Why are TV wildlife stars all so endearingly DOTTY?
As Countryfile star admits scarring her arm for life as a love tribute to her partner...
CUDDLING crocodiles, swimming with sharks and trekking to the farthest flung corners of the world... it’s not your average nine-to-five.
And with challenges like this to confront day after day, it’s no wonder some of our best-loved nature presenters are a little more eccentric than most of us.
This week, Countryfile’s Ellie Harrison, the seemingly sensible blonde who has copresented the series since 2009, cheerfully revealed that she had her arm scarred with a blade as a mark of devotion to her partner.
Meanwhile the show’s former host, Kate Humble, who has been married for 25 years, admitted to having a ‘panic attack’ at even the thought of becoming a mother. And she loves getting naked in the great outdoors.
But Ellie and Kate are far from alone in their quirky admissions.
From the one who dreams of being eaten by sharks to the one who serves fried rat at dinner parties, SARAH RAINEY rounds up Britain’s gloriously dotty nature presenters . . .
LET WASPS LICK JAM OFF HIS FIVE-YEAR-OLD’S FACE
CHRIS PACKHAM, 55, made his name presenting the children’s nature series, The Really Wild Show, from 1986 to 1995, before graduating to Springwatch in 2009.
The brother of fashion designer Jenny Packham, a favourite of the Duchess of Cambridge, his offbeat presenting style has gained him legions of fans — and he received plaudits last year for admitting he has Asperger’s syndrome.
Packham claims his pet dogs, Itchy and Scratchy, saved him from suicide — and when Itchy died in December, he decided to store his body in the freezer at his New Forest farmhouse until he can be cremated.
Last year, the presenter’s parenting abilities were called into question when he revealed he once let wasps lick jam off his step-daughter Megan’s face when she was just five.
This was a bizarre bid to ensure she wouldn’t be afraid of insects. ‘We laughed about it — well, after she’d finished crying,’ he said.
He also encourages children to eat tadpoles, something he did as a boy.
One of his quirkier traits was uncovered by music fans back in 2009, who realised Packham was shoehorning song titles and lyrics by the band The Smiths into his on-screen dialogue. He has since sneaked references to David Bowie, Madness, The Cure and Manic Street Preachers into the show, and in 2015’s Autumnwatch inserted the titles of 22 James Bond films.
SECRET WEAPON... ELEPHANT DUNG
THE birdwatcher, musician and former member of The Goodies Bill Oddie is famed for his unusual and often outspoken ways.
The 75-yearold presenter attracted criticism on-screen for his innuendo-laden nature commentary on Springwatch, particularly when describing animals’ mating rituals.
In 2008, doing the voiceover for a scene between two sparrows, he said: ‘The female is asking for it — and getting it, basically. She is doing that wing-fluttering thing like that, as if to say, “I’m a baby, feed me” . . . and is getting quite the opposite. That’s a wing-trembler she’s had just there.’
Oddie has talked movingly of his depression. He said he attempted suicide twice after being axed from Springwatch in 2010. He also has strong views on population control, despite having three children.
Oddie alienated cat lovers by describing the pets as ‘coldhearted killers’ and last year told of waging war on a neighbour’s cat that invaded his North London garden.
The presenter’s methods of attack included using elephant dung — felines are said to hate the smell.
LOVE MESSAGE CUT IN HER ARM
COUNTRYFILE presenter Ellie Harrison (main picture) shrugged off her butter-wouldn’t-melt image this week as she spoke about dabbling in drugs and attending drunken raves during an expletiveridden interview in the Mail on Sunday’s Event magazine.
But the most shocking revelation was that Harrison, 39, has ten circular scars etched into her left forearm, which she paid an extreme tattoo artist to do with a blade as a sign of her devotion to doctor partner Matt Goodman, with whom she has three children.
‘It’s called scarification,’ she explained. ‘There are only a few places you can go for it in the whole country. We’re not married, but this was my great offering to him. ’ She added: ‘It really f ****** hurts.’
Harrison, who lives in Gloucestershire, made her TV debut filling in for Michaela Strachan while she was on maternity leave in 2005 and joined The One Show before being chosen for Countryfile. In 2011, she posed naked in a murky bathtub full of seaweed on the show. Video clips of the scene have racked up more than 100,000 views online.
I WANT SHARKS TO EAT MY BODY
WITH a list of credits that include Countryfile, Autumnwatch and Springwatch, Michaela Strachan is one of Britain’s most familiar wildlife presenters.
Strachan, 51, had a brief music career as ‘Michaela’, with two singles in the top 100, and won the ‘Ladies World Gurning Crown’, which involved making grotesque faces, for an episode of Countryfile in 2002.
She courted controversy last year by slamming the Great British Bake Off for ‘promoting obesity’, having previously described the series as ‘obsessive and obscene’.
But her craziest moment came when she disclosed her funeral plans — which involve being put in a tank and having her body eaten by sharks.
Strachan, who lives in South Africa with her partner, their son and his children, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014 and had a double mastec-
tomy. She dubbed her reconstructed breasts ‘pina’ and ‘colada’.
SOFTIE WITH BIRD SONG ON HIS iPOD
He’S been bitten by crocodiles, stung by bullet ants and broke his back tumbling 25ft down a cliff face, but TV naturalist Steve Backshall is a bit of a softie.
Not only did he break down in tears while proposing to Helen Glover, his Olympic rower wife, in 2015, but he listens to gentle birdsong, which he keeps on a loop on his iPod.
‘I’m hoping when I go somewhere and hear a bird, I’ll be able to identify it,’ he explains.
A RUSSIAN SPY SPIKED MY DRINK
ADVENTURER Ben Fogle, who shot to fame on island reality show Castaway in 2000, has been stabbed in Costa rica, bitten by a flesh-eating parasite in the Peruvian jungle and had his car hijacked in London.
But perhaps his most curious tale centres on an evening in a Gloucestershire pub in 2013, during which Fogle’s drink was spiked with LSd.
He said it was a ‘strange coincidence’ that ryan Fogle, a CIA agent who shared his surname, was arrested in russia a few months later. ‘My drink was spiked just a week after I returned from russia . . . so they could have had us confused,’ he mused. Fogle, 43, who is married with two children, made headlines last year with an extraordinary attack on Lego, which he claimed had ‘stunted creativity’ and ‘ruined the world’.
TASTE FOR AN ODD THIRST QUENCHER
SURVIVALIST and nature presenter Bear Grylls takes the biscuit for doing odd and downright disgusting things on TV. Among the ‘foodstuffs’ he has consumed over the years are reindeer blood, elephant poo, raw snake, poisonous spider and goat’s testicles.
On his discovery Channel series Man Vs Wild, which was terminated in 2011 over contract disputes, he climbed inside a camel carcass for shelter, wrestled an alligator and held a dinner party in a hot air balloon at 7,200ft.
But he sparked outrage last year when celebrities on his ITV series, Mission Survive, were instructed to drink their own urine in order to stay hydrated.
Grylls, 42, real name Michael, frequently does so himself — but insists he would only do it in the wild, and never at home. ‘I’m weird, but I’m not that weird,’ he said recently.
UGLY ANIMALS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!
SHE’S been dubbed the ‘new david Attenborough’ and the ‘Steven Spielberg of sloth filmmaking’, but what wildlife presenter Lucy Cooke cares most about is overturning the ‘tyranny of cute’. Our obsession with cute, cuddly animals, insists Lucy, is endangering the lives of less attractive animals such as amphibians, reptiles and monkeys.
She became so besotted with sloths, the slow-moving, two-toed mammals, that she founded the Sloth Appreciation Society, wrote a book about them and uploaded videos of baby sloths in a bucket, which garnered more than a million views online.
‘You’ve seen one baby panda, in my opinion, you’ve seen them all,’ Cooke, 47, explains. ‘But while the world drools over cuddly, furry things, a whole class of extraordinary animals is being erased.’