‘I’m sick of fan mail that concentrates on how I look’, says presenter

COUNTRYFILE STAR Ellie Harrison has said she is fed up of getting fan mail about her looks.

The presenter, 39, who recently revealed she had circular marks etched into her arm to show her devotion to her partner, has been a part of the BBC’s ruralfocused TV series since 2009.

Discussing the kind of mail she gets from viewers, she told Radio

Times magazine: “’Where do you get your boots from?’ That’s all I ever seem to get.

“And people always seem to comment on how a woman looks.”

But Autumnwatch host Chris Packham told Ms Harrison: “Just to reassure you, I get that too. I refuse to answer those because I consider them trite.”

Mr Packham, 56, also said he receives an “enormous number of photographs” asking him to identify creatures and “a lot of pictures of animal poo, asking which animal it belongs to.

“I don’t mind. I do seem to talk a lot about poo”.

Mr Packham added that children should be given more freedom around nature.

“Just let your kids out. Parents restrict their kids’ experience of nature – ‘Don’t climb the tree. Don’t get your feet wet. Mind the stinging nettles. Don’t go in the mud’.

“It stops the engagement process. Let them explore the natural world for themselves,” he said.

Ms Harrison agreed, telling the magazine: “It’s significant that nature makes us well. We know it in our hearts. There’s plenty of research about how it changes our brains, and GPs are even prescribing looking at a tree for five minutes for people with chronic depression. Any time in green space is good for us. It feels that we haven’t evolved fast enough for the life that we live now, which is why we have chronic stress and anxiety. Being in nature ameliorates that, and people feel that appreciation also when they see it on screen.”

The presenter said that one of her early memories of nature was when seeing a housefly stuck on flypaper.

“I had to rescue it. I got tweezers and a cupful of water, spending half an hour doing this poor thing absolutely no good whatsoever, and then feeling utterly wretched that it had died at human hands,” she said.