Reading Lorraine Kelly’s autobiography is a little like watching her hold court on television: pleasantly exhausting. She is as excitable in print as she is in pixels, dancing from subject to subject. In a slight but readable 295 pages she flits from her favourite celebrity interviewees to her thoughts on the ageing effects of smoking. But where did the queen bee of breakfast television get her relentless buzz?

In Between You and Me, Kelly guides us through her first 48 years, though anybody expecting a Kathleen Turner-style memoir full of salacious revelations will be disappointed. It begins with memories of growing up in Glasgow, a tale of dank tenements and skinned knees, though sensibly she doesn’t dwell on childhood recollections. Far superior writers than Kelly have excavated the Gorbals and the east end to greater effect and with the vast roster of relatives she appears to think warrant a mention, the first few chapters pass in a confusing muddle of aunts, grandparents and inspirational teachers.

It starts to get interesting when Kelly joins the East Kilbride News in the late 1970s and her hard-hitting journalistic credentials are revealed. Now inextricably linked with the garish sheen of breakfast television, where she has served in one form or another since the late 1980s, it’s easy to forget that Kelly took a more arduous path to calorie counting and horoscopes than many of her perfectly coiffured peers.

She joined her local paper fresh from school, spent a brief period working for BBC Scotland, before becoming TV-am’s Scottish correspondent in 1984. She emphasises that she spent several years on call 24 hours a day at the behest of the London newsdesk who were under the impression that Glasgow to Inverness was a 30-minute trip.

For a woman who spends four mornings a week discussing skirt lengths and beauty tips on her current show, LK Today, it’s understandable that she should invoke the gravitas of her beginnings, and there is little question that Kelly earned her news stripes before she decamped south to the sofa of GMTV. In 1988, she filmed a report on the Lockerbie disaster from the broken cockpit of Pan Am Flight 103 and also covered the Piper Alpha and Dunblane tragedies. But like Darth Vader at the end of the first Star Wars trilogy — Kelly is bizarrely obsessed by science fiction, littering the book with asides about Star Trek and Doctor Who — there seems to be little left of Lorraine Kelly the newshound beneath the morning television machine.

Still, cheeriness is what Kelly does best and it seems churlish to question why she followed the route to a leather sofa rather than the flak-jacket-and-no-make-up approach of Kate Adie or Orla Guerin. Perhaps it is her devotion to her family — she is married to cameraman Steven Smith, with whom she has a 14-year-old daughter, Rosie — or her love of Scotland — she commutes to London from Dundee — but behind Kelly’s bubbly, effervescent personality beats the dependable heart of a supermum whose only claim to eccentricity appears to be a fascination with Emperor penguins and sci-fi. There are no scandalous disclosures of alcohol abuse or all-night drug binges. She reveals that she once got drunk with the actor John Hannah and turned up to work with a crushing hangover, but behind the sunny facade lie the hidden depths of a puddle.

Ultimately, this is where Between You and Me falls short as a gripping read. Kelly is clearly an intelligent woman but somewhere along the way she swapped her journalistic edge for something altogether more comfortable. And at 8.35am millions love her for it.

Lorraine: Between You and Me, is published by Headline, £14.99

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