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Hoda Kotb is leaving her role on NBC’s Today show after 26 years with the network.

“I realized that it was time for me to turn the page at 60, and to try something new,” the host said on Thursday’s (September 26) episode of the long-running morning show.

“I remembered standing outside looking at these beautiful bunch of people with these gorgeous signs, and I thought, ‘This is what the top of the wave feels like for me.’ And I thought it can’t get better, and I decided that this is the right time for me to kind of move on,” Kotb shared tearfully.

The broadcast journalist, who turned 60 last month, explained that spending time with her young daughters, Haley, seven, and Hope, five, was also an important part of her decision.

“Obviously I had my kiddos late in life, and I was thinking that they deserve a bigger piece of my time pie that I have,” she said. “I feel like we only have a finite amount of time.

“And so, with all that being said, this is the hardest thing in the world,” Kotb said.

She clarified that she will continue hosting the Today show alongside co-anchor Savannah Guthrie through January 1, 2025.

“It’s kind of a big deal for me,” Kotb said. “I’ve been practicing so I wouldn’t cry, but anyway, I did.”

Kotb has been an integral part of NBC News for nearly three decades, having first joined the network in 1998 as a correspondent on its weekly nighttime show Dateline.

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In 2008, she moved on to co-host the fourth hour of the Today show with Kathie Lee Gifford and then Jenna Bush Hager in 2019.

After NBC fired Today show host Matt Lauer in 2017 following accusations of sexual misconduct, Kotb stepped in alongside Guthrie as a temporary replacement. Weeks later, her role became permanent, as viewers responded well to her and Guthrie.

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Speaking to the New York Times, Guthrie commended Kotb’s decision, saying: “It takes such guts to leave a place where you’re so comfortable, so beloved. There’s nothing rash about this.”

She added that she was “super proud” and “super heartbroken” about the news.

Kotb further shared her plans to “remain a part of the NBC family” in a letter with the Today staff.

“Happily and gratefully, I plan to remain a part of the NBC family, the longest work relationship I’ve been lucky enough to hold close to my heart. I’ll be around. How could I not? Family is family and you all will always be a part of mine.”

ALL-singing, all-dancing, celebrity flasher John ­Barrowman exited public life this week, not with the flourish and round of applause he’d probably have wanted.

But with a puddle of vomit at his feet and the words “sack of s**t” ringing in his ears as he quit Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins just 32 minutes after the latest contestants had reached their base in New Zealand.

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This self-styled “centre of the universe” was back on Lorraine’s ITV show the next morning trying to explain that he’d been “true to himself” and blah blah blah.

Barrowman knew, though, that if there’s one thing the long-suffering British won’t forgive, it’s a quitter who shuns redemption.

He’s gone. It was public service broadcasting, then, of the highest and most brutal order from SAS: WDW, a show that, to ­paraphrase the great Johnny Carson on the Oscars, is 45 minutes of sparkling entertainment spread over an hour-long show.

First clue to the 15-minute lag arrived, right at the start of this series, with the ­appearance of a psychologist named Alia Bojilova, who ­specialises in declarations of the bleeding obvious and telling us the new celebrities are: “A complicated bunch.”

I’ll say. For “complicated”, though, you can probably guess that, with the exception of the sports stars, they are every sort of pointless, bone-brained public nuisance, from Boris’s steely-eyed sister Rachel Johnson to “comedian” Tez Ilyas, whose opening pitch asked us to “imagine the smugness that would emanate from me if I passed this course”.

Or indeed, even if he didn’t, because his self- satisfaction levels were radioactive long before it started.

Corbynista Tez, incidentally, used to sit on something called the Live Comedy ­Association but had to quit in 2020 due to his appalling behaviour towards women.

Yet the slightly surprising thing is, neither Tez nor ­Barrowman, whose flashing got him ­cancelled in 2021, is the most obviously annoying contestant on SAS: WDW.

How could they be, when there are no fewer than three recruits who’ve come through the ranks of The Only Way Is Essex — a show that, like red-necked parakeets, has infested every single corner of British television, so that almost no part is now free from their squawking self- obsession.

By far the worst of them here is Bobby Norris, whose act is pitched somewhere between Mick ­Jagger and Frank Spencer, and during the brief moments when he wasn’t vomiting into a bin-liner made a noise that appeared in the subtitles as: “NEEEEEEEEEE.”

He’d have failed every single challenge set for him by the SAS staff as well but for the emergence of an even bigger pain in the ar*e called Marnie Simpson, from Geordie Shore, who made the huge strategic error of back-chatting regiment legend Billy Billinghm after losing the dam descent to Bobby on account of the fact she “couldn’t breathe”.

“If you talk back to me one more time,” said Billy, leaving no one in any doubt he’d act upon it, “you’re going to become amphibious. I’m going to throw you in the f***ing water. F***ing spoilt little kid. Buck your ideas up, gobs***e.”

Bone-brained

The stunned silence that ­followed should’ve won the show awards as you could almost hear the great mass of viewers applauding Billy, the first man ever to put Marnie in her place.

It’s at this point, though, you got the sense that the SAS boys took a backwards step, TV people took over and Marnie was called in for “questioning” to see why she challenges authority (see ­earlier).

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These are not the brutal encounters in SAS: WDW of yore, however.

They are now shoulders to cry on and an invitation for the celebrities to unburden themselves of every minor “mental health” ­set-back in life they’ve ever suffered.

It’s exactly the sort of cliched comfort zone, in other words, from which I thought the show was meant to be removing these cry babies, and I’ve no idea why SAS: WDW indulges them as there isn’t a ­single gap ­anywhere in the TV market for Z-list sob ­stories.

Salvation through tears is the last thing that’s needed here, in fact, with the ultimate goal surely being to vanish most of the contestants just as effectively as it removed John Barrowman who, last time I looked, was trying to talk up his tour of Britain, on ­Lorraine’s show.

“It’s me and a piano.”

No audience. Just John and a piano.

GC? IT’S MUMBA JUMBA

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FILLING the screen like a diabetic Honey Monster, Gemma Collins boldly announced that last night was time to find out: “Why I am the way I am.

“Because, at the moment, it feels like I’m from outer space.”

A development that might’ve ruled out intelligent life on Mars but would definitely have led to a more interesting episode of BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are?, which rather lost me when The Brentwood Behemoth revealed: “I’ve got a lot of family in Wales” and I realised she was talking about the country rather than the animals.

The wider problem here, of course, is that, like so much else on the BBC, WDYTYA has been sacrificed to the cult of youth and fashionable political issues, like mental health, slavery and the excesses of the British Empire, with The GC’s episode being no different.

As interesting as it ever got, in fact, was the discovery of a “schizophrenic” grand-mother, on her maternal side and a great-grand- father “who was ill with lumba . . . jumba, help me aaaaht?”

“Lumbago.”

Nearly an hour later, it emerged that, for all the accompanying wows, Gemma’s Essex-based family had barely moved 20 miles down the A12, over several hundred years, having first crawled out of the primordial swamp at a pace that could not have been better named or serviced.

“Foulness Island,” explained narrator Phil Davis, “is owned by the Ministry of Defence.

“It’s used for the testing of explosives, so access is restricted, but Gemma has been given a special invite.”

And as far as I’m concerned, can visit any time she likes.

Unexpected morons in the bagging area

THE Chase, Bradley Walsh: “The word memorandum is often abbreviated to what four-letter word?” Phil: “Mem.”

Bradley Walsh: “To remain calm and be prepared for an emergency is said to keep your powder . . . ?” Namuli: “Wet.”

Tipping Point, Ben Shephard: “The word used to refer to land on the edge of a sea . . . SHORE . . . is an anagram of which equine ­animal?”

Bill: “Beach.”

And my favourite answer of the week, Mastermind, Clive Myrie: “In the 1980s, Jocky Wilson, John Lowe and Keith Deller all won the world championship in what indoor sport?”

Emma: “Cycling.”

Lookalike of the week

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Sent in by Arthur Godfrey, of Aylesford, Kent.