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HOW MY PEDIGREE PORKERS BECAME FILM STARS
In this enchanting extract from his new book, Countryfile presenter Adam Henson tells how the rare breed pigs his father raised on their farm brought home the bacon in more ways than one
When I was a young man, a friend asked what my dream job would be if I wasn’t a farmer. ‘I’d like to be David Attenborough,’ I replied a little embarrassed, not believing such a glamorous and adventurous career in the natural world would ever be open to me. But thanks to Countryfile, the BBC’s farming and rural affairs magazine show, I have fulfilled that crazy ambition. I remember on one of my first assignments as a presenter for the programme my joy in a boat off the island of Mull in Scotland as shoals of dolphins, porpoises and minke whales surfaced around us. ‘My heart is pounding here!’ I told the viewers in what was my very own Attenborough moment. I was living the dream. I had come a long way for a country boy.
My childhood on Bemborough Farm in the heart of the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire was idyllic. I’m sure there must be minus points to growing up surrounded by animals, with acres of fields and woods to run and roam and play in – but, try as I might, I can’t remember what they were. My memories are of fun, adventure and, most of all, freedom.
For a curious, wide- eyed nipper, every day brought some new distraction to investigate and explore. As soon as I could walk, I would be at my dad’s side like a shadow as he trudged around the farm. I think he saw in me the same keen, excited young boy he’d been when 30 years earlier he’d escaped f rom his urban upbringing in London and moved to the country to take up farming. He loved what he did and passed his passion on to me.
He taught me so much as I helped feed the chickens and rabbits and move the animals around. But I took some knocks along the way. I remember him herding 300 sheep down a lane and me – a kid at the time – being placed in a gap in a wall to stop them escaping. But the flock had a mind of its own, ran at me and trampled me into the mud as they fled in the wrong direction, leaving me spitting dirt from my mouth and crying my eyes out. ‘I’m so sorry, Dad, I just couldn’t stop them!’ I wailed. It was a valuable lesson learned early on that in life, if you’re knocked down, you have to get up, brush yourself down and carry on.
I also learned the joys of nature, walking the dogs on a crisp spring morning and listening to the dawn chorus, seeing the grass starting to grow in the fields after a hard winter and newborn lambs tottering after their mothers. The wonder of it all has never left me.
But Joe Henson, my dad, was no ordinary farmer, content to grow fields of barley with a few sheep on the side. What excited him was conserving rare breeds of livestock, beginning with two Gloucestershire Old Spot pigs. He expanded massively in 1971 when Whipsnade Zoo was getting rid of its collection of rare- breed farm animals, jettisoning them to make way for a more exotic herd of white rhinos. Dad took the rejects – Highland cattle , Longhorns, Jacob and Soays sheep – reasoning that he could charge the public to come and see them.
Thus was born the Cotswold Farm Park, a visionary venture but a very r isky one. Dad’s mates thought he had gone mad: ‘Nobody will pay to see farm animals! You see one sheep, you’ve seen ’em all!’ was the general reaction. But it proved a success from the start. In its first year, 20,000 visitors came to Bemborough and it is still thriving as both an attraction and a working farm 45 years later, with me as its proud custodian after Dad’s retirement in 1999 and his death last year. It was his life’s work and now it is mine.
One of the first visitors to the farm park all those years ago was Johnny Morris, wise- cracking host of the BBC children’s TV show Animal Magic and renowned for mimicking animals. He came with a film crew and interviewed Dad, who turned out to be a natural on the telly. It wasn’t really a surprise. There was always a large dollop of the showman about him, inherited from his own father, Leslie Henson, a music hall comedian of the 1920s and 1930s who became a West End star and a film director and cofounder of ENSA, the organisation that entertained the troops during the Second World War.
As a result of that first interview, Dad became an occasional presenter on Animal Magic and thereafter was often roped in on lots of different programmes as the ‘tame farm-
‘She trotted after Colin Firth like a besotted lover’
er’. We got used to booms and mikes around the cowsheds and pigsties. It all seemed amazing to me. Aged seven, I was mingling with TV stars! There were two in the family anyway. Dad’s younger brother was the stage and screen actor Nicky Henson, who for a while was married to actress Una Stubbs. Auntie Una was giggly and sort of ditzy, a lot like her TV persona as Alf Garnett’s daughter in Till Death Us Do Part. ( More recently you may have seen her as the landlady of 221b Baker Street in the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock series.) I loved their cheery visits to the farm.
Over the years we had many more brushes with showbusiness. One of our sidelines was to provide animals for films, including a pig named Sally for the title role in The Hour Of The Pig, about a pig being charged with murder in 15th-century France. Sally, an Iron Age porker – a hybrid of a wild boar and a Tamworth sow – took a shine to Colin Firth, who played the defence lawyer, and trotted after him on set like a besotted lover. She even bit another actor who inadvertently came between them. When Sally had her next litter of piglets, Firth sent her a card.
Various livestock of ours are also in Mel Gibson’s Braveheart, and as a teenager I made an appearance as a scruffy peasant leading oxen across a field. For 101 Dalmatians, I trained a Gloucestershire Old Spot pig called Princess to sit on command, so she could squat on Glenn Close, who was playing Cruella de Vil.
But there could be moments of unexpected drama, as when the artist Damien Hirst ordered a black ram for a photo shoot at Sotheby’s in London. His latest work was a ram cut in half and pickled inside a glass tank, and a magazine wanted a picture with a living black ram and a naked female model alongside it.
At the photo shoot, our ram acted as all rams do when they see another of their kind. It fixed the pickled carcass with a glare and lowered its head to charge. Fortunately our handler spotted the signs and managed to grab it just in time. Rams pack a serious punch and it would easily have smashed the glass tank. Hirst’s pickled ram later sold for millions of pounds.
Through all this, my chief love remained the farm, as it still is. But farming is a precarious business, as I discovered when Britain was hit by a foot-and-mouth epidemic in 2001. Movement of livestock was banned and farms went into virtual quarantine. Ten million animals were slaughtered. If it reached us, we would have to kill everything, including those precious rare breeds my father had built up over decades at the farm park. Luckily our animals remained healthy, but we couldn’t move them, sell them or display them to the public.
Suddenly we basically had no income stream. We were in deep trouble and I was sleepless with worry, particularly when the bank we’d been with for years refused to help tide us over with an overdraft, and our insurers tried to avoid paying for our losses. We survived by the skin of our teeth, though the epidemic cost us £100,000 and crippled us financially. We could easily have gone under, and very nearly did. If you’re a farmer, you’re in the lap of the gods.
But it turned out that the gods were smiling after all. Because in that same year, out of the blue, a whole new career beckoned. Countryfile was advertising for a new presenter. ‘You ought to go in for it,’ said my partner, Charlie, who once worked in television. I didn’t take her seriously. I’m a farmer, not a TV presenter. But we were still seriously skint after the horrendous year we’d just endured. I decided to give it a go.
With Charlie’s help I put together an audition tape, with a bull and a goat from the farm. The bull got bored and wandered off as I rambled on about myself and the goat bleated every time I opened my mouth to talk to the camera. But it must have done the trick because – from 3,500 applicants – I got the job. I couldn’t believe it. Me, yes, me, I was to be the legendary John Craven’s on-screen sidekick!
Well, maybe not. There was a catch. The BBC was looking for a berth for Ben Fogle, who had just emerged as the star of Castaway, the reality TV series shot on the Hebridean island of Taransay. Some BBC executives saw him as perfect for Countryfile. Ditch the ginger-haired farm boy from the Cotswolds, they urged. I was offered the consolation prize of... a single day’s presenting.
Huh? T ha t wasn’t what it had said on the t in! How had that happened? I felt let down. I not unreasonably thought it was a full-time job I was auditioning for. Dad was philosophical. ‘Adam, it’s the BBC,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Go along for the day, make the tea and carry the tripod for the cameraman. Who knows what might come of it?’
It was good advice because in the end the BBC executives relented and allowed Countryfile to have two new presenters. Ben and I were both hired. And that’s how my television career began – and a decade and a half later it’s still going strong. Lucky me!
‘I was to be John Craven’s new sidekick. Me, yes me!’