(Image: BBC)
Brought up in Fife, where her mother worked for Mothercare, an early attempt by the current director of BBC Scotland to get work experience at a local radio station was unsuccessful.
Undeterred, after leaving Edinburgh University she worked for DC Thomson and Radio Forth. She has worked in the commercial sector, but most of her career has been at the BBC, which she joined in 1996. Her cv includes stints as executive editor of Question Time and head of news at Radio 5 Live.
From London she moved to BBC Midlands and then to BBC Scotland in Glasgow, where she was the launch editor of the ill-fated The Nine. It was a rare but not a unique failure.
Together with Gary Smith, then head of news, she gave an interview to the Reuters Institute in which she stressed the importance of having a plan for closure before staff heard the bad news.
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“We could point to the fact that money was staying in Scotland and would be invested in other journalism,” she said. The same strategy of getting your defence in first applied to the boldest move she has made at BBC Scotland - axing River City. Then, she was able to say that the money saved would be going into three new drama series, none of which has yet appeared on screen. Filming on The Young Team began this week, roughly 19 months after the commission was announced.
Away from the office, she keeps her private life just that. one former colleague, who worked with her on a magazine-type show, said she was very encouraging as a manager.
“She was nice. Kind of lived up to her name, like Roald Dahl’s Miss Honey. The name fitted the character.
“Her only problem was that she wasn't very visual. She was used to talking heads and spoken word, having come from radio and Question Time. I’m pretty sure she left [the job] early, she just wasn’t suited to the programme.”
Another former colleague from her early days recalls a thing for expensive handbags that had to sit on her desk, never the floor.
Generally the picture is of a BBC staffer who has risen quietly up the ranks. She is never outspoken or openly passionate, a rare exception being when she said that she would defend the BBC’s coverage of the Scottish independence referendum “until my dying day”.
Glasgow seems to have brought out the bold in her, however. She hired Victoria Easton Riley from Bauer as head of audio and events and stood by her when she cleared out big-name BBC presenters and replaced them with commercial radio DJs.
Unlike her boss, Matt Brittin, Valentine is an experienced TV and radio journalist. She is unafraid to wield the axe if she thinks something is not working, or she needs the money for something else. Such is the political sensitivity surrounding the closure of the BBC Scotland channel it is Brittin, hitherto a salami slicer, who would have had to sign off the move. That won’t stop it becoming part of her career history.