Sally Magnusson: 'I was lined up to replace Jill Dando on Crimewatch – then told I was too old'

But with “an explosion of grandchildren”, novels five, six and seven to be written and her charity Playlist for Life — inspired by the response to music she saw in her mother, who had dementia — it’s about making more time for other activities rather than any disenchantment with news.

The daughter of two journalists, she grew up, she says, “amid clacking typewriters. For a few years I was determined to do something different. But I studied English at university, I wrote for a student newspaper, and it was such a joy learning how to be a reporter. There was either something in the blood or it was just inevitable. I got a very valued traineeship of a sort that doesn’t really exist any more, at The Scotsman, part of Thomson Newspapers, and worked there and on the Sunday Standard. I loved it.”

Her big break into primetime TV came on BBC One’s Sixty Minutes. “It was so exciting to be told, ‘Get your passport, you’re off to Paris to interview Mick Jagger.’ He was absolutely lovely, and I hope he won’t mind me saying this, but I do remember he was awful small.”

BBC Breakfast, which she anchored for 10 years from 1985, made new demands. “I had young children, so at 6pm I’d be answering questions, like ‘Do octopuses fart?’, which stumped me, and then get a call from the office to say I’d be interviewing the Chancellor the next day about the Exchange Rate Mechanism! It was exhausting, as for any mother, but exhilarating.”

Other high-profile jobs included presenting Songs of Praise, which saw her going to Cape Town to interview Archbishop Desmond Tutu — but also to the so-called “Jungle” migrant camp in Calais. ”I loved interviewing people outside news, outside anything that could ever make their lives known to others; they mattered.”

It was pregnancy with her fifth child and soaring property prices in England that drove the return to Glasgow. “It was an exciting time in Scotland with devolution, and we could also get a much bigger house. It was falling to bits, but it was only a few miles away from my mother.”

Reporting Scotland, which she joined in 1998, enabled her to work two days a week, job-sharing with Jackie Bird. “I could be virtually a full-time mother — but I also loved the buzz of the newsroom.”

Does she see herself as a trailblazer for older women? “No... you don’t like to look in the mirror and see a face that’s changing, but this is what older women look like! There was only one occasion in my career when I was told I was too old for a job — when my dear friend Jill Dando was shot and I was asked if I’d like to consider doing Crimewatch.

After I’d weighed it up, my agent told them I was interested — and then I got an embarrassed call from an executive saying they wanted somebody younger. It was a bit of a blow as it had never been stated to me so explicitly before.”

Both her father’s Icelandic heritage and her mother’s background on the Isle of Mull inform her historical novels. “My imagination often returns to its roots. My fourth novel, The Shapeshifter’s Daughter, coming out this autumn, is based on Norse myths, which were the stories I learnt at my father’s knee.”

Her mother’s Alzheimer’s, the subject of her moving and powerful 2024 documentary (see below), has made her realise “you have to make use of every single moment while you have a functioning brain. Don’t waste a minute. It’s time for me to focus on other things now. I’d like to make another documentary, too, looking at diet. We need preventative medicine. Brain health depends on how you live — how you exercise and, crucially, how you eat.”

The powerhouse that is Sally Magnusson clearly has a great deal of vital work left to do.

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Sally Magnusson: Alzheimer’s, a Cure and Me is on iPlayer. Find Sally’s dementia charity at playlistforlife.org.uk.

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