dad’s experience was so much more intense than ours, because of what he’d seen. With him being assistant manager at the club, he went to so many funerals; he was like a shell of himself for a long time, and I think it had a much greater impact on him that he even realised himself at the time.
“Whether those events shaped me in some way; I’m sure they have. Bradford was a national tragedy and being so close to those events gives you an insight into life and death, heroism, and the dignity with which a lot of people in Bradford dealt with the tragedy, but they’re really grown-up concepts for a young teenager to get her head around.
“Daniel’s death was also a very pivotal point in our lives. As teenagers you’re growing up and developing and not quite sure where your place in the world is; and when something like that happens, again it gives you a perspective on something you didn’t think would impact on your life until a lot later. Daniel’s death accelerated everything; it made me feel like you had to rush and get things done, because you didn’t know when it was all going to end, or what was going to come round the corner. I did manage to come away from those feelings, but it’s impossible to say how you would be different though, because until you experience that other life, you don’t know how much it’s shaped you as a person.”
I found what Gabby said so powerful, and actually I was flattered that she was willing to share those thoughts and feelings with me.
Terry Yorath will probably be best-remembered for his time at Elland Road, but Leeds United is not the club that Gabby supports. She is a diehard Newcastle United fan, her love of the club stemming from her time as a student in Durham and an early radio job in Newcastle.
I’ve seen a few games at St James’ Park down the years, including a 5-0 win over Manchester City in 1983. It was the days before seating and I was standing with a friend in the open Gallowgate End … well I was until a crowd surge after one of the goals left me where I was, but carried him some 20 rows down towards the pitch.
5-0 was also the scoreline of the famous win over Manchester United in 1996. Gabby saw the game live … whilst I watched it in a hotel in Rugby after my younger daughter had been Gateshead’s mascot in their 4-0 win at Rushden & Diamonds the previous day.
None of which has any particular relevance, but the latter is certainly a nice memory.
Anyway, does Gabby still get the chance to go and watch her beloved Magpies?
“I did the Liverpool game for Prime video, so my most recent visit was just a few days ago, and I often find myself there for work. I do the Great North Run for the BBC as well, so I do get to Newcastle a fair amount. I’m a Patron for the Foundation of the club as well, so I do their dinner and things like that and have a connection with the club in that respect. I do miss going to matches though,
“When I went to that Man United game you mentioned, I was single; I woke up, fancied going to the game, bought a plane ticket, flew up … I can’t do that with two teenagers. That time will come again; they’re doing their GCSE’s this year – well, not! – so I’m hopeful I will be able to get to games in the future; but that was a fantastic period of my life. I love the club. I absolutely love the city, and always feel very nostalgic when I go back…
“I remember once filming an opening link near where the directors’ box is at St James’ Park with a camera on a wire. My make-up artist was with me. She has worked with me for about ten years, yet amazingly seems to know nothing about sport; and she just stood there and said: ‘Is this the biggest stadium we ever go in?!’”
Gabby’s face lit up at the memory. “’No it’s not, but it’s one of the biggest in the Premier League’. She thought it was amazing and I said: ‘You should see it when it’s full of people; it’s even more impressive!’
“It’s a real cathedral and it sits looking over the city. When I do the Great North Run I stay at the Hilton in Gateshead and from there you can see St James’ and the [Tyne] Bridge; it’s one of my favourite views of any of the hotels I stay in. New grounds aren’t built in cities anymore and very few grounds have that sense of setting that St James Park has.”
Has Gabby ever taken part in the Great North Run?
“I ran it twice, once when I was working for Metro FM in Newcastle, after I’d finished university; and I went back a few years later when I was working in telly and did it again. It’s a fantastic race and a special day.”
My ‘fastest’(and I use the term advisedly) was two hours 23 in 1994. I’d like to think I took my time to make sure I got value for money, but the truth was I was just slow. I presumed Gabby’s best time started with a one?
“Yes, it was one hour 51, but I probably had quite a nice position at the front the second time. The first time I started near the back and ran with my then boyfriend. His family were from South Shields and they’d told us the wrong place to meet. They had all our stuff and we were just in our running vests and you know what the wind’s like along that seafront … we were so cold! The next time I did it, I was a ‘celebrity’ [Gabby signed two inverted commas], so they had all these buses and our kit was there, and I much preferred doing it that way!”
Since those days at Metro FM, Gabby’s career has blossomed and she is now one of the most familiar faces on our television screens. She’s done so many programmes, hosting a wide a range of live broadcasts, and fronting many studio-based shows. Does she have a particular preference?
“Live is always best for me because it’s so much more exciting and things get done because they have to. Some of the studio programmes like ‘Match of the Day’ are live, but those that aren’t tend to be a little more pedestrian; if something doesn’t work, they can just do it again to get it perfect; whereas if it doesn’t work live, you just get on with it … and it’s much more exciting that way.
How does Gabby prepare for a live broadcast; how does she do her research?
“Say it’s a live football match, you’ll get a ‘stats pack’ sent the day before, which you can go through and work out if you’ve got any gaps in your knowledge. It’s useful to have it with you on the day in case you need to check anything; and you tend to carry that knowledge forward, so you’re always building on it. At the moment I’m in and out of sports and it’s much easier if you’ve got a weekly show; I used to do ‘Final Score’ on the BBC for a few years and I could tell you the position of most teams in their division every Saturday evening, and it was easy then to keep going.
“If you take rugby for example, the BBC only does the Six Nations, and even though I watch a lot of rugby during the year, I’m not presenting all the time, so you find in the week leading up to the competition, there’s a lot more leg work to do.”
Away from the sporting arena, Gabby has appeared on a number of panel shows. I’ve seen a few, and she always looks completely at home even when surrounded by people who are funny for a living. Does she have a favourite?
“The show that I love doing the most, and I’ve done it about five times is ‘Would I Lie to You’, It’s like being on stage with three comics just riffing for three hours, because sometimes recordings have taken that long for a half-hour show – and there’s never a minute of dead air. I was lucky enough to be on two of those shows with Bob Mortimer, who is a genius. It’s the best, funniest, most joyful show to be on.”
The difference in our respective diaries became abundantly clear as Gabby was due to join a work-related phone call before heading off to appear on ‘The One Show’. As for me, a quick flick through a series of empty pages ended with a reminder that (all being well) I’m going to see Ed Byrne in May. There was just time to ask Gabby how she reflected on her career and whether she had any ambitions left to fulfil.
“When I first started out, obviously I was just trying to forge my own career; you don’t know what’s to come, what you’re going to be able to do, or what’s going to come after you. I think there’s a stage though when you realise that you have to keep going because you want to make sure you keep doors open and that more women come through, and there is also a point when you feel a responsibility in that area and you want to reach out and help other women pursue their goals and dreams…
“I think in this whole pandemic period of our lives, it’s hard to have ambition; it feels like it’s about survival and just getting through each day. As a parent of teenagers, creating positivity and hope for them – and they are full of hope and positivity – but keeping that alive and that spirit is more important to me than the pursuit of my own goals. I’m really valuing being at home, I’m not working as many nights or events and I am valuing and enjoying that, because I know it will change eventually. The kids might have left home by then!
“There are lots of things I want to do, but they’re not at the forefront of my mind … it feels more like a day to day existence at the moment, doesn’t it?!”
It certainly does, which is why I’m so grateful to Gabby and everyone else who has talked to me for their time, insight, and openness. It’s certainly making a real difference to me, and I hope the articles can do the same for the readers.
© Richard Kirby and Gabby Logan 2021
Shortly before Friday’s episode, I had the chance to spend almost an hour in the virtual company of one of television’s most recognisable and finest presenters. There were so many thoughtful or insightful questions with which I could have opened the conversation, but true to form, I ignored them all…
Had Gabby used the fondue set she won as a daily prize on ‘House of Games’?
Gabby laughed … which I have to say was a relief.
“No, I haven’t used the fondue set yet. I recorded the show in July, so I’ve had it for a while. I thought that maybe when we got to winter time I could do a chocolate fondue or something, but actually the kids must have forgotten we had it … so, no I haven’t used it yet; but I will!
“I think it’s the kind of thing you’ve got to do when you’re entertaining friends, and obviously there’s not been a lot of that going on; so maybe in this lock down, I will look up the ingredients for a chocolate fondue and surprise the kids!”
Back in 2018, I ruined many an early evening when I appeared on an episode of ‘The Chase’. So many people said Bradley Walsh was as nice is ‘real life’ as he appeared on the screen (and they were right); and Richard Osman seems every bit as much a likeable bloke – he’s certainly a fantastic presenter.
“Richard’s amazing,” Gabby agreed. “I can’t tell you how brilliant he is in that show. As someone who does the same kind of job, he’s so effortless. There are five shows recorded in a day and you obviously do them in sequence, but his energy is the same throughout the day. Also, his knowledge of the shows is incredible, because he genuinely doesn’t know what’s coming next and he never uses autocues; he explains the games brilliantly, never has to do pick-ups – he’s masterful at it, and so much fun.”
Time to change direction and go back to Gabby’s childhood: when did she realise that her father was a well-known footballer?
(Gabby’s father Terry Yorath played for Leeds United and Coventry City in a playing career that spanned six clubs and almost two decades. He also made 59 international appearances for Wales before a lengthy managerial career during which he also took charge of his home nation’s side.)
“Probably quite young actually. The thing about footballers is you generally tend to live in or near the city where you play, so if you’re living somewhere like Coventry which is nothing like London, the football team is really important to that city; and the boys and girls and parents who see your Dad pick you up from school know what he does. I’d see the older kids and parents talking to him, and people were always approaching him in public, so quite early on I might have asked him why that man was talking to you. And also you’d have newspapers round the house – we used to have newspapers then! – and you’d often see e a picture of your Dad in the paper…
“I’ve got a very large family, and if we went to big family gatherings, maybe at my Mum’s in Leeds with all her siblings and their kids, there was always a lot of fuss around Dad, and a lot of people wanting his time and energy. Add to that the fact that he was always home around half-past two or three o’clock every afternoon, when a lot of other Dads weren’t; and he was away at the weekend when other Dads weren’t, so yes from being little, I probably was quite aware that he did something a bit different.”
As well as that level of recognition, Terry Yorath was little different to the overwhelming majority of professional footballers in that he was transferred from club to club a number of times during his career. At such a young age, did Gabby find moving house, city, and even country on one occasion unsettling?
“We moved from Leeds to Coventry, from Coventry to Vancouver then back to Leeds, but Mum always made it a kind of adventure. Dad also joined Tottenham during the time, but we didn’t move in the end, because my Mum didn’t want to give up her nice big house and garden in Coventry for a town house in London … footballers weren’t earning the money they earn now!
“Eventually when we got back to Leeds, Mum said she wanted to put down some roots, so that we didn’t have to keep moving schools; because it was getting to a critical point in our education. So it was quite peripatetic, but also exciting. There was always new people to meet and things to do. At this point my little brother Jordan hadn’t been born, but there was this little gang of us, the three older kids who were quite close in age, and we all had each other. Also my parents were quite young; they were only in their early 20s when they had me, so there was always a lot of energy and positivity.”
One thing I’ve found chatting to athletes who excel in a particular field, is that they often tend to be quite gifted at a range of sports. Gabby would earn international recognition as a rhythmic gymnast in her teens, but were there any sports that she particularly enjoyed?
“My first love really was tennis. When we went to live in Vancouver, it was really easy to play tennis. It didn’t cost much, it wasn’t an elite sport, there were tennis courts everywhere; and the facilities were also great for indoor sport because obviously Canada gets very cold winters.
“So I absolutely loved it, I was about eight and that’s what I wanted to do. We came back to Coventry, and luckily an indoor racket centre had just been built in the city. Again it was cheap and easily accessible and I had about six or seven months in Coventry when I could keep my tennis up … I really enjoyed it, and was quite good at it.
“Then we moved back to Leeds, which didn’t have an indoor tennis centre. There was a private club that had one court and it cost a couple of thousand pounds a year or something like that. There was no way I was going to be able to join and that was basically the end of it. It was the middle of October, so I couldn’t really play outside, so I started going along to gymnastics with my sister, Louise.
“We’d both always done a lot of gymnastics – she’d done a bit more than me – and I just followed her until I ‘found my sport’. Obviously it was an after school thing; I was in the school netball team, and I also did a lot of athletics, and was quite good at the high jump.
“But the hours I was spending on gymnastics slowly started to creep up, and although I had a real love for the sport, it wasn’t necessarily my first choice; and if I could go back, maybe I would have been physically better off in other sports. That said when you find your tribe, or your happy place, you’re very lucky and gymnastics was definitely a passion.”
Gabby was selected to represent Wales in the rhythmic gymnastics competition at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland. Quite a trek, over 11,000 miles … was that the first time Gabby had been away from her family for any length of time?
“Yes, and it was my first time in the southern hemisphere, although we’d travelled a lot with my Dad. Obviously we’d lived in Vancouver, but my parents always liked to go on nice holidays, often to unusual places, but I’d never travelled that far without my family.
“I think I was just the right age tough. I was nearly 17, I was quite independent, quite good at looking after myself, and I suppose it was a perfect rite of passage and just a wonderful experience. I had three weeks living like a professional athlete … living the dream! I was training every day, doing the thing that I loved in an amazing country – I absolutely love New Zealand – so even though it’s a long time ago now, I still have clear and vivid memories of that experience.”
Given the successful career that her father had enjoyed, did Gabby ever feel (or put herself) under any pressure to succeed in her chosen sport?
“My Dad didn’t really understand why we were doing a sport that didn’t have a professional career,” Gabby explained. “He’d left his home in Cardiff at 15 to become a footballer at Leeds United. For him, it was a chance for a better life, and he couldn’t understand why we were spending all these hours on a sport that was never going to be professional. I think if we’d played tennis, he’d have been able to see that it could lead somewhere…
“So there was no pressure from him in that respect, but I always put pressure on myself to do as well as I could, and be the best I could be. I’ve always had quite a competitive instinct but rhythmic gymnastics is not a sport where you can go out on the mat and be as ferocious as you can; it’s not like rugby or football. It doesn’t help you to have that temperament; it’s all about the training really, all the hours and hours you’ve put in before, so that you can go out and create something on the day that is the best of all those hours.
“I was quite hard on myself with the training, I never missed a session, and I’d actually do ballet and other conditioning exercises at home as well. My parents attitude was always that if you do something, you do it to the best of your ability, you don’t waste people’s time; if coaches are giving up their time for you, it’s only right that you respect that and give back…
“Grass roots sport survives on that kind of relationship. My husband [Kenny Logan, a former rugby union international, capped 70 times for Scotland] sometimes coaches my son’s local rugby team and I’ve seen him read the riot act to the kids … ‘if I’m giving up my Sunday morning, getting out of bed and coming down here, then you’re going to bloody listen!’
“My son Reuben is in the under-16s now and incredibly, his club can still field three teams in that age group … and bless them they still all come in for a bollocking on a Sunday morning!”
I was struck at just how relaxed and natural Gabby was, chatting away so easily and openly to someone she had never met before – she really was genuinely lovely company. Unfortunately, I was my usual anxious self … I know what I want to say, but so often the words just don’t come or flow. Gabby couldn’t have been nicer, and I will keep trying to get better…
Was Gabby a natural performer? Note to self, keep the questions short.
“No I think I really had to work hard at the sport,” Gabby admitted. “As I alluded to earlier, rhythmic gymnastics probably wasn’t the right sport for me; I was a bit of a square peg in a round hole. The girls who went to the Olympics two years later were physically much more likely to succeed, and I really had to fight my body type to keep as flexible as I could. I’m flexible compared to the ‘average Joe’, but in terms of rhythmic gymnastics, I wasn’t hyper-flexible and not a natural by any stretch of the imagination, but I think I’ve learned how to be able to put on a performance.”
Gabby’s gymnastic career came to a rather abrupt end while she was still in her teens. The cause was sciatica … I’ve had it; it is incredibly painful. I was about to find out just how painful…
“I still get bouts of it; I had one before Christmas, which was horrendous, and it does rear its head about once a year. I’ve said it before, I’ve given birth to two children in sixteen minutes and to me, severe sciatica is that level of pain – the only thing is you don’t get to have a baby at the end of it … that euphoric moment.”
How did Gabby cope with the realisation that her sport had effectively been taken away from her?
“I struggled massively with purpose, because when you spend as much time, energy, focus, mental time on something and suddenly it’s gone then you have all these extra hours to fill. I’d been coping very well with my ‘A’ levels and school work whilst doing all that training, so it wasn’t like I could focus much more on my ‘A’ levels. I needed something … I didn’t know what it was, but in the year that followed I’d go swimming and time myself thinking I could be a swimmer, and the same with running.
“I probably could have found another sport if we’d done the Talent ID that we do now with athletes when they change sports. I was only 17, so I was still young; but maybe I wasn’t looking in the right areas. So yes, it did give me some dark moments, feeling quite low about where I was going to get that buzz in life, where was I going to find that joy, sense of achievement and purpose again?”
Gabby and her family had been affected by two separate, different, yet unbelievably tragic events between the mid-80s and the early 90s; firstly the Bradford fire in 1985 (Gabby had been in the crowd for the game and her father was the club’s assistant coach) and then in 1992 the sudden passing of her younger brother Daniel, who was on the verge of following in his father’s footsteps and joining Leeds United.
I asked two questions; how did Gabby deal with two such terrible tragedies, and did those events somehow shape the adult she has become?
“I’ve been writing a book recently, and I came to the realisation that after going through Bradford at 13, then losing my brother at 19, no one ever said to me or my siblings do you think you’d like some counselling?
“To go through the Bradford fire and to be in that stadium was traumatic and obviously what happened with Daniel … I found my own kind of therapy if you like in my 20s; but I think it shows just how much those conversations have changed now, and what support is more readily available…
“We dealt with it just how people dealt with things back then. With grief, you can’t say today you’ll feel like this and tomorrow you’ll feel like that, so everybody in the family dealt with Daniel’s death very differently.
“With Bradford, what was apparent as a family was that Dad’s experience was so much more intense than ours, because of what he’d seen. With him being assistant manager at the club, he went to so many funerals; he was like a shell of himself for a long time, and I think it had a much greater impact on him that he even realised himself at the time.
“Whether those events shaped me in some way; I’m sure they have. Bradford was a national tragedy and being so close to those events gives you an insight into life and death, heroism, and the dignity with which a lot of people in Bradford dealt with the tragedy, but they’re really grown-up concepts for a young teenager to get her head around.
“Daniel’s death was also a very pivotal point in our lives. As teenagers you’re growing up and developing and not quite sure where your place in the world is; and when something like that happens, again it gives you a perspective on something you didn’t think would impact on your life until a lot later. Daniel’s death accelerated everything; it made me feel like you had to rush and get things done, because you didn’t know when it was all going to end, or what was going to come round the corner. I did manage to come away from those feelings, but it’s impossible to say how you would be different though, because until you experience that other life, you don’t know how much it’s shaped you as a person.”
I found what Gabby said so powerful, and actually I was flattered that she was willing to share those thoughts and feelings with me.
Terry Yorath will probably be best-remembered for his time at Elland Road, but Leeds United is not the club that Gabby supports. She is a diehard Newcastle United fan, her love of the club stemming from her time as a student in Durham and an early radio job in Newcastle.
I’ve seen a few games at St James’ Park down the years, including a 5-0 win over Manchester City in 1983. It was the days before seating and I was standing with a friend in the open Gallowgate End … well I was until a crowd surge after one of the goals left me where I was, but carried him some 20 rows down towards the pitch.
5-0 was also the scoreline of the famous win over Manchester United in 1996. Gabby saw the game live … whilst I watched it in a hotel in Rugby after my younger daughter had been Gateshead’s mascot in their 4-0 win at Rushden & Diamonds the previous day.
None of which has any particular relevance, but the latter is certainly a nice memory.
Anyway, does Gabby still get the chance to go and watch her beloved Magpies?
“I did the Liverpool game for Prime video, so my most recent visit was just a few days ago, and I often find myself there for work. I do the Great North Run for the BBC as well, so I do get to Newcastle a fair amount. I’m a Patron for the Foundation of the club as well, so I do their dinner and things like that and have a connection with the club in that respect. I do miss going to matches though,
“When I went to that Man United game you mentioned, I was single; I woke up, fancied going to the game, bought a plane ticket, flew up … I can’t do that with two teenagers. That time will come again; they’re doing their GCSE’s this year – well, not! – so I’m hopeful I will be able to get to games in the future; but that was a fantastic period of my life. I love the club. I absolutely love the city, and always feel very nostalgic when I go back…
“I remember once filming an opening link near where the directors’ box is at St James’ Park with a camera on a wire. My make-up artist was with me. She has worked with me for about ten years, yet amazingly seems to know nothing about sport; and she just stood there and said: ‘Is this the biggest stadium we ever go in?!’”
Gabby’s face lit up at the memory. “’No it’s not, but it’s one of the biggest in the Premier League’. She thought it was amazing and I said: ‘You should see it when it’s full of people; it’s even more impressive!’
“It’s a real cathedral and it sits looking over the city. When I do the Great North Run I stay at the Hilton in Gateshead and from there you can see St James’ and the [Tyne] Bridge; it’s one of my favourite views of any of the hotels I stay in. New grounds aren’t built in cities anymore and very few grounds have that sense of setting that St James Park has.”
Has Gabby ever taken part in the Great North Run?
“I ran it twice, once when I was working for Metro FM in Newcastle, after I’d finished university; and I went back a few years later when I was working in telly and did it again. It’s a fantastic race and a special day.”
My ‘fastest’(and I use the term advisedly) was two hours 23 in 1994. I’d like to think I took my time to make sure I got value for money, but the truth was I was just slow. I presumed Gabby’s best time started with a one?
“Yes, it was one hour 51, but I probably had quite a nice position at the front the second time. The first time I started near the back and ran with my then boyfriend. His family were from South Shields and they’d told us the wrong place to meet. They had all our stuff and we were just in our running vests and you know what the wind’s like along that seafront … we were so cold! The next time I did it, I was a ‘celebrity’ [Gabby signed two inverted commas], so they had all these buses and our kit was there, and I much preferred doing it that way!”
Since those days at Metro FM, Gabby’s career has blossomed and she is now one of the most familiar faces on our television screens. She’s done so many programmes, hosting a wide a range of live broadcasts, and fronting many studio-based shows. Does she have a particular preference?
“Live is always best for me because it’s so much more exciting and things get done because they have to. Some of the studio programmes like ‘Match of the Day’ are live, but those that aren’t tend to be a little more pedestrian; if something doesn’t work, they can just do it again to get it perfect; whereas if it doesn’t work live, you just get on with it … and it’s much more exciting that way.
How does Gabby prepare for a live broadcast; how does she do her research?
“Say it’s a live football match, you’ll get a ‘stats pack’ sent the day before, which you can go through and work out if you’ve got any gaps in your knowledge. It’s useful to have it with you on the day in case you need to check anything; and you tend to carry that knowledge forward, so you’re always building on it. At the moment I’m in and out of sports and it’s much easier if you’ve got a weekly show; I used to do ‘Final Score’ on the BBC for a few years and I could tell you the position of most teams in their division every Saturday evening, and it was easy then to keep going.
“If you take rugby for example, the BBC only does the Six Nations, and even though I watch a lot of rugby during the year, I’m not presenting all the time, so you find in the week leading up to the competition, there’s a lot more leg work to do.”
Away from the sporting arena, Gabby has appeared on a number of panel shows. I’ve seen a few, and she always looks completely at home even when surrounded by people who are funny for a living. Does she have a favourite?
“The show that I love doing the most, and I’ve done it about five times is ‘Would I Lie to You’, It’s like being on stage with three comics just riffing for three hours, because sometimes recordings have taken that long for a half-hour show – and there’s never a minute of dead air. I was lucky enough to be on two of those shows with Bob Mortimer, who is a genius. It’s the best, funniest, most joyful show to be on.”
The difference in our respective diaries became abundantly clear as Gabby was due to join a work-related phone call before heading off to appear on ‘The One Show’. As for me, a quick flick through a series of empty pages ended with a reminder that (all being well) I’m going to see Ed Byrne in May. There was just time to ask Gabby how she reflected on her career and whether she had any ambitions left to fulfil.
“When I first started out, obviously I was just trying to forge my own career; you don’t know what’s to come, what you’re going to be able to do, or what’s going to come after you. I think there’s a stage though when you realise that you have to keep going because you want to make sure you keep doors open and that more women come through, and there is also a point when you feel a responsibility in that area and you want to reach out and help other women pursue their goals and dreams…
“I think in this whole pandemic period of our lives, it’s hard to have ambition; it feels like it’s about survival and just getting through each day. As a parent of teenagers, creating positivity and hope for them – and they are full of hope and positivity – but keeping that alive and that spirit is more important to me than the pursuit of my own goals. I’m really valuing being at home, I’m not working as many nights or events and I am valuing and enjoying that, because I know it will change eventually. The kids might have left home by then!
“There are lots of things I want to do, but they’re not at the forefront of my mind … it feels more like a day to day existence at the moment, doesn’t it?!”
It certainly does, which is why I’m so grateful to Gabby and everyone else who has talked to me for their time, insight, and openness. It’s certainly making a real difference to me, and I hope the articles can do the same for the readers.
© Richard Kirby and Gabby Logan 2021