'As long as I get my block of five hours' sleep, I'm fine'

As 'BBC Breakfast' turns 40, Ellie Harrison talks to presenter Naga Munchetty about being Auntie's face of morning TV

-  Ellie Harrison

It's 10.25am on a Friday morning and I'm starting to worry. I was supposed to start interviewing Naga Munchetty, the matter-offact, pixie-haired star of BBC Breakfast, just under an hour ago. But no one can track her down. Between 6am and quarter past nine this morning, her face was beamed into living rooms and kitchens across the country; now she's nowhere to be seen. At 10.29am, the publicist emails me. I'll be on the phone with Munchetty in 10 minutes. The presenter comes on the line apologising profusely: she left her phone, with all her appointments on it, on her hall table when she left for the Salford studio this morning. Mystery solved. I had started to fret a little. "Oh no, I'm fine," she says, laughing. "I'm just stupid." She says sorry. Again. "There's nothing worse than flaky interviewees not turning up."

The 47-year-old journalist has dealt with her fair share of flakes over the years - but the difference is she's often had to do it on live television. Munchetty first learned to roll with the punches when she started out in newspapers as a financial journalist in the Nineties, before moving into TV at CNBC Europe, Bloomberg, Channel 4 News, and then the BBC, in that order.

She joined the broadcaster in 2008 to present the business show Working Lunch, then switched over to BBC Breakfast in 2014 as the replacement for Susanna Reid - who had left to host ITV rival Good Morning Britain. As BBC Breakfast celebrates its 40th anniversary, today, it is the UK's most-watched morning news programme. Some 1.2 million tune in each day to see Munchetty and Charlie Stayt (her co-host, whom she speaks warmly of and describes as a "friend") on the red sofa, reporting on everything from ambulance wait times and the cost of living crisis to Mel C's new dance show. When you add in the numbers of those viewing the programme on iPlayer, its reach soars to five million.