“You’re very lucky that you’ve never been beautiful,” Kate Garraway recalls a school dinner lady telling her as a teen, “because it’s given you the chance to develop a little personality.”

“It was both harsh and a little piece of genius,” the Good Morning Britain presenter decides all these years on. Harsh, presumably, because by anyone else’s standards – and still now at 48 – Garraway has a face and figure to be envied by most women, and genius because she went on to hone a personality that has kept her on ITV’s flagship breakfast show throughout all its incarnations for eighteen years, allowing her to interview everyone from the Prime Minister and Syrian refugees to Brad Pitt with equal ease.

“Of course TV is a visual medium,” Garraway shrugs, lilting slightly in the middle of a day that started at 2.15am and must end “before the News at Ten gongs or I start to panic.”

Susanna Reid and Kate Garraway on Good Morning Britain Credit: ITV

“And of course people expect you to have made an effort, but it’s more about having a connection with the audience. I’ve worked with some of the most beautiful women in the world – many of them behind the cameras – so if it were about looks they would be on screen, not me. And I do feel lucky that professionally, I have always been treated exactly the same as a man.”

There can’t be many women in TV able to make a similar boast. In twenty years on screen has Garraway honestly never encountered sexism? “I really don’t think so,” she maintains. “But I have met women who say they absolutely have. And I’ve also met an awful lot of men in the industry who feel that they have seen women promoted above them and that there is inverted sexism going on.”

While she won’t be drawn on this, Garraway does feel that in our ongoing quest for equality, women need to pick their battles (“I think we’re all a little bored by the idea that men aren’t allowed to open the door for us, aren’t we?”) and be as fair as they’re asking men to be.

Susanna Reid and Kate Garraway Credit: Steve Meddle/ITV/REX

“I’ve got a lot of girlfriends who would be furious if their husbands didn’t load the dishwasher – but would never dream of lifting up the bonnet of the car. So women do need to start being fair. That said,” she points out, her warm, girlish features breaking into a smile, “I’m married to a man who never loads the dishwasher and whose family mantra – handed down from his grandfather – is: 'You don’t keep a dog and bark yourself.’ So maybe,” she goes on with her trademark guttural laugh, “a few more battles need to be fought on my domestic front.”

Anyone who has ever met Garraway’s second husband, Labour spin-doctor turned psychotherapist, Derek Draper – with whom she has a daughter, Darcey, 9, and son, William, 6 – will take this in the humorous way it’s intended. And it’s easy to see what the pair – who married in 2005 – see in each another.

Because although the Abingdon-born daughter of a civil servant and a teacher considers herself a feminist, “especially now that sensible-thinking women have recaptured the term and made it less about tub-thumping”, Garraway has always been too busy pushing ahead to complain about the female lot. “Thanks to the many wars that have been fought and won by my mothers’ generation, my daughter sees absolutely no difference between girls and boys. And in my view the biggest battles to be fought are taking place in other parts of the world.”

Derek Draper and Kate Garraway Credit: Alan Davidson

With the mythical cat-flights so enjoyed by the media back in the GMTV days now forgotten about, Garraway has been able to forge a close friendship with Susanna Reid, she says, without any talk of “competition.” “There was a point when it felt like no matter what Fiona [Phillips], Penny [Smith], Lorraine [Kelly] and I did, everyone was always being made to think that we hated each other. So we used to say to each other: 'Shall we just have a mud wrestling match in front of the building and lay it all to rest?’”

And, of course, I point out, it must be irritating that although male presenters are allowed to flirt as much as they like on screen, female presenters like Reid are often pilloried for doing the same. “Oh she’s supposed to be a terrible flirt, isn’t she?” Garraway chuckles. “But I constantly flirt with people on TV – in an increasingly desperate fashion. It’s reached that point now though, where because of my age, nobody is at all threatened by it. When I interviewed Harry Styles I was doing my best to flirt whereas he was probably regarding me like a slightly odd aunt at a Christmas party.”

More urgent than these occasional double standards, Garraway feels, is a need to highlight the less 'sexy’ issues she encounters every day at work. “People always ask about the movie stars I get to meet and of course they’re fascinating, but it’s the service personnel and veterans, or the mothers who have desperately fought to get something the rest of us take for granted for their child that really blow me away.”

For this reason Garraway has been devoting an increasing amount of time to charity work and is as happy to send herself up in aid of Decembeard – a Beating Bowel Cancer campaign, raising money to provide practical and emotional help for those affected. She is also training as a speech and language therapist for I Can – the children’s communication charity she has chosen to support next year in her new role as President of The Television and Radio Industries Club.

Kate Galloway makes a #bubblebeard to support DecemBeard

“Communication is this forgotten thing in our kids’ school curriculums, because everybody’s very concerned with arithmetic and reading despite research telling us that children in deprived areas are coming to school unable to formulate sentences. Since I’ve made my living talking, I feel it’s an area in which I might genuinely be able to help.”

With those energy-sapping early morning starts and so much time devoted to external projects, Garraway admits that she has to “watch the work and home balance.” “I always know when the balance goes wrong, because I’ll be trying to do something with the kids at 7.30pm that I should have done at 5pm – and then there are tears and tantrums. But now they’re older they both understand. And I think that most women are permanently torn between not feeling that they’re being a good enough mother or employee.”

In 2016, her resolution is “to start exercising,” she tells me, “because right now it’s really unpleasant when I’m naked – I mean really wobbly and horrible. And with 50 hurtling at me, I feel like it’s time to get fit. Also,” she adds slyly, “I’ve decided to embark on a bit of a journey. Fifty is this brand new phase of life, so over the next year I’m going to talk to as many women of over fifty and as many psychotherapists, doctors and nutritionists as I can about how to prepare yourself mentally and physically for that decade.” Do I feel a documentary – Kate Garraway on How to Turn 50 – coming on? “Maybe,” she grins. And I hope she’s serious. Because as far as templates go, she’s not a bad one.

Kate Garraway is supporting bathstore’s #bubblebeard campaign, encouraging the public to share their #bubblebeard selfies online and donate by texting BUBBL15 £2 to 70070