The former newsreader is used to proving her critics wrong and is now intent on winning over 'Crimewatch' viewers, she tells Roya Nikkhah
Kirsty Young is used to controversy. Since joining the BBC in 2006, her appointments as presenter of Radio 4's Desert Island Discs and, more recently, of BBC1's Crimewatch, have been almost exclusively described as "controversial".
The mere mention of the furore that greeted her arrival at Radio 4's flagship Sunday show after 18 years of Sue Lawley at the helm still prompts raised eyebrows and rolled eyes from Young. And when it was announced that Young, 39, was to replace co-presenters Nick Ross, 60, and Fiona Bruce, 43, as the new face of Crimewatch, headlines made much of the corporation's "ageist agenda".
"To be honest, I had no idea that it was set for a revamp," says Young, who is sitting cross-legged on the sofa. Her eyebrows shoot up again at the suggestion that she was chosen for being on the right side of 40.
"Nobody came to me and said: 'We think you're the fresh-faced future of the BBC because you're under 40', and if there was somebody saying 'We have to make Crimewatch younger', I can't imagine I was top of their list. I mean, I'm hardly bouncing around in a pair of hot pants and Perspex high heels," she laughs.
But clad in a grey cashmere jumper over jeans, accessorised with expensively highlighted blonde hair, knee-high black leather boots, a perfect manicure and plenty of diamonds, it could be argued that Young makes for a rather more glamorous package than her predecessors.
Ross, who had presented Crimewatch since it started in 1984, clearly felt he had been the victim of ageism, complaining that television was now "very much a young person's medium".
So what will Young - she of the news bulletin read while perched on the edge of a desk - bring to the tried and tested Crimewatch formula?
"Nick and Fiona have both done a brilliant job, and I suppose that me coming in is like giving it a bit of a spring clean," she says. "I hope I can bring a kind of conversational edge to it."
Does she really not believe that the BBC has developed just a tiny bit of an ageist agenda? After all, the booting out of Ross and Bruce followed the decision to axe Moira Stuart, the widely respected 55-year-old newsreader.
This week, another former news reader, Selina Scott, 56, chipped in, accusing the Beeb of excluding women over 50.
"It's a very difficult thing to judge and sometimes it can be hard to get to the bottom of these things," Young muses diplomatically. "The whole Moira Stuart thing was very confusing because she is brilliant at her job and I have no idea why she's no longer doing it.
"You only need to look to America to see that there are more women in their senior years who are regarded very highly in broadcasting - people like Diane Sawyer and Barbara Walters. There are only a few older women in broadcasting here and it is time that changed."
And will things change at the Beeb? "Well, I bloody hope so," she laughs. "Because I'd quite like to keep working for a while."
Whether or not she would indeed remain in employment at the BBC was very publicly debated when Young replaced Lawley on Desert Island Discs in October 2006, becoming only the fourth presenter of the programme in 65 years.
Within weeks of taking up her new role, she was savaged by critics, mocked for her accent, derided for the quality of her interview technique and attacked for being "overbearing" and for "lecturing" her guests.
One tabloid critic chided her for sounding "like a holiday replacement". She was also accused of lacking the delicate skills needed to tease out a guest's most intimate secrets. Basically, she simply wasn't Sue Lawley. After four months, the programme had lost 130,000 listeners - nearly five per cent of the audience.
She frowns and takes a deep breath before reflecting on the barrage of criticism she faced.
"If I had consistently lost figures and was even now taking the programme to a low, I would be taking that incredibly personally and considering my position," she says. "Because that is what matters to me - keeping the programme as popular as it can possibly be.
"Yes, it hurts when you have to take that kind of criticism on the chin but people will have their opinions and some will always think I'm bloody rubbish. But I was determined to make a bloody good job of it - really, really determined."
Her determination paid off and one year on many of her critics have been forced to eat their words, with record numbers of listeners tuning into her famously deep Scottish burr, which earned her the nickname Ol' Man River at school.
Her interview last year with John Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, who revealed to Young that she had strongly considered aborting her son, Sean, was hailed as one of the show's finest for years.
Such personal victories surely paved the way for her new job. Having joined a somewhat bruised BBC amid a flurry of "fakery" scandals, the new guardian of Crimewatch is determined that the programme will remain one of the corporation's untainted and stalwart shows.
"I think the culture within the programme has always been meticulous because you simply cannot play fast and loose with that sort of material," she says. "It is not a matter of conjecture or artistic impression and I think it is more important now than ever that people see the BBC is entirely honest."
Young is adamant that the corporation must hold up its hands when mistakes are made. "It is right that any flaws are exposed and right that there are investigations when things go wrong, whether in the case of the Blue Peter cat or anything else. Viewers need to trust what they are seeing."
She says she was thrilled to be offered Crimewatch because "untypically like most television, it is actually a very worthwhile programme".
Now in its 24th year, the series has a remarkable track record - one in five cases featured on the programme results in a conviction - and it has helped solve some of the country's most infamous cases, including the murder of the toddler Jamie Bulger in 1993.
"I think the programme greatly appeals to our sense of Britishness," she says. "The idea that maybe people can help, maybe they do know that man in the balaclava."
While Young has been the victim of crime twice - the flat she once shared with her sister in Glasgow was burgled and her car was broken into last year - she does not live in fear of crime.
"You know, even though the job of the programme is to highlight some of the least savoury aspects of life, I don't view the world as a horrible place where people are likely to do you wrong," she says.
Young was born in East Kilbride, near Glasgow. Her biological father, policeman Joe Jackson, abandoned the family for another woman when Kirsty was a baby and she hasn't seen him since.
Her mother later married John Young, a joiner, and moved the family to Stirling. "As far as I am concerned, John is my father. I love him like a father. I am very close to him, always have been, and I've called him Dad all my life, " she has said.
Young began her career with BBC Radio Scotland before moving to Channel Five. Presenting the bulletins on Five News, she was credited with revolutionising the stuffy world of newscasting when she became the first presenter to read the news standing up.
She then headed to ITV for two years, presenting the lunchtime and evening news, before jumping ship and returning to Channel Five in 2002.
When Young first defected to ITV in 1999, Channel Five, desperate to keep its biggest star, reportedly offered her more than £1 million a year to stay, prompting a torrent of outrage about inflated newscaster salaries and television executives who favoured looks over experience.
"I can't believe people still equate the fact that you're well groomed with the idea that your brains might have fallen out of your ears while you have a blow dry," she says, recalling the reaction to the promotion of Emily Maitlis to Newsnight and the media sniping that accompanied Natasha Kaplinsky's meteoric rise at the BBC before she moved to Channel Five.
As someone who has a Vogue fashion shoot to their name, she is clearly irritated by the issue: "It is ludicrous to draw the conclusion that you have to look like a bag of spanners to be smart. I can't believe people still think like that."
When she was younger, it was Kirsty's older sister, Laura Ewing, to whom she is very close, who turned heads. According to a former colleague of Young's it was the older, prettier sister who was the focus of attention.
''Kirsty felt she had somehow to distinguish herself and the media was her way." When she was a teenager, Young suffered from bulimia, as she admitted in the first edition of Kirsty, the Scottish Television Trisha-style chat show she hosted in 1994.
These days Young, who has dined with the Blairs and is said to be Gordon Brown's favourite broadcaster, is part of a smart media crowd who hang out at Babington House, a country club in Somerset owned by her husband, Nick Jones, the millionaire businessman and socialite and founder and chief executive of the Soho House group of fashionable private clubs here and in the US. The couple have two young daughters - Freya, six, and Iona, one.
She once said she aspired to be one of life's "sickeningly well rounded people" who did not want to get to her 30s and have nothing more than a job, a nice house and a car. She wanted that little bit more.
With her two plum roles at the BBC, a town house in Notting Hill, a country retreat in Somerset and a holiday home in Portugal, would she concede she now lives something of a charmed life?
"I am fantastically lucky. I have wonderful children and I really like my husband - which is lucky," she laughs, before delving into her handbag to retrieve a photograph of her new puppy, Jock. "I must show you his picture. Isn't he beautiful?".
So what ambitions remain for such a "sickeningly well rounded" high achiever? "Honestly? If I could train Jock not to pee on the carpet, that would be the greatest achievement of all."
• The new series of 'Crimewatch' is on BBC1 on Wednesday January 23 at 9pm
