Steph McGovern: ‘I didn’t see any tensions when I was on BBC Breakfast’ Benji WilsonSun, August 16, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC 0 Steph McGovern is presenting a new reality show, The Big Deal, with Apprenticestyle challenges within the art dealing world Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph Steph McGovern hops up from the sofa and does a jig. It’s not just any old jig, it’s a fullon Michael Flatley number that has me gobsmacked. It comes about because I was told that she used to be an Irish dancer and I’ve asked her to prove it.
Steph McGovern: ‘I didn’t see any tensions when I was on BBC Breakfast’
Benji WilsonSun, August 16, 2026 at 5:00 AM UTC
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Steph McGovern is presenting a new reality show, The Big Deal, with Apprentice-style challenges within the art dealing world - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph
Steph McGovern hops up from the sofa and does a jig. It’s not just any old jig, it’s a full-on Michael Flatley number that has me gobsmacked. It comes about because I was told that she used to be an Irish dancer and I’ve asked her to prove it.
“That’s my favourite thing that I love hearing from people,” she says, sitting back down again. “‘She’ll never be able to do that.’ And it’s like, ‘All right, love, here we go.’”
McGovern loves proving people wrong, which is one reason she’s presenting reality show The Big Deal with Steph McGovern, which began its run on BBC Two on Thursday.
It marks a return to the BBC for McGovern. She began her career there doing work experience on Tomorrow’s World and moved up the production side, always on business news and financial affairs, before stepping in front of the camera on BBC Breakfast in 2011. She left in 2019 to have a baby. But also, she tells me: “I didn’t want to do the hours anymore, because it was relentless. I did it for nearly 10 years, and I was always the girl out and about at 3am, in a hard hat and a hi-vis somewhere.” From there, she moved to Channel 4 to present Steph’s Packed Lunch in 2020, going on to launch The Rest is Money podcast in 2023 with Robert Peston.
McGovern was the business presenter on BBC Breakfast for nearly a decade - BBC
But, it seems, the BBC remains her spiritual broadcasting home, and she still speaks fondly of her time on BBC Breakfast. This, despite the fact that last year the BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty was formally investigated over allegations of bullying, according to reports in The Sun. (Neither the BBC nor Munchetty have ever commented on the reports.) McGovern is having none of this. She remains fiercely loyal to the team.
“For me, Breakfast was like my TV family. I still talk to Louise Minchin, Naga, Carol Kirkwood, Sally Nugent, Susanna Reid – all of them. When I started, I was like the baby of the team, so they very much took me under their wing.”
Did she witness any of the tensions that has since been reported?
“No, I didn’t see any of that. I mean, the editor changed by the time I left [Richard Frediani took on the role in September 2019], so I didn’t work under the one who is there now. But, look, people just love speculating about drama and, unfortunately, it’s quite boring in real life.”
The Sun reported that Naga Munchetty was investigated over bullying allegations on BBC Breakfast - James Stack/BBC
I tell her that there’s currently a job advert online for a Radio 5 Live radio slot on Breakfast with Munchetty. She won’t be applying. “I do not fancy doing breakfasts,” McGovern laughs. “I’ve done them. I love Naga, but I’ve left those heavy days with early starts behind me.”
The Big Deal features amateurs playing at art dealers, choosing artists and works and seeing whether they can make money in a notoriously fickle market. What’s not immediately obvious is why McGovern – engineering graduate, business journalist and sometime talk-show anchor – is hosting it.
“I am someone who grew up in a house full of art, because my dad [Eamonn McGovern] is an artist, a sculptor and a painter,” she says. “I watched him do his art for the love of it but never become a commercial success, so I’ve always been fascinated by how you make it in the art world.”
The first thing to say about her new series is that it’s conspicuously similar to the regular Apprentice challenge where – yes – they have to sell art. In fact, it’s virtually the same. Lord Sugar would call the whole thing a bit of a blah-dee cheek. “To be fair, I’ve said myself that it is like The Apprentice,” McGovern confirms, “but these are real deals.” She points out that the auctions on the series are peopled by genuine amateur collectors spending (or not spending) their own money based on what they think of the art on show. “They could have all said no,” says McGovern. “I mean that would have been a terrible episode if they had…”
But in taking pairs of contestants who are not from the art world and throwing them into the deep end of dealing, isn’t the programme setting out to make them look like chumps, again, as per The Apprentice? “Absolutely not. And I wouldn’t want to be a part of that,” insists McGovern, “because, as worthy as it sounds, I want them to do well.”
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This is the key to understanding her career path through business journalism and on into light entertainment. She sees herself as an outsider from a deprived background – she was born in North Shields and grew up in Middlesbrough, father that sculptor and painter, mother an NHS radiographer – and so she always wants to promote the underdog. “Some of them [the contestants] had never been to an art gallery before or came from backgrounds where they felt intimidated by the art world. So I was absolutely gunning for them to feel just as good as the people who did have a bit more confidence.”
“It really drives me mad,” she adds, “that lots of people rule themselves out from careers because they think they’re not of the right status, class, socio-economic group or whatever. That does my head in, in every walk of life, not just the art world.”
Ironically, McGovern says she learnt about fitting in and standing out from her father. “The kids would come around and go, ‘My God, your dad’s so weird,’ so I spent most of my childhood thinking he was. It’s only as an adult that I’ve gone, ‘Oh hang on, that probably taught me a lot about not conforming.’”
McGovern says her father, painter and sculptor Eamonn McGovern, taught her about not needing to conform - Instagram/Eamonn McGovern
At 44, McGovern says she is also proud not to fit in. “All the time, from day one doing engineering [aged 16, she won an Arkwright Engineering Scholarship], loads of people thought I couldn’t know about it… because I was a woman. Going into the BBC [in 2007], loads of people thought I couldn’t know stuff because I didn’t sound like everyone else in the building. Going into financial journalism, again, being a woman – and a working-class woman – all of these factors made it difficult. But the thing that I think is: being underestimated becomes your superpower.”
It was back in her Breakfast days that she interviewed Matt Brittin. Then, he was the head of Google in the UK. Now he is the director-general of the BBC. What might business journalist McGovern counsel Brittin now about the challenges that the corporation faces? “The key thing that I have learnt across all the businesses that I’ve been part of, and interviewed, is you’ve got to be agile. There are lots of big institutions where it’s harder to be agile… I would say the BBC is probably one of them.”
“Agility” in business sounds a bit like corporate tosh, though.
“I just mean, go with the market. As in, stay close to who’s watching and how they’re watching and just make sure you follow that.”
McGovern: ‘It’s really hard to get successful businesswomen on TV, because they get so much criticism for how they look and sound’ - Heathcliff O'Malley for The Telegraph
Something that many of those watchers might want to see is more faces like McGovern’s. She remains an outlier on television because successful businesswomen – northern women; in fact, any women at all – continue to be under-represented. “I still think one of the problems is it’s really hard to get successful businesswomen to put themselves on telly and to showcase what they do. Because they get so much criticism for how they look and how they sound. Why would you want to put yourself through that if you’re cracking on with your business and doing a great job?”
And by the by, McGovern’s own side hustles aren’t doing badly. She has investments in a healthcare business, a children’s slime manufacturer called Gootopia and, naturally, a few artworks of her own. She has invested in pieces by an artist called Lola Stong-Brett (“I noticed on Instagram that Tracey Emin and the Margate collective had started taking an interest in her work, so I bought two original pieces”). She acquired them for a couple of hundred pounds each; they now sell for £12,000-plus. “Again, I like the idea of being at the beginning of people’s careers, because that’s that underdog vibe that I always go into.”
She tells me that her favourite artist is the late David Hockney, and she now owns a Hockney print – although, surely, it would be hard to characterise him as an underdog. McGovern disagrees: “That was one of my dream purchases, but it comes back to the same point – Hockney was a man who didn’t fit in, who was proud to be gay when it was illegal, didn’t change his accent, painted these stunning, amazing pictures of Yorkshire, looked a bit different, all of these fabulous things… for me it’s as much that as about his actual paintings on the walls.”
But back to the dancing. McGovern appeared on The Masked Dancer a few years ago, so what about Strictly? A bit of ballroom seems like the obvious next step. Having seen her go full Lord of the Dance, I can confidently predict that she would ace it. “It’s a never-say-never, but not at the minute,” she tells me. If not dancing, then how about The Celebrity Traitors? “I’d love to do that show, but do you know what? Everyone who’s doing it is so mega-famous that I’ve got to wait until they’ve all had a go. When they get down through the A-list, then the Bs and Cs, maybe they’ll ask me.”
The Big Deal With Steph McGovern is on BBC iPlayer, and continues on BBC Two at 8pm on Thursday, Aug 20
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Source: "AOL Entertainment"
Source: Entertainment
Published: August 16, 2026 at 09:36AM on Source: RED MAG
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