Her magnetic personality has endeared her to millions of viewers of the magazine show. Now, Hammond is delving into something more serious, exploring untold stories of black Britons
Alison Hammond wants to clear something up: she didn’t actually interview a tree. “It was the tree specialist that interviewed her,” she says over the phone, in her trademark heavy Brummie tones. “That’s where people are getting it a bit wrong. I had a specialist who said that she could talk to trees, so I gave her the questions I wanted to ask. It was a great piece of television.”
Hammond should know. For 17 years, she has been a fixture on ITV’s This Morning, presiding over insane exploits and lawless celebrity interviews. Her 2017 encounter with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, which isn’t so much an interview as a piece of art, has been viewed more than 11m times on
YouTube and saw all three of them in hysterics. A video of Hammond doing the weather on a floating map of the
UK, an activity that saw her accidentally push a male model into the Royal Albert Dock in
Liverpool, was an instant viral hit. She’s also “gotten married” to the Rock, fed chocolates to Hugh Jackman, nearly been arrested on camera in
Italy and played Connect 4 with
Beyoncé.