The broadcaster Stacey Dooley gave birth to her daughter, Minnie, in January 2023. Though she has reported on women for almost two decades, she has been surprised by the transformations of motherhood. “I went into it so unprepared,” she says. “I cannot begin to tell you.” Like other soon-to-be parents, Dooley decided against attending antenatal classes and rejected manuals offered by friends. “You know, I used to see mums finding it tough and I’d think, ‘It can’t be that hard.’ I really used to think that. Which is fucking hilarious. I owe all of those women an apology.”
Dooley and I are in a hotel café in Knightsbridge, west London, where she is later due to meet her accountant. She has written a book, Dear Minnie, in which she profiles women who have had different experiences of conception, pregnancy and labour. Dooley’s own pregnancy was comparatively straightforward: some sickness, a scheduled C-section, though “the sleep deprivation knocked me for six,” she says. “I’ve never in my life been that tired.” In the book, Dooley describes the first six months of Minnie’s life as an overwhelm of struggle and vulnerability. “My living room looked like a teenager’s bedroom,” she writes. Her partner, the dancer Kevin Clifton, with whom Dooley was coupled during the 2018 series of Strictly Come Dancing, was given two weeks of paternity leave before being hauled back to work. (Clifton is currently appearing in a UK tour of Chicago.) “I remember him leaving and shutting the front door and being like, ‘What the hell am I going to do now?’” Dooley recalls. “And I felt envious. That he was going to be sleeping from 10pm to 8am. I remember feeling jealous of that.”
Dooley describes Clifton as a “brilliant” father. “Everything he does is for her,” she says. But still, work as a performer is demanding and Dooley, though well-supported by her mother as well as Clifton’s parents, was sometimes alone, and taken aback by the cloud of worry that blew into her home. “I’m fairly level-headed,” she says. “My natural default is relatively chill. I like to think I can take things on the chin. But Minnie is my Achilles heel.” Once, when she was a baby, Minnie contracted bronchiolitis, a common lung infection in children, and Dooley took her to hospital. “I had all the nurses saying, ‘This is completely normal, it’s bronchi season, it’s fine!’” She raises her eyebrows. “It’s difficult not to catastrophise.”
Dooley seems slightly surprised by what has become of her life. “I hadn’t taken into consideration how vulnerable I’d feel. And you’re madly in love with this person. And it’s a love you don’t recognise.” At one point, she reaches for her phone to share a picture of Minnie, who sits bright-eyed, with tight red curls, on Dooley’s bed. “Here’s something I didn’t think would happen,” she goes on. “She’s made me love everyone.”
This is surprising. Dooley is known in the television industry to be determinedly hard working and unapologetic about what she wants. A force. “I’ve always tried to behave well,” she tells me, but prior to becoming a mother “it wasn’t the priority.” A friend of mine who once met with Dooley professionally remarked on the ferocity of her ambition and found her difficult to warm to. (“I wonder how much she is a character of herself,” my friend said.) “So much of my identity was wrapped up in what I did for a living,” Dooley says. The work, it was clear, came first.
Still, people change. Dooley describes motherhood as providing her with “a sense of purpose you didn’t have before”. Asked whether her work offered purpose, she replies, “I feel proud. It gave people a platform. It highlighted some important points,” but “I wasn’t radically changing things.” (She adds, “What else was I doing? Nothing.”) Dooley believes that “the priority now is trying to be a really fucking good mum,” and that “work is important, but it’s work”.
Throughout our conversation she is informal, friendly and earnest, though she often recoils at her newfound earnestness, as if embarrassed. I sense it has been unusual for her to discuss her own feelings so gushingly, but she cannot help but go on. When I first ask Minnie’s age, she replies, “Two,” before adding, winkingly, “and obviously she’s the brightest, cleverest, most advanced two-year-old you’ve ever met.” Later she says, “I know this is annoying, Alex. I’m not unaware of how annoying this is. But her speech is just…” She mimics the awe of proud parents everywhere. “The shit she comes out with.”
In Dear Minnie, Dooley describes herself as her daughter’s “mum/assistant/slave”. When I bring this up she nods and says, “I’ve spent my whole life assuring everyone that I’m a strong woman. That I’m independent. That I won’t let anyone take the piss. Apart from my own child.”
Dooley grew up working class in Luton. For a while it was just Dooley and her mother. Her father battled alcohol abuse and was “not around,” she says. He died when she was in her 20s. Dooley’s mother held several jobs, but there was struggle. “She would get money at the start of every week and during the last few days things would become tough.” She often used spare time to clean the homes of her friends and Dooley would eat dinner alone. (She once described her childhood diet as consisting of “the three Ps: Pop Tarts, Peperami, Pot Noodle.”) Still Dooley recalls being “really very happy” and feeling “incredibly loved”. Dooley’s mother was from Liverpool. Her grandmother was a publican – people called her Crazy Haze – in the north of England and visited when she could. For two weeks after Dooley’s birth, her mother looked after her baby alone. “I think she had a friend there when I was born,” Dooley says. “But people have their own lives, they’ve got their work, they’ve got their families.” Dooley has “no idea” how she did it.”.
While Dooley was growing up, her mother encouraged her to “stand up for yourself, work hard, look after people,” Dooley recalls. It is a mantra by which she stands and one she will pass on to Minnie, who is already “very bossy, very loud, very confident”. (“I would hate for her to lose that,” Dooley says, before joking, “I’m a raging narcissist. I want my child to be just like me!”) When I ask if her own experience of motherhood has changed the way she thinks about her mother, she responds, “It has, which is annoying.”
“Why is it annoying?” I ask.
“Well, you know what it’s like, mums can be a pain in the arse.”
Dooley and her mother are extremely similar, she says. “If we spend too long together we do each other’s heads in. And Minnie is a carbon copy of me.”
I ask what Clifton is like.
“Kev’s very reserved,” she says. “As a performer – on stage, on Strictly – he’s sort of outrageous. It’s a very camp kind of… Ta-da! But as a man he’s shy, he’s unassuming, he doesn’t talk much in social situations.” If he and Dooley were at a wedding, she says, Clifton would avoid the dancefloor. “Socially he can’t dance. Unless he’s got some Latin choreography.”
Dooley and Clifton live in Liverpool, close to her mother and not far from his parents. (At once point, Dooley considered naming her daughter Cilla, “but I was like, it might be a bit on the nose, if she’s got red hair and she’s living in Liverpool”.) They are a long way from Luton now. Still, Dooley’s early life has been well documented and the stories have helped form the public impression that she is a working-class girl done good, which is not far from the truth. Dooley first appeared on TV as a contributor on the 2008 documentary Blood, Sweat and T-shirts, in which she and several other Brits travelled to India to navigate the sweatshop experience. Dooley was 20, a bit green, but unafraid to speak her mind, which encouraged BBC Three’s incumbent controller, Danny Cohen, to finance her own series. “It was all very accidental,” she says of her career. “I’d left school at 15. I was from Luton. I didn’t have an uncle at the Beeb.” But the series, Stacey Dooley Investigates, in which she reported on current-affair issues around the world, was well received. “I did end up in some sketchy areas,” she says, “and that sort of schtick became my USP.”
To many, Dooley’s closest contemporary in the scope of their interests is the broadcaster Louis Theroux, who is 17 years Dooley’s senior. Theroux is known for probing subjects from behind a self-deprecating front that disguises intellectual rigour. Though she left school early and without qualifications, Dooley’s intellectual brio is equivalent to Theroux’s and many of her documentaries have been similarly revelatory. (She has made more than 70 films for the BBC.) She exists in the public imagination as a kind of go-getter, but is also commonly described as too emotionally involved with her interviewees – an unfair, sexist trope – and, though in 2018 she received an MBE for services to broadcasting, her work has been deemed lesser as a result.
This is unfair, of course, and it has to do with both sexism and classism. (I wonder if a male documentarian would have been encouraged to write a book on parenthood after having children?) And yet Dooley’s audience continues to want more and the BBC remains an enthusiastic employer. In an email, Nasfim Haque, the current Head of Content at BBC Three, described Dooley as “a rare and relevant voice in the documentary landscape”, and that her “authenticity resonates, especially among young audiences who crave truth”.
I suspect Dooley would flinch at the use of the word “authenticity”. Throughout our conversation, she finds it hard to use professional buzzwords – “organic”, “the journey” – without a self-deprecating flourish of irony. When I ask why she struggles, she shrugs.Other people feel confident saying these words, I tell her. “Maybe I feel a bit daftsaying them.” It is agreed that although she is fluent in the language of the professional world, it is not her “mother tongue”.
The way Dooley describes her earliest films feels to me as if the BBC were conducting an experiment: what would happen if we dropped a young, plain-speaking girl into a hostile environment and filmed the results? I ask if she ever thought her early BBC series were exploitative.
“I’m not saying this just to toe the party line,” she says. “But it never felt voyeuristic. It never felt like they were taking advantage.” And things have moved on. “When I started, most of my colleagues were privately educated. Most of them lived in London. Most of them were middle-aged. Most of them were men. But there are more girls on the crew now. More girls shooting. More female execs.”
In the beginning, Dooley felt the need to prove herself. “When I first started doing current affairs-based issues, there was a bit of head-scratching. Like, who is this 20-year-old from Luton with no qualifications? Why has she been given two BBC commissions? So I think I was always trying to convince people that it was justified, that it was well-received, that there was an appetite for that kind of filmmaking.” She continues, “You’ve got high-brow, middle-aged, middle-class men writing opinion pieces on you. And sometimes they were considerate and generous and other times they weren’t. So, of course, when you’re in your 20s, you’re thinking, ‘Oh, there’s this one guy who works in the City who doesn’t get me.’ And that’s really important to you at that moment – which is hilarious now, because I promise you, hands on my heart, I couldn’t care less.”
Dooley’s career has not been without controversy. In 2019, the Labour MP David Lammy accused her of promoting an image of “her as heroine and black child as victim” while Dooley was in Uganda to film a documentary for Comic Relief. (She was later labelled a “white saviour”.) I ask if she’s considered what it will be like when Minnie grows up and reads about her. “There will be a time when she goes back and reads things about her mum. And some people will have called her a moron, thought she was completely useless and really weren’t into her at all. Which is totally fair enough. But, hopefully, she’ll be robust enough to recognise that that’s just somebody’s opinion. And they’re entitled to that. And it doesn’t actually mean that much.”
Though Dooley now considers work secondary to motherhood, she continues to work remarkably hard. Since Minnie’s birth, she has written a book, finished several BBC documentaries and performed in a West End play. During the first year of Minnie’s life, while the baby was still being breastfed, she travelled to work with her. (Once, when Minnie was young, Dooley stayed overnight in a Nevada brothel while Minnie and Clifton slept in a trailer outside.) Still, she hasn’t entered a hostile situation since becoming a mother and she finds it difficult to be away from home for more and a single night. “I need to try to be around for as long as possible,” she says. “And on a very boring, logistical level, I need to be home more. Minnie’s got football on a Saturday.”
I wonder if she has considered what might make things easier for working mothers?
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it,” she says. “There needs to be flexibility, obviously. People need to appreciate that mothers are mothers first and foremost. And if you trust them, they’ll continue to do a brilliant job because, wrongly, they’ll feel like they have to overcompensate, because you’ve allowed them to be a mum.” After a pause she adds, “Childcare in this country is a joke. The cost is crippling. Which means amazing women go off and have a baby and can’t come back.”
“What’s the answer?” I say.
“That’s for Keir Starmer to sort out. That’s for the Houses of Parliament. Don’t ask me, Alex.”
Towards the end of our conversation, I ask what Dooley pictures in her future.
“Personally or professionally?” she asks.
“Both,” I say.
“I would like to have more children,” she says. “But it’s not a given, is it.”
In Dear Minnie, Dooley shares regret at not having a family earlier.
“If I’d started sooner, I could have had more,” she says now. “I might have had two, or three or four. But you have to be realistic about these things. Like, biologically.” Dooley turns 38 this month. “I did everything I needed to in my 20s. I had an amazing decade of prioritising myself. All of that freedom. But, actually, I think I should have… I didn’t know I’d feel like this.”
In the book she writes how she never felt maternal. “Other mums were always destined to be mums. They knew. It was non-negotiable for them. But I didn’t have that thought.”
I ask what Clifton, who is 42, thinks about having four children.
“He’s up for it,” Dooley says.
“Because he’s touring,” I say.
“Exactly,” she says. “He’s got those 10pm to 8am sleep shifts.”
Dear Minnie by Stacey Dooley is published by BBC Books at £22 and is out on 13 March. Order it from theguardianbookshop for £19.80
