FANS know Lara Lewington her for presenting on BBC technology show Click.
But not many realise she is also married to TV’s Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis.
5
5
Although the couple have high profiles on the telly, they like to keep a low profile off screen.
They have been together for almost two decades and have 11-year-old daughter Sapphire.
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, Lara, 44, talks about how they met and reveals why, as a tech expert working on Artificial Intelligence, she does not fear the rise of AI.
She says: “Martin and I have been together for 18 years and we are not a TV showbiz couple.
“We keep ourselves to ourselves in that respect. We just happen to both be on TV.
“We met through a friend, an old friend of his from university who I was working with when I was presenting the weather on Channel 5.
“Martin had only just set up Money Saving Expert, it was the very early days.”
It would be another seven years before Martin sold his website for £87million, with his share £11million.
Most read in Tech
Martin, 51, who refers to Lara as Mrs MSE and Sapphire as Mini MSE, calls the presenter the love of his life.
On radio’s Desert Island Discs in 2020 he revealed life without his wife and daughter would be “total misery”.
He said: “I can cope without anything else but not without them.”
Martin also revealed when he and Lara started going out they would occasionally hire a motorbike on holiday and sing Frankie Valli hit Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.
‘Siri and Alexa don’t understand me’
It was the first song the couple danced to at their wedding in 2009.
He also admitted that since Sapphire was born Lara no longer allows him to ride a motorbike.
But he told how he, Mrs MSE and Mini MSE dance round the house to Ricky Martin’s Livin’ La Vida Loca.
For 14 years, Lara has been a reporter, then presenter, on BBC’s Click and she travels the world looking at the gadgets and trends of the future.
But the technology expert reveals she cannot get Alexa to obey her
She says: “I speak the King’s English but for some reason I have terrible trouble getting Alexa and Siri to understand me. Remember how you used to book cinema tickets on the phone line and you’d have to say what film you wanted to watch.
“I’d have to keep on repeating what it was and Martin used to find it so funny. The thing would never understand what I was saying and now it has moved into the higher tech version.
“What is there not to understand? May- be I need to put on an American accent. It has become a bit of a joke that they can never understand me.”
Many TV viewers only made the connection between Lara and Martin during lockdown.
Mrs MSE would appear on Martin’s ITV money shows, which came live from their North London home and helped millions of families keep their finances on track during the pandemic.
5
5
She says: “What was quite fun during the pandemic was that Martin was making his show for ITV from home. We had ITV downstairs and the BBC upstairs, as I was making my show from there.
“We had quite a nice procedure. Our BBC show needed to be finished by Thursday lunchtime, ready to air for the weekend.
“His show was Thursday evening, so I would work on it as the floor manager and runner.”
Lara spent the rest of her time in lockdown studying artificial intelligence in the hope that television companies would be interested in a programme on the subject.
She says: “The feedback I got was, ‘No one is interested in AI, everyone is scared, they don’t understand it’.
“Then came ChatGPT and suddenly everybody was interested.”
Lara and the team at Click used ChatGTP to write the script for one of their programmes which looked at the new AI writing app.
She says: “We had some fun with it. It started with, ‘Hey, tech enthusiasts, your favourite tech presenter here!’. I would never say anything like that in a million years.”
And Lara dismisses fears that AI could go rogue and wipe out mankind.
She says: “Yes, we need to be cautious with it but this sensationalist idea of a future where the robots are coming alive and killing us all is not a real thing.”
What she does believe, though, is that AI will help us live longer, fitter, healthier lives.
Lara is into her fitness and, incredibly for someone whose family owned a sweet shop on Bognor Regis pier, does not have a sweet tooth.
‘I don’t have any absurd desire to live to 150’
When we meet, Lara is wearing a Google watch and, on the finger of her right hand she has an Oura smart ring, which tracks heart rate, temperature, blood oxygen, activity and sleep.
On the day of our interview she had been up at the crack of dawn to run 5k before going to the gym.
She explains: “My ideal exercise regime is five or six days a week. I would do 5k. Then three days a week I would do weights. I try to do stomach exercises every day as well after my run and then an hour’s Pilates a week. My old next-door neighbour, Gail, is the best Pilates teacher ever. She is in her late sixties and looks phenomenal.
“I would be happy to look like her now. Gail has been my greatest inspiration.”
Lara’s family gave up their sweet shop on the south coast and moved to West London while she was at college — and Lara became a runner on TV’s It’s A Knockout game show. In 2003 she joined Channel 5 as a weather presenter.
She can be seen presenting the weather on a background monitor in the Daily Planet newsroom in the 2006 film Superman Returns.
After a spell as a showbiz reporter she joined the technology reporting team at Click and is now co-presenter with Spencer Kelly.
Lara says: “I did an experiment in 2015 where I wore four of the leading activity trackers 24 hours a day for a week to compare the data.
“The difference between the results was enormous. One thought I had done 25 per cent more steps than another.
“One reckoned I’d burned 3,000 more calories than another over the course of the week, that is a day and a half’s food intake for someone of my size.
“The one that thought I had burnt the most calories wasn’t the one that thought I had done the most activity. The results were all over the place.
“Last year I tested three of the leading devices in one go and the differences were negligible.
“These devices have got a lot better and the number of people wearing them now is huge.
“I love that people are caring more about their health, and technology can help that impact on people.”
5
Lara has made a Tonight ITV documentary on healthy ageing and believes we can all use technology to live longer, healthier lives.
She says: “The concept of being able to increase the number of healthy years of our lives, staving off disease for longer, is going to be hugely life-changing and AI will play its role. I would like to live healthily for as long as possible.
“I don’t have any kind of absurdly overdramatic desire to live to 150, because my loved ones might not do the same.
“But I would like to live disease free and be able to exercise for as long as possible. I think that is what most people want.”
- Tonight: Healthy Ageing will be on ITV1 and ITVX on July 13 at 8.30pm. Forever Young?, A BBC Click Special, will be on BBC One and BBC News on August 12 and 13. It is on the iPlayer now.
