We're not airheads says Katie Derham

Katie Derham has hit out at perceptions of young female newsreaders, saying it is "arrant nonsense" to suggest they are "airheads" or "dim".

Derham, 40, left ITN after anchoring the lunchtime news and London Tonight for the past six years to become the host of the BBC's Proms.

Asked whether viewers may have cringed to see her gaze "with wide-eyed adoration" at her co-anchor Alastair Stewart, 58, while presenting the news, she told a TV magazine: "But that's because I adore him."

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She said: "I know how that can be perceived, but it's arrant nonsense and tiresome because women do exactly the same as male colleagues.

"No one should underestimate how short a time we'd last if we were so dim. This debate goes round in circles. Newsreading is not rocket science. It's a craft, like being a carpenter or a juggler."

Derham, a Cambridge economics graduate, told the magazine: "I'm on telly, so people are entitled to their conclusions about me. You can't control what they think. That way madness lies."

She added: "I don't flash my cellulite where photographers might be. I was first put behind a newsreader's desk quite young – 27. Of course, people said, 'She's youthful. Does she know what she's talking about?' They'd do the same with a 27-year-old bloke."

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The mother-of-two added: "I haven't been called an airhead, but one could have a thin skin about it. There's this image of us all battling in a ridiculous fictional newsroom. There's competition, but we all get on well outside work."

Derham's comments came as Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark said in a separate interview that she would have liked to see a woman chair the historic live leaders' debates before the General Election.

The TV debates were chaired by David Dimbleby for the BBC, Adam Boulton for Sky News and Stewart. Wark said: "It would have been good to see a woman chair one of those, and there are loads of women who could have done it easily."

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