A peek into Kate Humble’s rural life

Humble By Nature is a whistle-stop event that will see Kate visit a smattering of UK theatres, including Shrewsbury’s Theatre Severn, on April 6. An Evening With Kate Humble promises to take audiences on an uplifting, inspiring, funny and emotional rollercoaster of a journey.

Kate is best known for shows including BBC’s Animal Park, Springwatch and Lambing Live, as well as the recent Channel 5 series Escape To The Farm, and current hit Kate Humble’s Coastal Britain. And as Kate’s taking to the road, fans can expect tales of travel, adventures, animals and more when Humble By Nature visits.

She’d like to say she’s looking forward to visiting. The truth, however, is that she’s terrified. “The build-up to the tour is awful. It’s still some distance away, but now, I’m really scared. Up until you go up on stage, it’s terrifying. Hopefully you see friendly faces then it all feels okay.

“It’s a funny old thing. You’re on telly yet I hate having my photograph taken and I couldn’t be more nervous about doing the show. It’s very, very different from TV work. When you’re making a programme, you film it and it goes out. If people are sitting and watching it and saying my bum is big, I don’t know. But when you go on at a theatre, the audience is there and you see their reaction.

“Now part of that is wonderful, it’s so lovely to have real people in an audience after all that we’ve been through. After the time we’ve had, there’s something properly special about getting together with people. That feeling of laughing together, that’s what I’m looking forward to. But it’s also terrifying. I am very aware that for a lot of people it’s still quite nerve-wracking to be in a crowd. So for anyone who comes along it’s a big deal.”

It’s a good time for Kate to tour. She presented the first series of BBC’s Springwatch with Bill Oddie, continuing until she left the series in 2011. That era made her a household name, though she’d previously had no intention of becoming a TV presenter.

Humble had been born in 1968 and grew up in rural Berkshire in a house next to a farm. She had what she describes as a ‘proper childhood’ – building camps, racing snails, climbing trees, interspersed with trips to A&E to patch up things when they broke. At the neighbouring farm she learnt to ride horses and developed a lifelong passion for mucking out.

At 18 she left school and home, and worked odd jobs for a year to fund a year travelling in Africa, which, she says, taught her far more than she would ever have learnt at university. On her return to the UK, Kate got her first job in television as a runner and met Producer/Director Ludo Graham who she married in 1992.

Kate travelled whenever she had the opportunity and in 1996 had her first travel article published by The Telegraph. That same year she got her first job at the BBC as a researcher on Animal Hospital and then The Holiday Programme. It was on her second day in the Holiday office when she was asked by the programme’s editor if she had ever presented before. “No,” she said. “And nor do I want to.” The rest is history and Kate has now been presenting programmes and writing articles and books for more than 20 years.

In 2007 Kate and Ludo moved to a smallholding in Wales and in 2011 set up Humble By Nature a rural skills school on a working farm in the Wye Valley. They live with a variety of feathered and furry livestock and three dogs.

“Spring is an important time,” she says. “But I hate to say it, I’ll probably turn up to the theatres looking utterly dreadful. We are lambing at the moment and spring is all about new life. On the farm particularly, it’s a really busy time of year.

“Yesterday I had a mixed day, I delivered lambs, I laid concrete for a new pig area, I mucked out pigs and goats then fed chickens and ducks. I picked the last of my kale and got the rhubarb up too. It’s a really, really busy time.

“But it’s a really optimistic time of year. It is about new life. It’s about the first flowers coming up. It’s about thinking ahead. The days are getting longer.

“I was up before 7am this morning and I didn’t need my head torch. So spring is an optimistic, joyful time.”

Lockdown was a peculiar time. While Kate kept busy on the farm, she also observed the way in which so many others reconnected with nature – even if it was simply watching a flower grow in a window box or a bird fly into the back garden.

“We did reconnect during lockdown. We had a renewed appreciation for what’s on our doorstep. The other thing that people realised was the importance of friends, family and their community.

“All those things have been forbidden in the last few years.”

She believes people are more willing to address concerns about our environment, having become more immersed in the seasons over the past couple of years.

“There’s a very difficult balance to strike between making people aware of the urgency of our climate situation and not tipping them into a pit of despair, which means they do nothing about it. We can’t dress it up and pretend it’s perfect. It’s a difficult balance to strike.

“Given that our generation, this post-war generation, hasn’t had anything really life-threatening to deal with, as other generations did, we’ve been a very lucky generation for the most part. But this pandemic hit and it affected everybody. It didn’t matter if they had more money than God or no money at all. It’s been a big shared experience.

“And yes, some people have had it much harder than others. Nobody has emerged from this unphased.

“Everybody has found huge comfort in the things that are normal, in inverted commas. When the blossom comes out, thank God that’s happening. When you see a star or the sun coming over the horizon, it’s a wonder.

“All those reassuring normalities have got a lot of us through an anxious-making time. It’s been a time when we haven’t known what’s happening. I think nature has allowed people to feel safe, or to feel reassured.

“I think in a funny sort of way, it’s that fact that nature has been here for us that has perhaps made people realise how important it is, how important our wildlife and our environment are.

“It’s so important we have lambs gambolling in fields or birds nesting. If we don’t look after it, that awful sense of I don’t know what’s happening will creep into the very things that we find so reassuring.

“The thing that I think is still the stumbling block is that we tend to think it’s such a big thing that it’s only something Governments can deal with. That’s not true. The more that we as individuals and communities fight, the more that supermarkets or governments have to respond.

“We are made to feel powerless, but we are the people who keep businesses going or who keep politicians in power. It’s our responsibility to look at what’s important.”

Kate has lived – and continues to live – a remarkable life. The girl who grew up next to a farm didn’t ever imagine she’d publish books or make TV shows, that she’d one day own her own farm or encourage others to connect with nature. She has daily pinch-herself moments when she reminds herself how well things have gone, for the most part.

“This is my job and there are days – many days – when I think how the bloody hell did I get so lucky? How is this my job? It’s a sort of unconscious thing. You know, we all know, that if you find something you love – a book or a TV show – you want to share it with people. You become it’s greatest advocate.

“I know how much the natural world and being outdoors and being on foot makes me feel happy. It’s the simplest of pleasures and simplest of joys. If I can pass that on to people, that’s great. To enjoy nature, you don’t need to be super human or an Olympic athlete or own loads of expensive kit. You can just put an old pair of shoes on and walk for 100m and put your arms around a tree because it will make you feel marvellous. That’s what I love about the job that I have.

“Instead of just talking to my neighbour, who might think I’m completely mad, I can talk to millions of people and they can all think I’m mad.”

She laughs at what she’s just said, then adds: “To be honest, I no longer care. I’m too old now and I’m past caring. Nature just makes me happy and I want to share that, that’s all there is.”