Sally Magnusson dishes on King Charles III reporting the weather – and why she doesn't miss Reporting Scotland following 27-year run

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Ask Sally Magnusson what she misses after finishing her 27-year run on Reporting Scotland six months ago, and the long pause while she tries to think of something is as telling as her actual answer.

“I’ll be incredibly honest with you,” she says eventually. “I don’t really miss it. I miss colleagues, but I’m still on the WhatsApp group, and we meet up.” So she now gets all the perks with none of the work? “Well, yes. But I don’t get the money, either.”

Certainly Magnusson earned her wages: across her years on Reporting Scotland, Breakfast Time and others, she recalls covering such dark times as Dunblane, Lockerbie, Zeebrugge, Princess Diana’s funeral and Covid – which she found just as harrowing in its way as those other, more dramatic stories.

But there were happier moments, too (“so many!”). And, pushed for examples, this time there is no hesitation at all. “One of the most joyful was the day that Prince Charles and Camilla came and did the weather on my programme. That was a huge amount of fun, especially trying to get Camilla to do it. Charles read off the autocue with great aplomb and did the whole thing very well, but when I asked Camilla she said, ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly!’ Charles encouraged her, though, and he held her handbag while she had a go. She wasn’t quite as good as him… but be careful how you tell that story, because I don’t want to make it look as if she was terrible.”

(If you’re worried that RT has just blown Magnusson’s chances of an honour, relax: she got her MBE in 2023.)

Now, at any rate, the 70-year-old has time to write. Previously, she’d squeezed her literary output in around the day job and bringing up five children – all the more remarkable when you consider the breadth of her work, from a moving memoir of her mother’s dementia (“I wanted to describe her at each stage, so I would never forget how she smiled, or moved her hands through her hair, or put her lipstick on”) to children’s story Horace and the Haggis Hunter – via, naturally, Life of Pee, her semi-scholarly tome on the significance of urine in human civilisation.

If there’s a unifying theme, it’s what Magnusson describes as “our need for stories” – and her new novel, The Shapeshifter’s Daughter, tells a fascinating one. “It’s a reimagining of the Norse myth of Hel, queen of the underworld, one of the most fascinating characters in the the Norse pantheon. But it’s also telling the story of a woman in the modern day, who comes back to her home, after 40 years away, to die. These two figures from two different worlds connect in one golden winter and begin to influence each other so that they both work out what they are really for.” (“Gosh,” she adds, “I hope that’s right. I need to re-read it myself!”)

The novel – which will soon be featured on Sara Cox’s Radio 2 Book Club podcast – is set in the Orkney Islands, a place Magnusson describes as being “on the way” between Scotland and Iceland, thanks to its long history of Norse rule and Viking culture. “It feels like home,” she says, perhaps unsurprisingly as the daughter of a Scottish mother and an Icelandic father – the writer, scholar and original presenter of Mastermind, Magnus Magnusson.

“I wonder now if this book was a little inevitable,” she muses. “I learned the Icelandic sagas at his knee. I grew up listening to the clack-clack-clack of his typewriter, and I’d go into his study and he’d have all these books and dictionaries laid out around his desk and he’d be wrestling with the Old Norse.” (His translations of the sagas are still, in many cases. the definitive editions.) “The Norse gods – those stories of Odin and Thor and Loki – are part of my hinterland, and my dad had an incredible fund of them.”

Viking mythology isn’t the only thing Magnusson inherited from her father, though. When Magnusson Senior retired from presenting Mastermind in 1997, he was given the show’s famous black leather contestants’ chair – and when he died, it passed to his daughter. “I decided it wasn’t going to be a museum piece, so it’s there in my house and people sit on it – especially my husband, as it’s the nearest chair to the television. It got a bit scruffy over the years, so last October I took it into The Repair Shop – you can see it on iPlayer. They did a wonderful job, sprucing it up and giving it a new lease of life, but without taking away the knocks and scratches.” And was that disappointing? “Oh, no. It’s the knocks and scratches that tell the story.”

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The Shapeshifter’s Daughter by Sally Magnusson is published by John Murray and releases on 6 November.

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