Sally Smedley

Quote
"No one can say you're not experienced. In fact, the word I'd use is old, old and raddled. Old, raddled, pushy, arrogant, quite frankly, and so physically repugnant I'd rather go to bed with a one-eyed, syphilitic warthog."

- Sally to Henry

Details
GlobeLink’s second news anchor, handpicked by Sir Roysten when he acquired the company. Sally is noted for her snobbishness and vapidity, and tends to view newsreading merely as a means to boost her public image and attract fashionable promotional contracts.

All her views are conservative and it is much to her chagrin that she is a pin-up for so many gay men. She always has a problem with at least one member of the staff, and complains incessantly, usually prefacing her gripes with "I’m not one to complain…". She is generally disliked and mocked by her colleagues, mainly due to her obsession with fashion and her own image to the exclusion of any real awareness of current affairs.

Helen occasionally tries to sympathise with her, and there are infrequent incidents that reveal Sally’s vulnerability. She was raised by her grandmother, who clearly abused her as a child — incidents are recounted in which Sally is locked in a rat-infested cellar; or abandoned in a forest, ostensibly to cure her fear of trees. Despite this, she was deeply upset when her grandmother died (though she still gave several public interviews on her grief) and briefly became an extremist Christian, though she gave this up after being sexually harassed by televangelist Earl Johnson. Sally lives alone with her Filipino maid, whom she views (and treats) as little more than a slave.

Sally is infamous throughout the GlobeLink offices and elsewhere for her supposedly secret liaisons with dockers, soldiers, sailors, sportsmen and, in particular, lorry drivers. During one encounter with a sound engineer, her colleagues were delighted to discover she had left her radio microphone on, and tapes of her experience were quickly circulated around the office.

The episode where Sally miscarries her baby and agrees to conduct a magazine interview suggests that Sally’s sexual preferences are something of a defence mechanism to ensure that she is devoid of emotional feelings, because she fears being overwhelmed by them. Sally — who is 42 at the end of the final series in 1998, and no longer wanted by many television companies, echoing many of the complaints by middle-aged female news readers such as Selena Scott, Jan Leeming and Anna Ford — opts to make her money by marrying a very rich old man with a weak heart, Sir Gordon Miller.

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