Kate Humble: ‘I was propositioned for sex by a TV director at 22'

Telegraph

22-03-2025

Kate Humble has been up all night doing the lambing on her Wye Valley farm in Monmouthshire. And now, she explains apologetically, she just has to pop out into the kitchen to check on the bread she is baking. 'It is all sounding very Felicity Kendal,' she jokes with her trademark broad, toothy grin as she disappears.
The 56-year-old TV mainstay presenter of Countryfile, Springwatch, Animal Park and – appropriately – three series of Lambing Live, has been living 'The Good Life' since 2007. That was when she and her producer husband Ludo Graham escaped media-saturated west London to make a new home in the country on a four-acre smallholding on the Welsh border.
Three years later, they also took on a 117-acre farm six miles up the road – to save it from being sold for development. 'I waded in because I do,' she explains, 'and I am a pain in the arse. I didn't understand why they were breaking it up'.
While the day-to-day management of the farm is in the hands of a couple of born-and-bred farmers that Humble first met on Lambing Live, she is hands-on at peak times – 'lambing, shearing, and when we are assorting sheep in the autumn for who is going to be tupped with whom'.
She describes herself as the 'apprentice farmer'. 'And I love it,' she says, settling back down in her book-lined, beamed sitting room, still in her overalls but – as has been her winning way over her three decades on our screens – managing effortlessly to look both scruffy and stylish.
'I am told I am very useful in the lambing shed because I have very small hands and so I can get into spaces that others can't. I love doing the night shifts. There is something about being in a giant maternity ward at night, the sound and smell.'
Farming is not in her blood. She was born in London, but was raised in rural Berkshire when she was nine months old with her younger brother Charlie. Her father worked for IBM and her mother was a housewife. Being a novice was part of the appeal of her popular Channel 5 lockdown series, Escape to The Farm, which she made with her husband in 2020, and was subsequently renewed for two more series.
Jeremy Clarkson took up the idea the following year in Clarkson's Farm. 'What he has done for farming is fantastic,' Humble enthuses. 'I spend my whole life preaching to the converted and he has brought farming to an audience that never knew they cared.'
Self-deprecation is part of her charm, but the reality is that, as she lives the good life, farming has become both her passion and her cause, which is why she will be appearing next Saturday (March 29) at the Oxford Literary Festival as part of a panel asking if we need more compassion in our food and farming. 'As consumers,' she explains, 'we have all become cushioned from the reality of farming. We are not the ones growing food.'
But plenty of people have a vegetable patch or an allotment. 'I have a vegetable garden' – she points out of the window to where it is – 'but if everything in it fails, as it did last year when it was a disaster, I can still nip to the supermarket and get something to eat. That's the bottom line.'
So, what are we cushioned consumers in the supermarket aisles failing to see? Humble is 80 per cent vegetarian, she says, and has done her research on how much of the world's farmable land is taken up keeping cattle, or growing feed because the global appetite for meat is rising fast. It is a question of cutting down on meat, then?
She nods. And it is not just red meat, she adds, which gets the worst press. 'I've stopped eating chicken because I live in the Wye Valley and my river is being poisoned by chicken farms.'
Swapping farmed chicken to free-range or organic, though, might be beyond most people's budgets. 'It depends on where the chicken comes from, not how it is raised,' she corrects me. 'Councils have given permission to farmers to raise chickens in enormous numbers in river catchments. Chicken s- - t is full of nitrates and if it runs off into the river, it poisons it.'
The Telegraph – Humble is a reader – recently reported on a groundswell of local opposition to a proposed 'mega-farm' in Norfolk on just these grounds. 'We still say, 'thank God, we aren't like America with its mega-farms', but that's wrong. We are becoming more like America.'
All the dominant trends in farming, she suggests, are moving in the wrong direction, 'away from small-scale mixed farming with some livestock and some arable. That was how it was pre-war and it enabled us to feed ourselves and be much more in tune with nature.'
Bigger and bigger farms tend to mean more harmful chemical fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides. 'As soon as you scale up, you become more reliant on them and then you use more antibiotics on livestock, especially when so many of them are now reared inside.'
The plight of the small family farm has been making headlines of late, as well as seeing protestors, some in tractors, outside the Houses of Parliament to oppose changes to inheritance tax rates in the last budget that they warn will drive them out of business. Is the Labour government getting its approach to farmers all wrong?
'I don't think any government, whatever they do, is going to be particularly admired by the farming community,' she replies. Humble might be plain-speaking – she is exactly the same girl-next-door as she appears on TV (though she swears a lot more) – but now we have got onto the politics of farming she is noticeably picking her words with care.
The problem, she says, is that for farmers there is often no difference between the main political parties. 'If you are a farmer, you will have seen so many government directives, and seen the results, good and bad, over your time on the land. Rightly or wrongly, many of the people making the decisions in government are not farmers.'
Someone, though, has to make those decisions for the sake of the country. 'People in government are not out here,' she counters, 'up to their thighs in mud, trying to make a living. They are not dealing day-to-day with the land, and yet they are telling farmers how to manage it.'
The result is that farmers feel, well, 'What the hell do you know?' It comes down, she points out, 'to the disconnect between urban and rural. It is more stark now than it has ever been.'
Especially so, she adds, when farmers are also having to deal with climate change. 'We don't need to get into the who or what or why or point fingers. The fact is that the climate is changing and, unless the mad Elon Musk has his way, this planet is the only place where we can exist.'
Again it is an issue that puts the urban-rural divide in sharp relief. 'In the developed world in particular, for want of a better world, we think we are separate and immune from the natural systems and still feel affronted if there is a flood or a wildfire that stops us going on holiday to somewhere we wanted to go to. We have our heads in the sand.'
Tough decisions are needed, she insists, which takes us back to whether or not to eat meat. Food regulators announced this week that they are looking at giving the all-clear to the sale of laboratory-grown meat. Would Humble consider switching to that?
'Synthetic meat doesn't appeal to me,' she admits, 'but if you want to provide meat in a sustainable way to an ever-growing human population that is predominantly urban and not producing its own food, you have to start using science and technology in a sensible and pragmatic way.'
And, in case it sounds a bit do-as-I-say rather than do-as-I-do, she runs me through her experiences of eating insects on her travels around the world for different television series. Termites, she reports, taste like carrots.
I am still grimacing at the thought, but she chastises me. 'But who would eat an oyster? I think that's bloody mad. It's just like eating a great big blob of salty snot as far as I am concerned, but there are people falling over themselves to eat oysters.'
Humble puts her directness – or what she refers to as being 'arsey' – down to an upbringing that gave her a spirit of independence and self-confidence. 'I was astonishingly lucky to have had a secure, very loving home. I had a great base to be myself.'
It meant there were 'plenty of fights, teenage nonsense and angst. You have to have that as a child so you can find out what your boundaries are, but we were brought up with a strong sense of priority, of politeness, and the importance of other people. I was given very good ground rules.'
Her education at the independent Abbey School in Reading put her off going on to university. 'It was hugely academic and we did nothing but take exams. We were all absolutely expected to go to Oxford or Cambridge. I was told, if I chose not to do that, I would never have a proper job.'
Characteristically she took no notice and was proved right. She moved to London and started working as a runner in television and film. 'I was paid £40 a day and was living on crisps and air.' In between jobs, her 'irrepressible wanderlust' saw her go travelling, crossing Africa solo in her late teens.
What would she tell an 18-year-old now about whether to go to university? 'That there is no right or wrong. I would say it depends on what you want to do. Don't go if you think that is the only avenue open to you.'
By 23, she was married to 31-year-old Ludo. His family were friends of hers and, with hindsight, it sounds almost fated. Their paths had crossed several times but when he invited her along to his 28th birthday party because she was a 'telly type', romance blossomed.
Did her parents, Nick and Diana, have any reservations about the age gap or her settling down too soon? 'Oh God, they were relieved. They didn't think I was going to do anything with my life.'
She must be exaggerating, because at 23 she had already begun to climb the ladder on the production side of TV, then a very male world. In the pre-MeToo world, did she face any unwanted advances?
'Of course. I entered an industry that is not easy, but then life is not easy or fair. If you want to do something, you fight for it. You call people out.'
And she did. 'When I was very young, probably 22, I was working for a director on a Channel 4 series. I was sitting with him in the edit suite. At the end of the day, he turned to me and said, 'Should we go and have sex?' It was slightly flippant, but… And I said back, 'If that is why you hired me, you better find someone else.''
She doesn't want to name him and, in a stuff-and-nonsense way, refuses to treat it as a trauma. 'I recently met an extraordinary young woman in Costa Rica. She comes from a very traditional family, but is the first to learn English, go to university and start her own business, despite being told by her family that she couldn't do that as a woman.'
That, Humble says, 'is proper sexism, socially ingrained sexism. Me being propositioned by some bloke wasn't sexism. It was just someone trying it on and you tell them to p--s off.'
It was while working on the BBC's Holiday in 1998 that she made the switch from being behind the camera to in front of it. 'There was an offshoot series. I can't remember what we called it, but it involved the presenters doing holiday jobs. Jill Dando – the late, great Jill Dando – was an air hostess and I had to host an 18-30 holiday to Ibiza. I mean…'
She tosses her mane of curls forward over her face as she rocks with laughter. 'You can imagine.'
The following year, she remembers, she was given an on-screen role on Top Gear. 'I really tried not to do it. I'd only ever driven a Fiat Uno, a Peugeot 205 and a truck in Africa, but the BBC said it really wanted a 'regular woman' because research had told them that, when buying a family car, the decision comes down to the woman.'
She was being made to fit a stereotype but, inevitably, didn't conform to it. 'My very first Top Gear shoot was to the Aston Martin factory. Had I been the one choosing the family car, it certainly wouldn't have been an Aston Martin Lagonda.'
Oddly enough, she didn't last at Top Gear, but it did her no harm. She has been busy ever since, becoming in the process a household name. Humble is, though, in many ways, a very un-celebrity sort of celebrity. She speaks often and unapologetically of wearing no make-up – definitely unnecessary when lambing – sticking to the same old clothes until they wear out, and giving glamorous parties a wide berth.
'I wouldn't know anyone there. When we moved here 17 years ago, a lot of people imagined we would only drop in and out by helicopter. Very quickly, though, they realised, 'Oh, she drives a shabby old car and does her own shopping.' I have never been interested in the emperor's new clothes side of celebrity.'
Some of her favourite times, she says, are when she and Ludo retreat to their French bolthole, an old fishing cabin hidden in the woods in the Dordogne with its own private lake, somewhere she can shut out the world and, as a keen naturist, go round without bothering about clothes.
'You can be in the public eye but that doesn't mean you have to permanently put yourself in the public eye.' The celebrity tag, she argues, is one that people project onto her.
'To me, being on the telly is a job, a lovely job. You're not a separate species if you are on the telly.'
But it does give you a platform. Her fellow Springwatch presenter, Chris Packham, is used to being so forthright that he has faced death threats. Humble's approach is lower-key.
'Here's my terrible admission: I have an imaginary tabloid journalist sitting on my shoulder, and if I say something in public, I always think, 'Can I justify it to that tabloid journalist? Do I feel my integrity is intact? Do I know enough about what I am talking about?''
When the answer comes back as yes, she has been prepared to get very personal, as on the subject of her choice not to have children. 'The assumption is you get married and have children, but I didn't want them.'
When she kept being asked about why there was no patter of tiny feet, she found it, she recalls, 'f- - - ing rude and no one's business. I didn't want to get into the why and wherefore. And I thought I might change my mind.'
She didn't. 'Motherhood wasn't for me.' When she was 40 – 'it still wasn't quite too late but everything was shrivelling up' – she made a conscious decision in an interview on Woman's Hour to talk about the choice of not having children. 'It was a real relief to say, this is how I feel, it's my decision, don't judge me, and we are lucky to live in a society where women have the choice.'
Her remarks made headlines and prompted 'astonishing' feedback. 'So many people, not just women, contacted me to say, 'We don't want to be parents and yet we felt guilty about thinking it. And now you've said it.' When you can do something that legitimises something because you are on the telly, it feels important.'
She and Ludo, alongside their own careers, run Humble By Nature, the commercial arm of their farm, a collection of rural artisan businesses, where any profits generated help keep the livestock operation going. After 33 years, she believes the secret of their happy marriage 'is not thinking you are a single entity. You are still two individuals.'
Many women in TV talk also of ageism when it comes to on-screen jobs. Humble admits to working out with a trainer, but insists it is to keep healthy, not to look young. 'I don't stand in front of the mirror and think, 'I've got another wrinkle.' Well, yes, I do, but we all do whether we are on telly or not.'
And if the roles start drying up? 'That's not a relevant question,' she shoots back. 'The TV industry in this country is in crisis.'
This week producer Elisabeth Murdoch has warned of an 'exodus' of talent from this country because, with the rise of streaming, British broadcasters are cash-strapped and focussing what money they have on drama, not factual programming. And the fall-out from that is being felt, Humble says, 'whether you are old or young. The likelihood is that none of us are going to have jobs because people are watching telly in new ways.'
If she wanted to avoid that fate, she says, she could set up a YouTube channel or a TikTok account, 'but I have no interest in doing either. I'm not sitting on a small fortune, I have to work, so I'll just try something else.'
It's that independent streak again that comes from her mother who is going strong at 80. 'If I am skipping around like she is at that age, I'll be happy, though I hope I will wear my glasses more than she does!'