When Sky’s foreign affairs editor had her live broadcast gatecrashed by her four-year-old, an instantly relatable meme was born. But does Charlie now wish he’d asked for more?
The look of panic, the embarrassed laugh, the mortified apologies: a young child crashing a work video call has been the peril of lockdown for working parents and many would have instantly recognised Deborah Haynes’s pain. The difference for the Sky News foreign affairs editor was that she was on live television, broadcasting from her spare room – and so was her four-year-old son, Charlie, who had come in to ask if he could have two biscuits. In a grim year, it was one of the lighter moments.
We speak over Zoom one morning as Haynes is trying to get everyone ready for school. Charlie, hugely angelic, sits patiently for all of 20 seconds before wandering off. That morning in July, Haynes had been asked to go on air at fairly short notice to talk about the strained relations between the UK and China over Hong Kong. Her two older children were out. “I put Charlie in front of the television and I think I gave him a cake, so I genuinely thought I was covered,” she says. “I had played out in my head what I would do if he came in and never properly established it; I just didn’t think it would really ever happen. So when it did, I genuinely wanted a hole to gobble me up. It was like everything slowed down.”
