Countryfile’s Helen Skelton I was groped on TV while pregnant
Countryfile’s Helen Skelton tells India Sturgis about the day she was grabbed live on air, and why television is an unfair industry
Helen Skelton, the Countryfile presenter, is midway through a story about the time she was groped by a male interviewee during coverage for a sporting event in 2014 when she stops and shrugs – not a trace of self-pity evident.
“Basically, this guy grabbed me on the a--- when I was presenting live telly. I felt really awkward about it. I was pregnant at the time as well. I didn’t really know what to do. It’s intimidating and you don’t want to be the person who is being difficult and awkward. That’s just the culture that television breeds. No one wants to be difficult. You want to bring solutions, not problems. We are all ‘Happy, happy…’”
If there was an upside to it happening so publicly, it was that her colleagues saw what happened and took action.
“Colin Murray [a sports presenter on BBC Radio 5 Live] complained for me,” she explains from a corner of a pub in Leeds, near her home. “He said it wasn’t acceptable. He kicked off and said that needs dealing with. It was handled brilliantly because of that. I’d never thought about complaining.”
She raises the incident now, something she hasn’t spoken about before, not to fan the flames of #Metoo, the social media movement whereby people have shared stories of sexual abuse and harassment to demonstrate its prevalence, but to highlight a typical response of someone who finds themself in just such a situation at work – in her case, inaction through embarrassment.
“I don’t want it to become my identity,” she says. “The man in question was punished. There was a line drawn under it, and that was that.” It’s the sort of straight-talking that
Countryfile viewers have come to expect from the tenacious 34-year-old Cumbrian farmer’s daughter, since she presented her first show in 2008.
It would be wrong to ever underestimate Skelton. As well as a 12-year career spanning stints on
Newsround and Blue Peter and fronting BBC coverage for the 2016 Rio Olympic Games, she has broken world records for solo kayaking 2,010 miles down the Amazon, become the second woman ever to complete a 78-mile ultra-marathon in Namibia and the first person to cycle to the South Pole.
This is the second time we’ve met; the first was to discuss the intense scrutiny she faced for wearing a pair of shorts while presenting the swimming in Rio. She shrugged that off too, saying wasn’t it a shame people weren’t discussing what was happening in the pool.
On the #Metoo movement in general, she believes “we have to maintain a bit of perspective”, and references those in the US seeking to ban the word “man” and hashtags such as #allmenaretrash and #yesallmen, adding to a dangerous climate of misanthropy. “We are getting too wound up about it all, and losing the ability to actually change things. We run the risk of making our argument ridiculous,” she says.
Yet we’re not here to put the sisterhood to rights today; we’ve met to discuss her forthcoming battle for Sport Relief with Camilla Thurlow, from ITV’S Love Island. Next Friday, the two women will enter the boxing ring to raise money for some of the poorest countries in the world to combat malaria, and improve maternal and mental health services in the UK and Africa. There are also two other bouts: Made In Chelsea’s Spencer Matthews against former footballer Wayne Bridge, and S Club 7’s Hannah Spearritt taking on Vanessa White from the Saturdays.
“It’s the worst idea I’ve ever had,” deadpans Skelton, from behind a split lip; she has also already lost a tooth in training. Despite these minor setbacks, and not setting foot in a gym since giving birth to her second son, Louis, in April last year, she rates her chances. She doesn’t know Camilla and didn’t watch Love Island, but has earned herself the nickname “the Hell Raiser” from her trainer.
On fight night, her husband Richie Myler, a professional rugby player, will be in the audience, but not her two boys – Louis, now nearly one, and Ernie, two. “I tell them every day not to fight,” she laughs.
Skelton looks as fit as a fiddle: toned, lean and muscular in sports leggings, top and trainers (after this, she is off to a training session) – yet says she’s made peace with the physical changes that having children has had.
“After you have kids, you feel differently about your body. Aesthetically, am I happy with my body? No. I definitely think you come to view it as more functional. But you just get past it. My kids are my priority, then my husband, then my life, then work. I don’t have time to think about whether my a--- looks good.”
Before Christmas, the family moved from a remote spot in the south of France, where Richie had been playing for the Catalans Dragons, to Leeds, after he was offered a place with the Rhinos. Now they live in a house surrounded by woodland and football pitches.
Giving up a life of blissful rural isolation, croissants and wine in France for the West Yorkshire city has been a culture shock.
“I was in a bubble for a few years, she says. “I was away, spending all day with the kids, not seeing anyone or being bothered how I looked. I became much more relaxed about all that stuff.”
Now she’s back to juggling work around her young family and presenting documentaries for ITV about the side-effects of fat-burning pills and plastic recycling. “I get really angsty, like any working mum. You feel guilty if you do, you feel guilty if you don’t.”
Skelton grew up on a dairy farm
‘I’m not happy about what I’ve been paid… But I signed that contract’
near the Lake District with father Richard, mother Janet, and older brother Gavin, now a former footballer turned manager.
She got a degree in journalism from Cumbria Institute of the Arts before landing a slot on Radio Cumbria in 2005, becoming one of the youngest breakfast show presenters on the BBC. Three years later, Blue Peter snapped her up.
It’s not surprising to hear Skelton is concerned about the BBC gender pay gap, the depths of which were made public last summer when salaries of the corporation’s top earners were published – only a third were women, and the top seven were all male.
Matt Baker, her erstwhile Countryfile colleague and host of The One Show, was revealed to be making between £450,000 and £499,999 a year ( joint eighth in the rankings, with Claudia Winkleman). Skelton, who now works freelance, never expected to make the list, but found the results no less shocking.
“Those figures make me feel sick. I started on Blue Peter with a £24,000 salary for a 365-day contract. I would have been better off working in the supermarket,” she says, seriously.
Last October, a report into BBC salaries found men were being paid on average 9.3per cent more than women, and director general Tony Hall promised to close the gap by 2020. On Wednesday, ITN revealed that it pays men an average of 19.6per cent more than women.
“It’s an inherently unfair industry,” says Skelton. “I’m not happy about what I have been paid. I’m not happy about what some of my colleagues have been paid. But I signed that contract because the minute you don’t, there are 10 people behind you that will.
“Everyone asks me how to get into television. Ultimately, you have to work for free for years. As much as we enthuse about diversity, we are never going to be truly diverse because the system means only a certain section of society can do that.
“At the minute, people who live and work outside of the media are rolling their eyes and going: ‘Oh God, is everyone still going on about that?’ We have to be very careful that this doesn’t become a whingeing old boring argument. It needs to remain relevant. We need to – and I know this sounds awful – keep the argument sexy.
We have to keep it in the public eye.”