Forget the weather, here’s the news about Carol Kirkwood. Everyone’s favourite breakfast TV forecaster has firmly established a parallel career as a best-selling writer of romantic fiction. Her first four books skipped up the charts and now here comes the fifth, Meet Me At Sunset, published this week. As ever, she starts with the setting. For this latest offering, it is Majorca. “I love everything about it,” says the permanently sunny Carol. “The scenery, the beaches, the mountains, the food, the people...”

On holiday there, sitting in a favourite restaurant one night with husband Steve, her eye was caught by an elegant woman in her 50s, hair in a chignon, ramrod straight back, dining alone and drinking white wine from a slender glass. “I’m a real nosey parker, I love people-watching, and my mind went into over-drive,” she chuckles. “I started fantasising about this woman’s life and why she was on her own. I decided there and then that she was going to be the main character in my next book.”

As fans of Carol’s chart-topping novels will know (“I’m no Tolstoy – these are beach reads, pure escapism”), this is a familiar tale of broken hearts, blackmail and betrayal, Hollywood glamour, closely guarded secrets and a last stab at happiness as the sun sets over the golden sands. “It’s a fairy story,” she says, without apology.

Carol’s loyal readership is predominantly female “although my dentist loves my books and he’s a man”.

What about the main man in her life? Just before Christmas 2023, Carol, 63, married serving police officer Steve Randall. For 25 years she was married to Jimmy Kirkwood, not the Northern Irish hockey player as is so often mistakenly reported, but a Scottish businessman. There was no dramatic ending to the marriage, she says. It just ran its course. That said, it is not easy breaking up with your husband if you have a public profile.

“I still had to be smiling Carol on screen. It was all so shocking to me and I found it a real challenge. I’d come off-air – we used to broadcast from the Blue Peter garden in those days – go to the Ladies, have a good cry and then have to reapply my eye make-up before stepping in front of the cameras again.

“In a funny way, though, all of that helped with the healing process. I put my grief into a compartment which I kept separate from my work, otherwise, I’d have ended up in a puddle of tears. Work kept me going. It was simple – I had a public face and a private face.”

She’s one of eight children and would have loved a family of her own but it never happened. “Nor were we ever told why [by doctors].” But she refuses to feel downhearted. “Well, just look at the life I’ve had. I couldn’t have achieved half of it if I’d had children at home.”

She refuses to compare her marriages. “I was very happy with Jimmy for many years and now I’m very happy with Steve.” But she can’t resist adding: “This one’s a keeper, though.”

In September he’ll be 50. Hand on heart, is she just a little bit relieved that his age will now start with a new number? She roars with laughter. “I promise you, I never think about it. And nobody would pay it any attention if he was the one who was older than me.

“No, you can forget all about toyboys and cougars – so old-fashioned and rather sexist when you think about it.” End of. He is now a part, loosely speaking, of his wife’s novel-writing career. “If I feel I’ve hit a bit of a dead end, I’ll ask Steve for his suggestions.”

Once she’s put the last full stop on a novel, Carol releases the characters from her head to make way for the next cast. She’s already working on book number six, set in the Cotswolds and New York at Christmas, out next year. “I still sometimes pinch myself,” she says. “We think we’re in charge of our owndestiny but it’s just not true. All of this came from nowhere.”

Actually, it came from a man called Kerr MacRae, a publishing agent whocunningly identified Carol as someone with a loyal following who might be able to tap into that popularity given she knew how to string two words together. So it proved.

And she loves her parallel lives: “One keeps me fresh for the other.” She’s certainly looking good on it, which is no mean achievement when you have to set your alarm for 2.45am Monday to Thursday in order to arrive at BBC Breakfast by 4.30am: “Thank you. But it gets harder all the time.”

Over the last six months she’s lost half a stone. “Out of something bad has come something good. At the beginning of the year I was laid low with a really nasty bout of food poisoning which kept me off-air. I felt I’d been run over by a steamroller.”

It transformed her attitude to food and eating. “I’d always been a real snacker. But I made a decision only to eat when I was hungry. For instance, I had pitta and hummus at five o’clock yesterday afternoon and won’t have anything until two o’clock this afternoon.” So what will she eat then?

“Whatever I fancy! But it’s likely to be protein – boiled eggs or chicken or pitta with rocket and tomatoes. And, if I want some chocolate after that, I’ll have some. It’s my main meal of the day. But then, I do 10,000 steps a day minimum, mostly on the 40-minute return journey from the station to my house.”

She’s just finished her annual stint at Wimbledon, despatching regular weather updates from SW19. “It’s one of my favourite events of the year although I never actually get to see any of the tennis,” she says.

The weather has been kind this year. “It has. But I have to be careful. I can’t stand up and say there’s going to be lots of lovely sunshine tomorrow because that doesn’t suit everyone. If it’s very hot, which it certainly was in June and earlier this month, it can be a real health hazard, especially for the elderly with respiratory issues.”

So, how’s the rest of the summer going to pan out?

“Well, we live on an island which sometimes means we can have four seasons in a day. It’s pretty much impossible to predict with any accuracy more than about five days ahead.”

For all that, people habitually stop her in the supermarket wanting to know what the weather will be like in three weeks’ time on Saturday when their son is getting married. And it can hit closer to home. “How bad do I look if I’ve invited friends round for a barbecue and the heavens open?”

Still, the British obsession with weather means it’s a busy life. Carol broadcast from the Chelsea Flower Show again this year and we’ll see her next as a guest of James Martin on his ITV Saturday morning cookery show. Then she’ll be up in the Highlands forThe One Show, filming an item on the Glenfinnan Viaduct which her maternal grandfather helped to build and which has featured in the Harry Potter films.

She’ll also be giving a talk on a cruise of the Outer Hebrides and another on a steam train to Mallaig from Fort William. Any remaining unfulfilled ambitions? “Yes, I’d love to take part in Race Across the World. I’d be in charge of the budget – Steve would be chief boy scout looking after logistics. It would be such fun. I’m sure there’s more of China and India to be explored or maybe America. Our dream, when we finally retire, is to get in the car and head off into the wide blue yonder.”

A long career appearing on our TV screens with such regularity has inevitably involved one or two memorable moments. “There was the time a dog chose to relieve itself behind me on-air on a beach in Wittering,” she smiles.

And she got herself in an awful muddle broadcasting from Greenwich Park on one occasion. “I was trying to explain to viewers that I’d been watching people walking their dogs but, for some reason, it came out as me having watched dogging!”

She also remembers the occasion when she was filmed holding two measuringjugs of water. “One contained the amount of rainfall we should have had – the other contained the amount we’d actually had.

“The late Bill Turnbull introduced the item by asking: ‘Kirky’ – he always called me Kirky – ‘are you going to repeat your experiment for us?’ To which I replied:‘Yes, I’ll have my jugs out again in 15 minutes.’ “Bill was unable to speak after that – Mishal Husain had to rescue him.”

Meet Me At Sunset by Carol Kirkwood (HarperCollins, £16.99) is out now