The look of panic, the embarrassed laugh, the mortified apologies: a young child crashing a work video call has been the peril of lockdown for working parents and many would have instantly recognised Deborah Haynes’s pain. The difference for the Sky News foreign affairs editor was that she was on live television, broadcasting from her spare room – and so was her four-year-old son, Charlie, who had come in to ask if he could have two biscuits. In a grim year, it was one of the lighter moments.
We speak over Zoom one morning as Haynes is trying to get everyone ready for school. Charlie, hugely angelic, sits patiently for all of 20 seconds before wandering off. That morning in July, Haynes had been asked to go on air at fairly short notice to talk about the strained relations between the UK and China over Hong Kong. Her two older children were out. “I put Charlie in front of the television and I think I gave him a cake, so I genuinely thought I was covered,” she says. “I had played out in my head what I would do if he came in and never properly established it; I just didn’t think it would really ever happen. So when it did, I genuinely wanted a hole to gobble me up. It was like everything slowed down.”
Charlie comes back. Lots of people saw him on TV; how does he feel about that? “Shy,” he says and buries his face in his mother’s arm. I think he could have asked for anything at that moment and his mum would have gladly given it. Does he wish, now, he’d asked for more? “The biggest packet of biscuits,” says Charlie with a huge smile.
Afterwards, Haynes says she was “mortified”. There had been some criticism of the channel for cutting away so quickly when Haynes, ever professional – although clearly a pushover in the biscuit-negotiating stakes – could have carried on, but she says: “Honestly, I was relieved.” (The studio director was concerned about showing a child on TV without his parents’ permission.) “I remember thinking maybe no one will notice,” says Haynes. Instead, the clip went viral; we all loved it. Biscuit companies offered freebies (admirably declined) and the moment has become something of an icebreaker when meeting new people, she says.
These sometimes-chaotic glimpses into the home lives of others (Haynes was not the only one whose child gatecrashed a live broadcast) was an encouraging reminder that life for every working parent of young children – even the most accomplished and outwardly calm among us – can career out of control.
Haynes came off air and Charlie got his biscuits. “I had a hundred and billion biscuits,” he says. (He had two, Haynes clarifies.) A bench barricaded the door for future broadcasts. What did Charlie make of seeing himself on TV? “It was funny,” he says. It could also have been a lot worse, acknowledges Haynes. “Anything could have come out of his mouth, so the fact he asked for biscuits was a relief. I got off lightly.”
