Kate Silverton - Misplaced Pages

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Kate Silverton (born August 4 1970) is an English television presenter, currently presenting BBC Breakfast on weekday mornings alongside Dermot Murnaghan or Bill Turnbull. She is standing in for regular presenter Sian Williams during the period of her maternity leave. Previous to this Kate presented daily on BBC News 24, and she has also fronted the weekend news bulletins on BBC One. She is an annoying crap presenter and a fuking bitch

In December 2006 Silverton left the comfort of the BBC Breakfast studio and spent some days reporting from Basra in Southern Iraq. She produced reports for BBC Breakfast and BBC News 24, as well as the main news bulletins on BBC One.

Biography

Silverton was born to Terry Silverton, a National Health Service registered hypnotherapist and Patricia Silverton who now heads Kate's company Freya Media Ltd (named after the Norse goddess Freya). Silverton has an elder sister, Claire

Silverton attended West Hatch High School in Chigwell, Essex, where she was a champion swimmer and started to compete in the triathlon. She also practices judo. She spent a year studying Arabic and Middle Eastern politics before switching and has a BSc in Psychology from the University of Durham, (St Cuthbert's Society).

Silverton worked in corporate finance for a London-based investment bank before becoming a journalist. She trained with the BBC working on Look North before becoming a reporter and presenter at Tyne Tees Television

She has been a presenter on five's The Wright Stuff, The Heaven and Earth Show, Big Strong Boys and Weekend Breakfast on BBC Radio Five Live, but now presents on BBC News 24 and BBC Breakfast.

Philip Hayton incident

In September 2005, Silverton drew some media attention when her co-anchor at BBC News 24, Philip Hayton, resigned his position six months into a year's contract after being with the BBC for 37 years. The Daily Telegraph, without substantiation and quoting an unnamed 'insider', reported that he turned to Silverton during a break and said "I don't like you" The Daily Mirror quoted another BBC 'insider' as saying that Silverton is "...pushy beyond belief. Behind her big superficial smile she can be a really aggressive, manipulative monster who always gets what she wants." Mr. Hayton merely cited "incompatibility" with Silverton as his reason and when his managers refused to move Silverton to another time slot he left. Silverton was in the peculiar position of having to go through the morning's paper review live on air the morning the story broke, avoiding any discussion of the story and chiding her new co-anchor when he looked to refer to it Hayton said that he left the BBC "without bitterness or rancour"

Many viewers thought there was less behind the scenes to this incident than the newspapers reported. The height difference between Kate Silverton and Philip Hayton was very striking to any viewer on the first day of their broadcast. Kate is a tall woman (almost 6 feet) and Philip is around 5'6' . This was less noticeable on the second day as Philip appeared to have "grown", but he still seemed to be looking her in the chin. This may not have seemed appropriate for a serious news programme. It is interesting that Kate continues to work daily as an anchor on BBC News 24.

Her senior and much admired BBC News 24 colleague and presenter of The Politics Show, Jon Sopel, commented on the incident "She's warm and friendly. With Kate, what you see is what you get - she's bright, lively, talented and vivacious. I like and trust her. Yes, she's ambitious ... but aren't we all?"

On the incident with Philip Hayton, former programme editor of Radio 4's influential Today programme and co-presenter with Silverton Rod Liddle said: “Kate is intelligent, attractive and has strong opinions. She is far cleverer than Hayton. There are plenty of very stupid women at the BBC but she isn’t one of them. Philip probably needs to work on an island where there are no women. She was absolutely lovely, good fun, professional, intelligent and devoid of the usual afflictions of TV presenters - narcissism and greed” . It was later revealed while the pair worked on a short-lived BBC TV politics programme in 2003 Silverton allegedly hit Liddle, who said: "I made a stupid comment about the disabled which Kate rightly took exception to. We took the fight out of the pilot. It's good to get these things out before we go on air. My admiration for Kate knows no bounds."

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