
BBC Radio Two presenter Vernon Kay congratulates wife Tess Daly on MBE
BBC Radio Two presenter Vernon Kay has congratulated his wife, Strictly Come Dancing presenter Tess Daly, for being made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).
The 56-year-old has been recognised alongside her Strictly co-host Claudia Winkleman in the King's Birthday Honours for her services to broadcasting.
Kay, who has two children with Daly who he married in 2003, also praised Winkleman and the Strictly team for 'consistently producing the best show every year'.
Posting a series of photographs on Instagram, Kay said: 'Well what can we say!!! Congratulations @tessdaly on your MBE.
'All the hard work and huge effort you put into everything you do has been recognised by the King.
'Being on Strictly from the start when our babies weren't even born just proves how well you've done. Now they're almost 21 and 16 and we've all enjoyed this journey together!!
'Also, bravo everyone at @bbcstrictly and @claudiawinkle for consistently producing the best show every year!! Time to pop a cork me thinks…'
Daly began working as a model and first appeared on screens in 1999 when she hosted The Big Breakfast's Find Me A Model competition on Channel 4.
She reached new levels of fame as co-host of the BBC One Saturday night dancing competition Strictly Come Dancing, which she presented alongside the late Sir Bruce Forsyth until 2014, three years before his death at the age of 89.
Traitors presenter Winkleman joined Daly as Strictly co-host, with the pair picking up the best entertainment award at the 2024 Bafta TV ceremony.
On being made MBE, Daly told the PA News Agency: 'I cried when I opened the letter, because I just I couldn't believe it.
'It feels like the most wonderful honour, because when you work as a broadcaster, you're part of people's viewing habits.
'Broadcasting is without a doubt a collective effort. I've been really fortunate to work with some of the very best production teams that there are in the business. And so my biggest thanks is to them, because you're only as good as your team.'
The broadcaster also presented the ITV makeover show, Home On Their Own in 2003, replacing Ulrika Jonsson, and in 2011 fronted the BBC Two documentary TV Greats: Our Favourites From The North where she took a look at Manchester's broadcasting past as BBC North bid farewell to its studios in the city to move to Salford.
Across her career she has interviewed stars including Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette, rock band No Doubt and US musician Lenny Kravitz.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Times
31 minutes ago
- Times
‘Irreplaceable' bronze statues stolen during manor house festival
It was the first day of the summer jazz festival at Iford Manor. The sun beamed on the blooming gardens and the sound of a saxophone filled the air but the contentment was about to come to an abrupt end. On Friday morning, the owners of the country estate near Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire, woke to discover that four bronze sculptures had been taken from the grade I listed gardens overnight. Among the missing pieces was a copy of Rome's Capitoline Wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, including its plinth, which had been in the gardens for 120 years, a pair of symmetrical bronze fawns inspired by those at the ancient Villa dei Papyri in Herculaneum, and a bust of Antinous. Marianne Cartwright-Hignett, 42, who runs the estate with her husband William, also 42, said: 'The policeman asked for a victim statement and I said, 'well, you know, it's not my statue'. And he said, 'oh, who owns it?' I said, 'no, no, no, this is everyone's loss'. This is a huge loss.' The garden, which has been open to the public since about 1910, receives about 20,000 visitors during the six months of the year it is open. Cartwright-Hignett said: 'It feels a million miles away from everywhere. When you go into the garden, you're not sure which country you're in, you're not sure which century you're in. There's a cloister at the back which has a line from a Tennyson poem. The inscribed line says 'a haunt of ancient peace'. 'It's a really tranquil, healing space … it feels like someone's just ripped the soul out of the garden.' After she posted the news on Instagram, the BBC gardening presenter Monty Don replied to say he was 'very sorry and angry'. Cartwright-Hignett, who lives on the estate with her husband and two sons, Horatio, six and Freddie, three, added: 'Gardeners' World have been here a couple of times in the past and Monty Don did a lovely episode of his series of Big Dreams, Small Spaces here.' Wiltshire police are investigating, and asking antique dealers and auction houses to be on alert for the stolen pieces. Cartwright-Hignett is particularly keen to see the Romulus and Remus statue returned. She said: 'That's kind of irreplaceable. The curator of the Capitoline at the time, in the late 1800s, let the estate owner take a direct copy from the original. We believe it's the last time a direct copy was allowed to be taken. Ironically, it was here for safe keeping in case the one in the Capitoline ever got lost or stolen.' She added: 'My dearest hope is that no one's stupid enough to melt it down. I just hate the thought of this being in someone's private garden where one person gets to see it.' In 2011 a Henry Moore sculpture worth £3 million was stolen from his foundation in Hertfordshire. It was later believed to have been melted down. Earlier this year a bronze statue worth £60,000 was stolen from the home of the artist Anne Curry in Essex. A 17th-century 'Shepherd Boy' statue was stolen from an outbuilding in Pickering, Yorkshire, last year — it still hasn't been found — and in March two men were sentenced for damaging and stealing a Paddington Bear statue in Newbury in Berkshire.


Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter: from Disney to festival headliners
Eight days apart, at the British Summer Time stage in Hyde Park, in front of a crowd of 65,000, two glittering, platinum pop titans will perform. First up, next Friday, is Olivia Rodrigo: 22 years old, 46 million monthly listeners on Spotify; 14 Grammy nominations; three wins; and about to headline Glastonbury. Then, on July 5 and 6, Sabrina Carpenter: 26 years old, 70 million monthly listeners on Spotify; six Grammy nominations; two wins; her song Espresso the biggest single of 2024 by a female artist. The pair have often been depicted as bitter rivals: two Disney Channel alumni whose overlapping journeys to superstardom were powered partly by lyrics that may, or may not, have been written about the same ex-boyfriend. But really, they are both lessons in how to pull off the Disney breakaway — what happens when young women wriggle out of their contracts and embrace their new freedom by singing about the brutality and reality of modern girlhood, its shattering heartbreaks and the fun of the rebound. One of the things that marks both of them out is the obsessiveness with which their fans pore over their songs and image-making, whether it's Rodrigo last week being accused on social media of ordering a Nashville music venue to take down Taylor Swift imagery before she filmed there — it was actually removed by the venue for legal reasons — or Carpenter sending the internet into meltdown with the suggestive cover art for her new album, Man's Best Friend. Rodrigo grew up in Temacula, California, a theatre kid in a family who did other things — her mother a teacher, her father a therapist. After various singing competitions and school productions, she was made the lead in the American Girl doll franchise movie at 12 years old and, the following year, cast in Disney's Bizaardvark and then High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a mockumentary. Rodrigo was homeschooled, studying for her exams on set. 'Like, 'Oh shit, I worked my whole childhood and I'm never going to get it back,'' she told The Guardian in 2023. 'I didn't go to football games, I didn't have this group of girlfriends that I hung out with after school. That's kind of sad.' After a song she wrote for the High School Musical show went viral, Rodrigo sought a record deal, choosing not to make music for Disney's in-house label. She went with Interscope/Geffen. Disney allowed her to break her contract before the show's fourth series and, during the pandemic, Rodrigo sat down to write. In 2021 her song Drivers License went stratospheric, breaking a Spotify record as the first song to hit 80 million streams in seven days. The track reached No 1 in 48 countries on Apple Music, 31 countries on Spotify and 14 countries on YouTube. 'It's been the absolute craziest week of my life,' she said in an interview. 'My entire life just, like, shifted in an instant.' Four months later she released her debut album, Sour, a pop-punk triumph about her teenage heartbreak, the songs searing and seething with anger, underwritten by longing and ache — all written by a 17-year-old, with her producer, Dan Nigro. Though she stretched her legs in the ballads, it was her stroppy, plucky rock which was particularly satisfying. Critics, with some arch surprise that it had come from a squeaky-clean Disney-kid, gave the album rave reviews. At Glastonbury 2022 she brought on Lily Allen to sing Allen's 2009 banger F*** You, dedicating it to the Supreme Court justices who had just overturned the Roe v Wade abortion ruling in the United States. 'I'm devastated and terrified, and so many women and so many girls are going to die because of this,' Rodrigo said on stage, having spent hours memorising her speech. As well as being a great song with crushing lyrics, it created a perfect storm of gossip and intrigue. 'And you're probably with that blonde girl,' she sang, 'who always made me doubt — she's so much older than me.' Fans were convinced she was singing about her former Disney co-star Joshua Bassett, with whom they thought she had a romantic relationship. The 'blonde girl', they suspected, was Sabrina Carpenter, who was rumoured to have dated Bassett the next summer. 'I put it out not knowing that it would get that reaction, so it was really strange [when] it did,' Rodrigo told Variety. 'I just remember [everyone being] so weird and speculative about stuff they had no idea about.' She also said she and Carpenter had only met 'once or twice in passing'. 'So I don't think I could write a song that was meaningful or emotional about somebody that I don't know.' In January 2021, two weeks after Drivers License blew up, Carpenter released Skin. 'Maybe 'blonde' was the only rhyme,' went the lyrics. 'You been telling your side, so I'll be telling mine.' She, like Rodrigo, was not drawn on specifics. 'The song isn't calling out one single person,' she wrote on Instagram. 'Some lines address a specific situation, while other lines address plenty of other experiences I've had this past year.' The internet whirled, creating soap opera plots around them. They both later said they received a barrage of death threats. Bassett told People magazine that he received so much hate that he was taken to hospital, diagnosed with septic shock. 'I have a right to stand up for myself,' he told GQ. 'People don't know anything they're talking about.' For his part Bassett, 24, has just been on a European tour, playing venues in Glasgow, Birmingham and London that are about 20 times smaller than his apparent exes' Hyde Park performances. Carpenter, meanwhile, has hit mega fame. Her sixth album, Short n' Sweet — she is 5ft tall — debuted at No 1 in America. Her single Espresso went platinum in more than a dozen countries and won a Grammy for best pop solo performance. The Disney empire first claimed Carpenter, who grew up East Greenville, Pennsylvania, at 12 years old, signing her into a five-record deal, after which she starred in its show Girl Meets World. After family-friendly pop, Carpenter broke away from the label after just four albums ('I definitely didn't fulfil my contract, thank god,' she told Vogue) and signed with Island Records at 22. Her fifth album, Emails I Can't Send, took a turn towards something more grown-up — and cheeky. 'Woke up this morning, thought I'd write a pop hit,' she trills. Her image shifted again for Short n' Sweet, taking on a hyper-femme, soft-edged, Betty Boop look, her blonde hair big and bouncing. As Time magazine put it: 'She's short, she's funny, and she's horny.' But as she became more of a sex bomb, she got more sardonic. 'You'll just have to taste me when he's kissing you,' she sings in Taste. Her video for Please Please Please featured her then-boyfriend, the actor Barry Keoghan, shortly after his viral scene in Saltburn, in which he is so lustful for his friend he drinks his bathwater. During her performance at Coachella, she swapped her lyrics around with a wink. 'He's drinking my bathwater like it's red wine,' she sang. After their break-up, the internet is again spinning with speculation that her new song, Manchild, relates to him. 'This song became to me something I can look back on that will score the mental montage to the very confusing and fun young adult years of life,' she wrote on social media. It includes the couplet: 'Never heard of self-care/ Half your brain just ain't there.' Carpenter's amped-up naughtiness, however, now runs the risk of tipping into alienation. Her recent album cover, which shows her on her knees in front of a man's legs, while a hand pulls her hair, drew enormous criticism including from Glasgow Women's Aid. Her caricature of the sexualised, submissive woman suddenly looked exactly like the thing it was supposed to be riffing off. At Hyde Park, Rodrigo and Carpenter will hit the same stage on successive weekends after sold-out arena tours, their fans trailing in stomper boots and eyeliner (Rodrigo) or sequins and pale-pink babydoll dresses (Carpenter). It is a very modern coming-of-age story, two young women whose specificity of lyrics and canny presentation of their personal lives have whipped up a frenzy of speculation; whose rage and cheek and charm has been released on the world; who dazzle and glitter — and kick 'em where it hurts.


Times
2 hours ago
- Times
2 ways to look smart in the summer heat
I t's hardly groundbreaking to suggest that you should invest in shorts and pastel shades for the summer. But these perennial favourites have made a return with a dash of difference. Gone are the days of tiny denim, stripy linen or crochet shorts — this season, it's all about tailored styles. In crisp white, rich brown or jet black, shorts have made the move to the smarter end of your wardrobe. Wear yours to the office with a sharply tailored jacket (don't worry, you don't have to wear it on the bus or the Tube), soft loafers and some no-nonsense chunky jewellery. For the evening, swap in a dramatic one-shouldered top and a pair of heeled sandals to make the most of your new-found best friends.