Lorraine Kelly broke down in tears on air after a performance of the Christmas song dedicated to her show’s late producer Hannah Hawkins.
The 64 year old TV icon struggled to carry on presenting following the moving rendition of the Change + Check choir’s charity single Golden, featuring Joss Stone on Friday, 15 November. The song has been dedicated to Lorraine producer Hannah, who died from secondary breast cancer last month aged just 33, only two months after giving birth to her son Rory.
Golden has been performed by a choir of 20 women who discovered their breast cancer thanks to the ITV daytime show’s Change + Check campaign, which was founded by breast cancer survivor and Lorraine show producer Helen Addis. After the song was performed on the show, which also featured a guest appearance from Hannah’s widower Tom and their son Rory, Lorraine choked back tears as she said to baby Rory: “Wow, wow, wow. That’s your mummy’s song.”
Lorraine then struggled to pass over to the This Morning studio in a live link. Earlier in the show, Tom had joined Lorraine on the sofa to discuss his inspirational late wife and how he was dealing with grief.
Speaking about Hannah’s final weeks, he said: "She was focussed on us being okay. One of the last conversations I had with her was she was saying, 'I want you to find love again, I want Rory to grow up in a family and have brothers and have sisters’."
Lorraine replied: "That's so typical, her thinking about everything else. A remarkable girl. She had breast cancer and then it came back when she was pregnant and you knew how bad it was, but when someone is still with you there's hope so it was a real shock to everybody."
"Absolutely," Tom agreed. He also discussed how it was difficult to cope with the big milestone occasions that have come since Hannah’s death.
Tom said: “She passed away the day before my birthday. We had our wedding anniversary fall a couple of weeks ago and we obviously had her birthday as well.
"Christmas is just going to be a case of getting through it, we’re obviously not particularly celebrating but at the same time it’s going to be a time where they family is together, because that’s what it’s about."
Tom paid a heartbreaking tribute to Hannah on Instagram after her death in November.
He wrote: "For someone who’s love language was gift giving, leaving us the day before my birthday was really not the one. I wish you’d kept the receipt."
He added: "There is no way I can pay tribute or sum you up in one post. In fact I could write an essay on how unfair this is.
"That you miss out on seeing Rory growing up, that he won’t be able to feel the love of his mum, and that this terrible illness took hold so quickly.
"But that’s not how you saw it. The remarkable person that you were, the phrase you used so many times over the last few weeks – and it set me off every time; “I’m so at peace with the life I’ve lived” is something we can all admire. The fact that right until the end you were putting others feelings first and making us all laugh was just you to a tee.”
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