‘I don’t need something called home… the planet is my home’

With ‘Life on Earth’ set for Dublin, Liz Bonnin spoke to Donal Lynch about racism, national identity, ambition and the weirdness of life in Brexit Britain

LIZ Bonnin still remembers the moment she realised she was “different” in Ireland. She was 16, and walking on the street in Dublin on her own. “A group of boys shouted at me and called me the N-word,” she recalls. “I remember thinking that’s very strange and weird. I did ballet before I moved to Ireland and we didn’t have ballet when we came so I went to Irish dancing instead and I remember all the old dears commenting ‘oh who’s that lovely little brown girl dancing?’, but it was all with love and kindness. This (the situation with the boys) was obviously very different. And it was the first moment I realised that I was different.”

It was a formative and no doubt painful moment, but in the intervening years Bonnin’s ability to shrug off adversity and stand out from the crowd has been her greatest asset. In the last few years she has established herself as one of the top nature presenters in Britain and an heir apparent to David Attenborough. When Attenborough’s show Life on Earth II comes to the 3Arena next year, Bonnin (43) will take over the presenting duties.

“We project clips to this enormous HD screen; I’ve seen what it looks like, it’s so much more emotive than watching it on the telly,” she explains. “You have a live orchestra playing the music of Hans Zimmer. It’s very emotional and I’ll probably shed a tear, so I’m grateful that there’s rehearsals first.”

Modern nature programming walks a fine line between showcasing the lush escapism that audiences love and delivering the robust environmentalist message that we need to hear. Chris Packham, another of Bonnin’s colleagues at the BBC, recently said that the public were only being shown nature at its “very best”.

Bonnin recently made a hard-hitting documentary on plastics and has another forthcoming on the environmental impact of the meat industry, but she’s aware that a certain cohort of people are turned off by forceful nature documentaries.

“Nobody can say that the programmes failed us because they didn’t tell us enough (about the environmental crisis),” she says.

“After I made the plastics documentary I had many people telling me ‘oh I couldn’t bear to watch it’ and what I realised was that there is a large number of people… how do we fire those people to care about the natural world? It’s not to shy away from issues, it’s to say you need different kinds of programming to reach different demographics. When I watched nature programming as a child it instilled awe and respect for the animals we share the planet with.”

That childhood was spent between France — she still has a French passport and spends a lot of time in the south of the country — and Ireland, where her family moved to when she was nine.

“It was huge culture shock to me,” she recalls of the move. “In France we were used to effectively living outside. In Ireland it seemed like it was always raining — we were inside a lot of the time.”

As a girl, she was “eager to let go and try out new things”, and her youth was marked by early fame and experimentation with different identities. She was an academic teenager and went to Trinity College to study biochemistry. After completing her degree, she joined a girl band called Chill, who were managed by nightclub impresario Valerie Roe. Despite winning a recording contract with Polydor and the endorsement of boyband king Louis Walsh, the group split before completing their first album.

While she insists science was her first love, Bonnin continued to make inroads at the fame game in the years that followed. She got a second shot shortly afterwards when working on youth television at RTE — including spells with Zig and Zag and on fashion show Off The Rails. But while many of her peers were happy to climb the ladder at Montrose, Bonnin had bigger ambitions.

After a group of Channel 4 suits came to Dublin to headhunt her, she moved to London. Soon she found herself presenting Channel 4’s short-lived breakfast show RI:SE and guesting on Top of the Pops during its final years.

“It sounds like it was all part of

a master plan but I didn’t plan anything really,” she recalls.

“The executives from Channel 4 came to Ireland and said ‘do you want to come to London for this job?’ Over the following few years I went to LA and on all these junkets and met some huge stars. And I was happy to do all those things because I always knew eventually that I would go back to academia and science. I wasn’t moving over thinking ‘I’m going to make it in the Big Smoke’, I moved over thinking ‘I may as well do this for a while’.”

The fame made her something of an It girl in the British media. Lads’ mag FHM made her an offer to pose for them, but Bonnin refused and set her sights on burnishing her science credentials with a view to moving into nature programming.

In 2008 she moved to Nepal to begin a research master’s degree on tigers, and she says it was a transformative experience. “The master’s nearly broke me because I wanted it so badly,” she recalls.

“I was trying for three months and I had people telling me to give it up, but to my detriment I am stubborn. My equipment was lost and I remember going to bed crying thinking I was going to fail when I’d saved up with my TV money to do it. In the end I worked like a lunatic and ended up coming first in my class.”

The combination of her science expertise and her presenting experience made her an irresistible prospect for the BBC, but even as she climbed through the ranks, presenting bigger and bigger nature programmes, there were those who said she was undervalued.

Writing two years ago in the Daily Mail, TV critic Darren Boyle compared her to Matt Baker, the presenter of Countryfile and The One Show, who earns around £450,000 a year.

“How symbolic that (Baker) was accompanied by one of those underpaid women presenters, Liz Bonnin, whose talents make her twice the presenter he’ll ever be and whose name doesn’t appear on the BBC Rich List. Baker is paid at least three times more than wildlife expert Bonnin, who got a master’s in animal conservation with the Zoological Society of London and Royal Veterinary College,” he wrote.

“Well, perhaps naively I was never aware of the imbalance in pay coming up the ranks,” Bonnin explains now. “Now I am much more aware of all of that, but when you’re fighting a battle for the planet and to take big industry to task, you have to sort of pick your battles.

‘The master’s in Nepal nearly broke me because I wanted it so badly’

“I have a lot on my plate. I wasn’t as aware as I should have been about issues around pay back in the day. I wasn’t aware that (equality of pay at the BBC) was an issue and I’m embarrassed to say that.”

Bonnin’s career has hit its stride at a moment when environmental issues have taken centre stage in the news.

She is particularly heartened by the campaigning of Greta Thunberg and watched the young Swedish woman’s UN General Assembly speech with admiration.

“I saw a young lady who has been demonised — people have said that she has a mental illness — and I’d say shame on those people. She started off a year ago with one little placard and now she has mobilised millions of people all around the world.

“She has put her life on hold to fight for the future of her generation. In the speech she sounded fed up and angry that the grown-ups in the room smile at her and tell her well done when they’re not doing enough to protect the planet. The tokenism, the incremental change, is all greenwashing. Nothing has changed, it is business as usual.”

Bonnin’s new project is a new BBC documentary on the meat industry and its impact on the environment.

“It’s a global story, and we take examples from all over the world,” she explains. “I don’t eat red meat any more. I still eat a little organic meat. You don’t have to give up meat completely, it’s about knowing where your meat comes from.”

She is an Irish person in Britain in an era of Brexit, and she finds it “slightly weird” that she now has to apply for settled status in a country where she has made her home for years.

“When Brexit was announced, I realised that I really am European. I think Brexit shows that we really haven’t learned from our mistakes. There is a disenfranchisement and disconnection from politics that we are seeing the world over. It’s dangerous and I feel like we’re going back a step.

“In Britain we’re losing researchers and funding for science at a staggering rate. I really hope Brexit doesn’t go ahead.”

Bonnin firmly guards her privacy and won’t be drawn on anything to do with family or relationships. Despite her identification as European, she still struggles to say where is really home.

“It’s a question that I still don’t know how to answer,” she says. “I don’t need something that’s called ‘home’ — the planet is my home, as corny as that sounds.

“That’s said, I’d say the south of France comes closest because I love the food, the wine, the cheese. I’d love a little converted farmhouse, with a couple of dogs, a couple of cats, that’s where I see myself breathing and that’s what I want to make happen. But I’m just so damn busy!”

Liz Bonnin, nature presenter, main pic, Greta Thunberg, climate activist, inset