‘On air in ten minutes…’

It was a Monday lunchtime in September 1999 and we were about to go live on ITV with the very first episode of a new daytime show, Loose Women.

I looked across at Derek Hallworth, our unflappable studio director, who had visibly paled. ‘We have no sound going out of the building,’ he grimaced.

I felt physically sick – and not just because of the positive pregnancy test I’d done that morning. As a seasoned producer on shows like This Morning (I had produced Richard and Judy’s last show from Liverpool) this was the first programme I had created from scratch and there was a lot riding on it. A chat show with no sound could be career-ending.

On the screens in front of me, I could see our carefully curated line-up of presenters waiting behind the scenes, blissfully unaware of the potential disaster unfolding.

After an unbearably tense few minutes, during which we stared helplessly at the backside of a sound engineer who was fiddling under the desk with a screwdriver, he finally emerged triumphant and gave a thumbs-up sign through the glass.

‘Roll titles!’ shouted Derek to a relieved studio gallery. As the punchy theme tune reverberated around the studio, a booming, disembodied voice introduced the panel: ‘Please welcome Kaye Adams! Nadia Sawalha! Jane Moore! And Karren Brady!’

There was no trace of nerves from Kaye Adams, a Scottish journalist-turned-presenter, as she opened the show and steered the panel into the first discussion topic of the day: Lord Frederick Windsor admitting to taking cocaine.

The internet was in its infancy and social media didn’t yet exist, so we relied on good old-fashioned phone calls to connect with viewers. We’d had to pull people off the streets to be in the studio audience, so we had no idea whether anyone would ring in.

To our amazement, one of Lord Frederick’s friends called to defend him, saying she thought the newspapers should ‘leave him alone’. This was the first inkling that we were onto something with our new show.

As it celebrates its 25th anniversary, the story of how Loose Women reached our TV screens is one of desperate measures, chaos and calamities that only the very few of us who were there would remember.

It all started six months earlier, when my boss at Granada TV told me ITV was looking for a new daily show aimed at women and asked me to create a pilot episode. He was hoping to emulate the success of The View, a hit US talk show devised by the legendary journalist, Barbara Walters, that featured a panel of intelligent, funny women discussing the topics of the day.

He told me they had decided on the title Loose Women. The male execs were adamant it was a clever pun – in TV parlance, a discussion that does not follow a script is ‘loose’ talk – but it did cause us a few problems in the early days. Some guests refused to appear when we told them the show’s title.

I did feel there was a gap in the market for a different type of talk show, so it was with a sense of excitement that I, along with producer Clare Ely, set about creating the Loose Women pilot.

At the time, we were working together on a makeover show called Better Gardens, so we had to make a lot of phone calls from muddy back gardens in places like Durham or Chichester and wrote the pitch document and scripts from hotel rooms in Leeds and Sheffield.

We began by holding auditions to find a pool of 12 presenters – four of whom would appear on the show each day. We were looking for women who were intelligent, funny and relatable.

Jane Moore was a high-profile newspaper columnist who caught our eye. She had appeared on TV many times, but mainly on political programmes. At her audition, a male executive who was in the studio suggested we ask each woman to look to camera and introduce herself, followed by the words, ‘…and I’m a Loose Woman.’

Jane flatly refused and, as a result, she was the first one booked. I thought: ‘She’ll be trouble but she’ll be worth it.’

Jane, 62, who’s still a regular on the show, recalls: ‘Getting the chemistry right was crucial. Viewers might think, “How hard can it be to sit around chatting?” But if you put 99 per cent of people in front of a camera on live TV, they couldn’t do it.’

Kaye, now 61, arrived wearing tailored black trousers, sensible flat boots and had a copy of The Guardian tucked under her arm. She was instantly transfixed by Nadia Sawalha, 59, fresh from playing Annie Palmer in Eastenders, looking fabulously bohemian with her wild curls and toe rings, cackling as she flicked through a copy of OK magazine. They were the perfect pairing of polar opposites.

The final line-up included then-Birmingham City FC managing director, Karren Brady, sports journalist Trish Adudu and TV presenter Ruth Langsford. It was important to have as wide a range of women as possible but the premise was simple: topical debate from a female perspective.

We recorded the pilot with a small studio audience. Richard Bacon agreed to do his first interview after being fired from Blue Peter for taking cocaine, on the understanding that it would never be broadcast; Fay Ripley was our celebrity guest ahead of the launch of the ITV drama Cold Feet and the discussion topics included Mick Jagger’s recent split from Jerry Hall and his bombshell claim that their marriage in Bali was never legally binding.

The execs seemed to think women only wanted to talk about chocolate and sex. I had to battle hard to keep the premise of the show – topical debate from a female perspective – at its core.

I remember being horrified by the first script for a marketing promo for the show. It completely missed the mark, featuring four women sitting around gossiping, saying things like, ‘Ooh you’ll never guess what so-and-so’s just said!’ Or, ‘I can’t believe she went out wearing that!’ Needless to say, it was devised by a man.

For Kaye, the choice of topics was key: ‘It wasn’t just women talking about ‘women’s things’, it was women talking about anything that we felt was interesting. And we did like to talk about the trivia sometimes, because it would be pretty bloody grim if we didn’t. But we were able to do it in a humorous way, with a bit of substance to it.’

One of my favourite topics was when Jane wanted to discuss insurance premiums and we all thought it would be boring. Kaye introduced it by saying, ‘Go on then, Jane, talk about insurance,’ before face-planting onto the desk, snoring. It was very funny. And it rated through the roof.

ITV initially commissioned Loose Women for just a four-week run. We were told that, in order to secure a recommission, we had to hit an audience share of 30 per cent. Prior to Loose Women, the slot was getting a 15 per cent audience share, so it was a tall order but we managed to hit the target on the final day.

And, although Loose Women quickly started to gain traction with audiences at home, we still struggled to fill the studio audience. By the second week, we had exhausted our supply of willing friends and family, leaving us with just nine bewildered-looking souls in a seating area built for 100.

I was panicking, but director Derek was, as ever, unfazed. ‘I’ll shoot around it,’ he shrugged. No one watching at home would have had any idea how few people were actually there.

Because it was a new show, we also found it difficult to attract celebrity guests. One day, in desperation, producer Jane Beacon dived in front of actress Natalie Cassidy’s car as she was leaving the GMTV studios and persuaded her to come on Loose Women.

Natalie was at the height of her fame playing Sonia Fowler on Eastenders and the BBC press office was furious, giving us a stern telling-off and making us promise not to pull a stunt like that again.

As the budget was so tight, we had to cut corners. My good friend from university, Patrick Duffin, wrote and recorded the theme tune. Patrick was in a band with my boyfriend and was the only person I knew who could write music. He had just a week to turn something around and was paid £200.

While ITV stars today can sell-out clothes with one Instagram post, at the beginning of Loose Women, we had to ask the panellists to bring in their own outfits, as there was no money available for wardrobe.

‘For me, the most exciting thing was getting my hair and make-up done properly for the first time, which there was a budget for,’ recalls Jane. ‘I’d only ever done current affairs, where the sum-total of your make-up is a powder puff on your nose that’s probably just been used on Roy Hattersley.’

Once the show looked like a success its run kept being extended, which brought its own challenges. Having discovered I was pregnant on the day of the launch, by the time we came off air for a break in April 2000 I was five days over my due date and had to wear a headset to speak to the women, as I could no longer fit behind the desk in the studio gallery. I gave birth to Alice, who is now 24 and a TV producer herself, just two days after the series ended.

The numerous extensions also forced us to be chaotically nomadic, as we had to move from studio to studio. We would finish the show on a Friday and arrive somewhere new on the Monday, with our production manager, Jacqui Moore, having single-handedly moved the entire set and production over the weekend.

Once Loose Women was established, I imagined it would be a straightforward recommission and that I would return from maternity leave to pick up where we left off. But while I was away, there was a change of leadership at ITV and the new daytime boss decided to change the show’s name to Live Talk and move the production to Manchester, where it was made by an entirely new team and featured a different line-up of women.

It was depressing to see the show we had worked so hard on go into freefall and ultimately be cancelled.

Meanwhile, another fallout from the change of leadership at ITV was that Richard and Judy decided to leave ITV’s This Morning and defect to Channel 4. This had a disastrous impact on the show’s viewing figures, so, in an entirely unexpected move, I was asked by my boss at Granada TV to take over This Morning. Fern Britton had also been on maternity leave and we persuaded her to return early, to front the show with John Leslie.

A year or so later, once we had stabilised This Morning – and following yet another change of leadership at ITV – I was asked to launch Loose Women all over again. Oh, and this time it had to be produced from Norwich.

I started by calling up the original women – including Kaye, Nadia, Jane and Karren – and began to get excited as the ‘old gang’ agreed to get back together. We all slipped easily back into the rhythm of the show that we loved.

A breakthrough moment came when TV critic Kathryn Flett spent a day in the studio and wrote a piece celebrating the ‘extremely witty’ show’s ‘achingly simple format’ that allowed women to ‘shoot the feistily feminine breeze on their own terms’.

She put the show on the cultural map. So much so that it has since spawned successful spin-offs Loose Men and Loose Kids.

One thing I could never have predicted was the lifelong friendships that have resulted from working on the show. Jane attributes it to the daily production meeting: ‘We get to know everything about each other, which is like a massive therapy session and requires enormous trust.’

With so many strong characters, there have inevitably been presenters who don’t gel, but despite the odd blip, Nadia predicts Loose Women will still be going strong for years to come: ‘I remember saying to Kaye, when we were about two weeks in, “I suppose we’ll never do this again after this month, because we’ve spoken about most things now, haven’t we?” And Kaye’s reply was, “No, no, no. If you think about friendship, it’s a conversation that goes on for ever.” And she was right.