CLARE Frisby likes her tea strong. Two bags (Yorkshire, of course) with milk. It’s that brew that got her going in the middle of the night for the past 15 years when she would rise at 4am and drive from her home in York to BBC studios in Leeds to present the breakfast news on Look North.

She was never late, not once. Even in the foulest of weather, when bosses suggested she take a hotel room in Leeds, she turned them down.

“I told them I would be fine,” says Clare, with that cheeky grin that has won her legions of fans across the region.

And she was. That’s not to say there weren’t any hazards en route

“The things I’ve seen on my way to work!” begins Clare, who lives in Copmanthorpe with her two sons Freddie, six, and Ollie, 11. “I’ve rounded up horses, narrowly missed a deer, picked up and dropped off at a police station a man in pyjamas.

“Quite often, my car would make the first tracks in the snow on the A64.”

The lifestyle was “all consuming” says Clare, who will be 50 later this year and is now a single mum.

She said: “It became a way of life. I was bringing up two small children at that time. If they were poorly, I would be up through the night and at 3.30 I would be thinking: ‘better get to work’.”

Clare isn’t complaining. She doesn’t seem that type. She is a get-on-with-it sort of girl. Although from Kent, she is an honorary Yorkshire lass by virtue of having lived here for the past 25 years (and appears to have the prerequisite grit to warrant the honour).

“As a mum, it was tough. But that is how it is. Talk to any mum who works full time and they will tell you about juggling children, running a house - we all do it.”

Like other people who work unsociable hours, she had her routine off to a T. She would finish at 9.30am, then spend most of the day doing jobs around the house and preparing dinner. “I look back at it and wish I’d done more, like learnt Italian!”

But the early rises are no more. Clare has now switched to the lunchtime slot on Look North at 1.30pm and is the new presenter of the popular Radio York Saturday morning show, Finders Keepers.

Trouble is, she is still waking up at 4am. “A doctor friend told me that might never stop because my body clock is so attuned to getting up early.”

When we meet for a tea (yes, with those two teabags) at Cafe Concerto in the shadow of York Minster, there is no sign those early mornings have taken their toll. Her skin is peachy soft and radiant, practically line-free. She has great bone structure and her red hair looks as if she’s just left the salon. I tell her as much, and she is quick to deflect any talk of age - which can be a thorny issue for women presenters on TV.

“Age isn’t important. It is how you feel. We spend so little time as women thinking about ourselves. You are trying to deal with the children, your job, running a house. Now and then you have to take time out.”

For Clare, that means going running. “I’d love to be a member of a gym but you have to do what fits in with everything else you have to juggle. Running does that for me. I just have to pull on a pair of trainers and head out down the lane. It makes me feel better, keeps the weight off and clears my mind.”

Her favourite day is Monday, when she runs around the Bar Walls of York. I tell her that her fans will be waiting for her next week, wanting a selfie. Clare doesn’t mind that, and says she is always happy to oblige. Unlike some famous faces, her experience of social media has only been good and she has a positive relationship with her “fans”, many of whom took to Twitter to tell her how much they missed her in the morning.

But Clare is enjoying her new challenges. She writes, produces and presents the lunchtime bulletin, reminding us that she is a journalist as much as a presenter. “They says of the show-and-go presenter are long gone. I am first and foremost a journalist and reporter - it just happens that at 1.30 I go upstairs and sit on the sofa and read it to you.”

She wanted to be a journalist for as long as she could remember. “My first memory was sitting on my dad’s knee watching the fall of Saigon on the black and white TV.”

After studying politics at Hull university, she landed a traineeship with the BBC, starting at Radio York. She reported from abroad during the first Gulf War, where she saw veteran female broadcaster Kate Adie in operation. “Reporting on the Gulf War was a big eye opener for me. It changed the way I thought about journalism and women in journalism. It made me realise we need more diversity.”

Clare’s popularity rests on her natural ability as a broadcaster. It’s a skill you either have or haven’t - you can’t fake it. Clare reveals she picked up a top tip early in her career during work experience on Radio One. She met Steve Wright and asked him for advice. “He said: ‘sit in front of the microphone and imagine you are talking to them and telling them a story’.”

The words have guided Clare. “Sometimes as a news presenter, some of the things you have to say aren’t very nice and it is a question of trust: ‘I’m going to tell you something that is not very nice, but you need to hear this’.”

Some of the hardest broadcasts, she says, followed the death of Jo Cox, the Yorkshire MP for Batley and Spen, who was murdered during the EU referendum campaign.

“Look North coverage was excellent and went to the heart of how people across Yorkshire felt.”

Clare talks warmly about living in York and how she still gets a kick out of seeing the things tourists coo over every day. “I love the cosmopolitan feel, the heritage everywhere. To stand there and look at the biggest gothic cathedral in Europe makes me proud to call York my home.”

As a busy, single mum, whose free time is often spent as a “mummy taxi” ferrying her boys to sports fixtures, Clare says she has little time to explore the bustling cafe and restaurant scene in the city, or go out to the cinema and theatre.

But there is one place that she and her boys cherish - and that is the weekly trip to their favourite ice-cream parlour, LICCS, on Back Swinegate.

“One of my favourite things is LICCS and flicks, when we go for ice-cream every Friday then watch a movie. I know the owner Dawn and she always has a cup of tea ready for me.”

With two teabags, of course.