In the same week that Britain’s first female chancellor arrived at HM Treasury to a round of applause, Kirsty Wark left the BBC’s Newsnight after more than 30 years as one of its presenters, her departure marked by tributes from Tony Blair, Gordon Brown – and Jan Ravens, whose famous impersonation of Wark (“more on that story later”) turns her Scottish consonants into a kind of verbal pibroch.
Doubtless the chancellor is too busy with her red boxes for TV just now, but as Wark did her best to maintain an expression of delighted scepticism during the politicians’ encomia, I looked on and wondered if Rachel Reeves’ career would have been possible, or even half so easy, had Wark not spent the last three decades asking difficult men – and rather fewer difficult women – awkward questions. As soaring role models go, she has been the best: a smiling assassin in stripes and excellent earrings whose Instagram account reveals – here’s the real miracle – a hinterland as wide as the Firth of Clyde (she reads, she cooks, she darns socks).
I don’t know Wark, but I once sat next to her in the back of a car that was taking a group of writers and journalists to Sir Walter Scott’s house in the Scottish Borders, Abbotsford. A long career of my own has taught me that her male equivalent would probably have chosen politely to ignore me as our knees knocked on the journey – that, or I would have had to interview him (“How fascinating… and when did you realise you were a genius?”).
But as her colleague Martha Kearney testified last Friday, Wark is both exceedingly generous and – a sorely underrated quality in journalism – a great enthusiast. Within seconds, we were talking about clothes. In a half whisper, she confessed to a serious internet shopping habit, though I knew it already, of course: anyone with eyes can see her love of labels; her deep feeling for a pattern or a row of buttons. Ravens joked that Wark would have to hire a U-Haul van to take all her Prada sweaters back to Glasgow, where she lives. Newsnight is long past its heyday; if the old clips of Wark last week were wonderful, all shoulder pads and utmost preparedness, they were also a reminder of what has been lost since the bean counters took an axe to the programme. But still, she’ll be badly missed.
A vanishingly small number of presenters, on the BBC or anywhere, can deploy tenacity and flintiness and a certain kind of warmth, even spontaneity: a combination that keeps an audience loyal even when other things are awry. To push back against half-truths and rank obfuscation is one thing. To bring – yes, I am going to use the word – joy to a studio is quite another. Wark has always been determined to enjoy herself: a quality that is as central to her work as is curiosity or stubbornness.
Down the years, it’s this that has given her licence to make the occasional misstep (like Womanhood, a BBC series in which she and other “celebrities” – Jacqueline Gold, Sinitta – chatted about their hormones in a pretend house-share), and it’s this, too, that should by rights land her some brilliant gigs in the future. Her sheer avidity: even now, it is without peer.
• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist
