Strictly favourite Susanna Reid: No cliff edge for female presenters now Earlier this year, the Older Women's Commission, established by Harriet Harman, the Labour Party's deputy leader, released figures showing 82 per cent of television presenters over the age of 50 are men. Age has not been a barrier to Reid's continued success on Strictly. Despite being older than her remaining female rivals, Reid, a mother-of-three, went into Saturday night's Strictly Come Dancing semi-final as favourite to win the competition, even though judges had marked her out as the weakest of the remaining five celebrity dancers. The public vote is keeping her in the contest and is likely to send her to the final after today's [Sunday's] results show. Dancing with Kevin Clifton, her professional dance partner, the couple have become household favourites. Clifton, in his first year on the show, has said how surprised he is by Reid's apparent youthfulness and suggested that - despite being 12 years her junior - cannot always match her "energy levels." Since taking on the Strictly challenge, Reid received permission from her bosses to take Mondays off from the day job, allowing her to spend a little bit more time with her three young children Sam, 11, Finn, nine, and Jack, eight. With Strictly filmed at weekends, she feared it would eat into her precious time with her boys and her partner - and their father - Dominic Cotton. Her schedule is gruelling, even before adding in the rigours of the dance competition and the training that goes with it. Her working day begins with waking at 3.30am in a hotel in Salford - where BBC Breakfast is now filmed - and which is followed by a live, three-hour television programme. She then takes a 200-mile trip back to London, just in time to pick the boys up from school and then a train back to London at the end of the evening, allowing her to be in Salford for the next day's filming. She has praised her partner - she calls him Dom - as 'brilliant" and insists she could never have done Strictly without his support. Mr Cotton, 47, is now communications director for a children's charity, although the couple first met when they were both working on BBC Breakfast, when it was filmed in London. Reid recalled: "We went to the pub one night with a whole load of people and suddenly everyone disappeared and I said to him, 'You know what? I think that we're going to end up together and have children together. And he looked at me and went , 'We had better go out on a date then, hadn't we? And 13 years later, here we are with three children. I knew. I just knew.