The British Broadcasting Corporation or more famously known as BBC, is an extremely famous broadcasting company that creates media content and documentaries about affairs from all around the world. It is known to develop video and audio content of around 120hrs per day available for the general population to access.
This eminent company is likely to have gifted broadcasters, too, who lead the company to success. One such broadcaster is Kirsty Young. If the name does not right a bell, maybe Crimewatch will? That’s right! This is the same Kirsty who ran the program on BBC One from 2008 till 2015. She was missing from our television screens for a while now. Took it up to cover the royal programs and its major events but other than that, she has taken a break from the show-biz.
Kirsty Young comes from a non-media background where no one really had worked in the media before. She hasn’t exclusively mentioned the reason she decided to join the media, but the fact that she is good at it cannot be denied, and her curiosity to know about things and present them to the world is pretty evident too. Kirsty was born on the 23rd of November, 1968, in East Kilbride, Scotland, to Catherine and her biological father, who seemingly moved away from them when Kirsty was really young. She completed her studies at Stirling High School and decided not to go to university.
Kirsty’s career began when she decided to work as a news researcher and eventually announcer for BBC Radio Scotland. Going further on to work with Scotland Today as a presenter with them and had her first show called “Kirsty.”
From 1996 to 2006, she took up various different roles, working as a relief presenter with The Times and The Place, as a consumer show co-host for a BBC show, news show anchor, and some memorable appearances on shows such as “Have I Got News for You” and “Room 101”. After this, she is seen continually working with BBC in its different radio and visual shows. Over the years, her popularity and role in media content was also increasing.
In 2008, Kirsty was said to become the head presenter for a widely popular BBC Program she would gain popularity for. She worked in this show from 2008-2015. Other than this, she worked with a BBC Radio 4 show called Desert Island Discs which she continued to work with from 2006 till 2018, when she decided to take a break.
Kirsty Young Takes a Break
Kirsty has been working in the show Desert Island Discs, a radio show by BBC, for almost a decade now, and a lot of fans were saddened to hear that she would be taking a break. The why she decided to take a break from the show was mentioned briefly in 2018 when she said that she was suffering from certain conditions which made her unable to work properly. She had received a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia. There was not a lot that she mentioned about it at that time, though.
Kirsty decided to go for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Coverage and, soon after, Queen’s Funeral Coverage by BBC, and that was the time that she opened up and told people about her ailments and how they had been affecting her. She mentions the diagnosed disorders caused her an immense amount of pain even while doing normal daily chores, exhaustion, and mood swings.
Fibromyalgia is considered to be a disorder that causes an individual to have a heightened sensitivity toward pain. Even the smallest bumps can cause a high amount of pain to the suffering individual. How this disorder develops or why, science does not really have an answer for it.
The other diagnosis is Rheumatoid arthritis, which is a kind of autoimmune disease that causes the body to attack its own cells, majorly focused on joints, which suffer and cause pain to the individual. Kirsty mentioned how she could not climb a flight of stairs without having to stop for a while and let the pain rest before continuing and how she felt like she was being hit by a “baseball bat” most of the time, causing not only her physical but also mental health to plummet.
During an interview she mentioned living with these disorders made her feel like she was drugged up, with sleeping tablets of some kind, but at the wrong time of the day, like she had messed it up somehow and now was lsong her mind.
It was kind of a chain reaction for Kirsty as one condition led to another. She was seen mentioning how she initially did not get the right medication that was required for her condition, leading to it worsening and developing into fibromyalgia and forcing her to take a break which lasted from 2018 to 2022.
In 2022 she finally decided to come back to cover Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee event and how she could not miss it because it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. She also covered Queen’s Memorial event and was appreciated by many for the way she carried it out.
Kirsty mentions she is doing much better now and trying to get herself into the new kind of care and lifestyle that she needs to hold. She mentions how her family is helping her hold through the situation better, her husband, Nick Jones, and their daughters, who continue to support her through her journey.
She says how she could not find it in herself before to tell anyone about her problems other than her husband, not even her daughters. She also tells about how good she feels to be working again, talking about her recent comeback to the BBC show to cover King’s Coronation coverage.
Also, read: What Happened To Kirk Franklin? A Tragic On-Stage Accident
