Michaela Strachan: ‘Chris Packham and Jeremy Clarkson are both provocative silverbacks in their own fields'

Telegraph

09-03-2025

Michaela Strachan bounces into the room, all upbeat energy, laughter and a big, warm smile. That's how she's been on our screens since she was 20 years old, getting children revved up on The Wide Awake Club, introducing a generation to the natural world on The Really Wild Show, graduating to Countryfile and then finding her perfect nesting place on the BBC's beloved Springwatch. It's how she is in real life, she tells me. 'I think I've just got a cheerful disposition. My mum has a very sunny nature, too.'
We're at a country house hotel in Buckinghamshire, a few short miles down the road from Bovingdon Airfield, where ITV's Dancing on Ice is filmed. She's still glowing from the skating rink, where she's been rehearsing ahead of Sunday's live final after nine weeks of intense competition. She was up at 6am, at the rink by 8am, going through routines with her partner, the former Team GB skater Mark Hanretty.
They had two hours on the ice practising their showpiece dance to Barbra Streisand's Don't Rain on My Parade and an hour practising Ravel's Bolero, which they'll only get to perform if Strachan makes it to the final two – though she's the hot favourite to win.
If she does, she'll be the oldest contestant, at 58, ever to take the crown, and the first woman since gymnast Beth Tweddle in 2013. So far, she's avoided the blade wounds, broken bones and torn ligaments that have curtailed many a celebrity skating adventure since the show began in 2006, but her purple leather trousers are concealing finger-pressure bruises all around her shins, where professional dancers have grabbed her ankles for a spectacular lift. Earlier this week, she fell flat on her face and just today, she says, 'I pulled something in my hip doing one of the lifts. Fortunately, the physio was there, so I went straight in to see her. She manipulated it a bit; put me on anti-inflammatories…' It's still sore.
Her friend and co-presenter for the past three decades, Chris Packham, has been a trusty support. 'He was on the phone to me yesterday for 40 minutes going, 'Mich, you've got to win this'.' She and Packham will be celebrating the 20th anniversary of Springwatch in May this year. 'We've got an incredibly loyal audience that wants escapism when they watch our show, they want the joy of nature. And they don't want to be preached at, although obviously there's a lot of environmental stuff that we'd like to talk about…' She knows Packham has to put up with a lot of abuse for his passionate campaigning on issues from climate change to animal welfare:. 'I think you need Chris Packhams in this world. And I think because of his autism, he doesn't care what people think about him, so if people start throwing insults at him, that spurs him on. I could not cope with the sort of s--- that gets thrown at him. I couldn't cope with dead foxes and badgers being thrown over my fence, and my gates being set alight.'
She does have opinions about environmental and wildlife issues, although she's quick to point out that, having been in a relationship with South African film-maker Nick Chevallier and building a life there as stepmother to their children Jade, Tom and Sam, and mother to their son Ollie, she's not very up to date with UK government policy.
But she will say that some of the resistance to green energy infrastructure – people who protest against wind farms because they kill birds, for example – is often spurred by very localised thinking. '[A protester] will try to find anything to stop that wind farm going up near his house because he doesn't want it. There's a huge amount of Nimbyism going on.'
As for Packham's ongoing feud with committed wind farm-hater Jeremy Clarkson – they've locked horns over everything from Range Rovers to Taylor Swift's private jets, to the similarity between Packham's hairstyle and Keir Starmer's – she thinks it's down to the fact that 'both of them are provocative males. Silverbacks in their own fields.'
Our conversation turns to British broadcasting's truly big beast. 'I don't think there will be a successor to David Attenborough. I think he was of a time... when David started that sort of blue-chip programme was really all there was, whereas now there's room for so many others.' She's proud that she has blazed a trail for women in wildlife television. 'I think I have opened the door for a lot of other female wildlife presenters that come with better credentials than I came with,' she says.
Strachan grew up in the well-to-do Surrey suburb of Hinchley Wood, the daughter of a building society manager and a former dancer. She was educated at stage schools, including the Arts Educational Schools (ArtsEd) in London, where she trained as a dancer, alongside singing and acting, and hoped to make a career in the theatre. She brings her school up when I ask if the Strictly bullying scandal made her worry about how she would be coached on the show? 'No, not at all, but I come from a different era. I went to ArtsEd and the teachers were tough on us. Half of us respected the teacher that was tough and think it was the best thing that happened to us. Half of them think that they've been damaged by it. I'm obviously quite a toughie.'
She has had a challenging few years. Strachan has spoken about the grief of losing people close to her, including one of her best friends, Springwatch series producer Lucy Bowden, who died aged 54 of breast cancer in 2023. 'She loved musicals, and she would have been the friend that I would have phoned after every performance on Dancing and gone 'What do you think?'. Her mum messaged me just yesterday and said, 'Lucy would have absolutely loved seeing you on this'.'
The presenter had breast cancer herself in 2013. 'I had a tiny bit of cancer and I had a double mastectomy, which I think is quite brutal, actually. I think in 20 years' time, we'll look back and think, wow, did they really do that?'
It's a topic that often comes up, but she says, 'I don't want breast cancer to define me… And I don't think of myself as a cancer survivor. I think of myself as somebody who has thrived since cancer… I think we have to redefine this cancer thing. I had 'an operation'. I think the fear that the 'C' word puts into people is very unhelpful with their recovery from it.'
Strachan developed anorexia as a teenager, and has talked about her memories of starving herself, throwing up every night and exercising compulsively, as well as the pressures on her to count calories if she wanted to be a dancer. A friend from the time later died from the condition.
I wonder if being so visibly on show, dancing and performing in front of millions, is triggering for her. 'No, because in my older years, I've been very content with my figure, because I'm healthy and fit, and that's what I've wanted to be in the last 20, 30 years. I don't want to be stick thin so I eat well, I exercise, I have a fairly healthy lifestyle.'
'Anorexia is a mental disorder,' she explains. 'So yes, it can be triggered by being at ballet school. But there's usually something else going on in your life that makes you turn to anorexia. That classic anorexia [affects] people that like to achieve and they like control in their life, and something goes out of control in their life, so they start controlling their own bodies.
For her it was when the sheltered world she had grown up in fell apart after her father lost his job, but she notes, 'If you're at ballet school, then you are going to have to be careful about the size you are, because you're a ballet dancer.'
Eating disorders are on the rise again, especially among young girls. 'I think kids of today have an awful lot of stress, because they're exposed to so much on social media… I think if I'd had social media criticising me, I'm not sure I would have stayed in telly. I'm strong now, but at 20 years old, I think I would have been absolutely crushed by it.'
She can lean into the attention more now, too. At the end of last year, she and a friend went to see chart-topping pop rockers Scouting for Girls at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in west London. Their 2007 debut album included a hidden track titled Michaela Strachan that includes the lines 'I turned on the telly/ When I got home from school/ You were there in your wellies/ And a yellow cagoule', before the declaration, 'You broke my heart when I was 12'. After meeting the band before the gig, she saw the lead singer give a fulsome introduction to the audience that 'the woman I fell in love with is here today… And then everyone put the lights on on their phones and started singing the song to me.' Strachan still can't quite believe it, 'especially with the lyric, 'You put the meaning in Wacaday'.'
Her own pop career, as Michaela, was short-lived but fun, 'apparently it's considered a hit if you get into the top 75, so I had two hit records,' she points out, tongue ever so slightly in cheek. (H-A-P-P-Y Radio reached No 62 in 1989, while Take Good Care of My Heart, which she performed alongside scantily clad dancer Wiggy on ITV's The Hit Man and Her, went to No 66 in 1990.)
When she thinks back to that live-from-a-nightclub show, which she presented with hitmaker Pete Waterman (of Kylie & Jason, Rick Astley and Steps fame), she can't quite believe that either. 'How did I get away with it? How did I do a music programme that was really quite tacky and risqué and then be on the same channel a few hours later singing The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round?
'Some of the stuff we said on Hit Man and Her would not be allowed to be said now. Some of the games we played, too, like 'Get your Gums Around These Plums', and 'Clothes Swap', where people had to swap clothes behind a sheet that we kept dropping. I don't know whether that sort of telly would happen these days.'
There are rumours that this might be the final series of Dancing on Ice, a reflection perhaps of the effect of streaming on audiences for live television more than the end of Britain's love affair with ice skating, which goes back to when Torvill and Dean produced their unforgettablegold-medal-winning ice dance routine to Bolero in Sarajevo in 1984.
They're judges on the show, of course, and Strachan would love to perform it in front of them; but it's already been a dream come true for the girl who began her career performing in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers in the West End to have skated as Sally Bowles in Cabaret and Maria in The Sound of Music in earlier episodes. Nineteen-year-old Ollie will be there cheering her on – he's at Loughborough University studying Sports Management – and her 85-year-old mother Jo will be there, too.
'My mum has Parkinson's and she belongs to a Parkinson's club, and they're all talking about it. That is the thing with something as inclusive as Dancing on Ice, it brings an enormous amount of joy to people.' Strachan, meanwhile, is soon to become a grandmother herself – in April – and she's loving it. 'To go from Dancing On Ice to thinking, 'God, I'm gonna be a Granny'...' She laughs – 'Granny on Ice!'
The Dancing On Ice final airs live on Sunday from 6.30pm, on ITV1, ITVX, STV and STV Player.