Michaela Strachan: ‘After the menopause I went inwards’ ...Middle East

We seem to have two types of kids in the world today,” says Michaela Strachan. “One group really cares about wildlife and is very well educated about it – largely because once you start clicking on the topic, the algorithm will send you more of the same. But we’ve also got a group that is completely disengaged. They couldn’t care less.” She grimaces. “It’s the same with adults.”

Still, talking via video call, the 59-year-old Springwatch presenter is ever the sleeves-up optimist. She’s meeting this challenge by doubling down in her commitment to “bring the joy, bring the wonder” in her role as one of natural history’s few female presenters.

I’ve always found her an admirably energising presence on the screen. Like her near contemporary Anneka Rice – who zipped around the UK in Lycra through the 80s and 90s, getting stuff done on shows like Challenge Anneka – Strachan has always projected practical positivity with warmth and humour. Can you hold this python, Michaela? No problem! Dive from a 7.5-metre board on ITV’s Splash? Hold my goggles! Dance on ice through the menopause? Cue that Bolero!

But as Strachan prepares to tour the UK with a show celebrating her 40-year career, she tells me that for many of those years she has “felt inadequate, an imposter in the wildlife world” compared to her long-term co-presenter Chris Packham (with whom she presented The Really Wild Show from 1993-2006 before they took the helm of Springwatch in 2011).

“Chris came to the job with a degree in zoology,” she says. “He’s a scientist. A full-on, fact-packed nature nerd – he could tell you the inside leg measurement of a sparrow. Whereas I come from an entertainment background. I don’t have a good memory for those kinds of facts no matter how many times I hear them.”

Strachan attributes her newfound ability to see her own contribution as “valuable” to being awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Wolverhampton in 2023. “When they wrote to me, I replied to point out that I don’t have an academic background so might not be eligible. But they said: ‘You have done as much for the natural sciences as anybody with scientific qualifications.’ For the first time I thought, ‘Yeah, that is true!’ My skills as a communicator, a translator of science, do matter.”

Born in Surrey in 1966, the daughter of a building society manager and a dancer, Strachan is a stage school graduate who laced up her wildlife-presenting safari boots fresh from zany 80s children’s TV (The Wide Awake Club and Wacaday) and eccentric overnight clubbing show The Hitman and Her with pop impresario Pete Waterman.

As part of a wave of cheeky, boundary-pushing youth broadcasting, The Hitman and Her was hugely popular but also, Strachan likes to remind modern interviewers, “incredibly tacky”. I’d forgotten features like “Clothes Swap” (in which contestants would switch outfits behind a bed sheet that would be dropped on purpose). This was an era in which the show’s creative team mooted a game in which a man would be blindfolded and invited to grope the bodies of several women in an attempt to identify his girlfriend. Mercifully, the idea was scotched by a female researcher. But feminism as we now understand it was still some way off.

“Do you know why you work on this show?” Waterman notoriously informed Strachan. “It’s because you’re attractive, but not attractive enough to make other women hate you.”

Strachan – who tells me she’d been a shy child and recalls crying at the prospect of speaking in front of her junior school class – doesn’t dwell on those early sexist knocks. By the time she found fame, she’d already come through an unsettling battle with teenage anorexia, which she attributes to being “the kind of person who likes control, organisation, structure. If that control is taken away – like my dad losing his job – you then start to control something you’re in charge of and your weight can be something you focus on. As a dancer, looking at myself in the mirror every day in a leotard and tights, I guess if you’re going to have any mental health issue, then that’s the obvious one.”

She says she is lucky that her anorexic period “didn’t last that long” and left her feeling “passionate about being in good shape, being healthy”.

“I think I come from a generation that just got on with things,” she shrugs. That doesn’t mean she forgets unkindness. Today she recalls being treated appallingly by the late Carry On actress Fenella Fielding while starring as Dorothy in a Wizard of Oz pantomime when she was just 21. “Fenella was horrible to me,” she says. “She and Charlie Drake [the comedian] were the biggest names in the show so got the last bow. But after the first show, Charlie kindly invited me to take the final bow, and the next night Fenella refused to go on unless I promised not to take the final curtsy.” She shakes her head. “It was a good lesson for me. I thought: I will never, ever behave like that.”

Strachan’s gung-ho warmth has often provided a counterbalance to Packham’s spikier side. Their banter-packed double act has matured into a wonderful friendship. “I’m quite a sarcastic person,” she says, “so when Chris takes the mickey out of me on TV I find it funny. I find it sad that some people judge that sort of ribbing more seriously these days. It’s fine in the context of a relationship where you have so much respect for each other, when you adore each other. It’s how we roll.”

Looking back, Strachan says, she was “quite shocked” by Packham’s 2005 autism diagnosis, which she discusses in her show. “We just thought that he was individual, that he was different. He hid it very well… but nobody talked about autism in the 1990s.” She smiles fondly. “It has been so lovely to watch Chris change and mature… He was somebody who couldn’t look people in the eye when he was a little boy and he has turned into this incredible communicator and campaigner. I am just so proud of the man he has become. He is an inspiration to so many people.”

Packham has become an increasingly influential environmental activist and campaigner over the past decade, pushing back hard against badger culling and fox hunting, promoting vegetarianism and taking unsuccessful legal action against HS2. Does Strachan ever feel it’s her job to rein him in? “No,” she says. “Chris has become very aware of what our role is on Springwatch. The category of television we are in is entertainment not news. So yes, we will touch on environmental and conservation issues. But our remit is to make people love wildlife. We get criticised by our viewers if we go too far down the road of preaching about sustainability, but there are clever ways of weaving it into stories without lecturing people.”

Strachan relishes the way the cosy show opens windows into accessible drama of bird’s nests and suburban ponds. She’s just as invested in the narratives of British newts as some of the more showstopping creatures she’s encountered in her career. On tour, she’ll talk fans through some of her hairier encounters, including the time she had to shoot a tranquilliser dart at a charging buffalo to save the life of a vet who was stuck up a tree, and the moment she was nearly crushed by two southern right whales, both trying to mate with a female off the coast of South Africa (where she lives with her husband Nick Chevallier and her son Olly). “Squashed in a whale threesome,” she chuckles. “That would have made for an interesting gravestone.”

She had a grimmer brush with mortality in 2014 after a breast cancer diagnosis led to a double mastectomy. “I dealt with it by carrying on,” she says, ever the stoic. “Afterwards, I did some trauma release therapy, which I found really beneficial. You need to process the emotions.”

But she says the experience made her glad that she has lived a life in which “I never learned to say no to things”. Never? “The only time I can recall opting out was when I was asked to dangle from a rope from Clifton Suspension Bridge while the crew built a spider web around me,” she says. “I had never been to Bristol before. I didn’t know how high that bridge would be [101m], so when I looked over the side my fear was acute. I completely lost it and started crying.” She shudders. “But I don’t like being afraid, so I have tried to conquer that fear.” She is chuffed that she managed to jump off the 7.5m board on the ITV reality show Splash. “I coped with that fear by diving backwards,” she says, “so I didn’t have to look at the drop.”

Dancing on Ice, last year, caused Strachan to feel a jittery performance anxiety for the first time. “I’m not a naturally anxious person,” she mulls, “but that show coincided with me going through post menopause.” She tells me she coped by “going inwards”. “I noticed that when the younger people were nervous, they became quite loud – chatting and laughing more noisily. I did the exact opposite. Before we went out to skate, I held [partner] Mark Hanretty’s hand and sat very quietly.”

“I can put my whole career down to resilience, really” she concludes. “I worry younger generations aren’t being taught enough about how to be resilient. Life is not easy. Life has its ups and downs.” She encourages her son to think of life as a horse race with “perfect trots”, “disorienting gallops”, “boring walks” and moments when “your foot is out of the stirrup and your head is near the ground and you think you might never recover”. She believes “it doesn’t matter if it’s a long life or a short life. You need to be able to look back and say: ‘I had a good ride.’”

Does Strachan feel she can say that? “Yeah! If you had told me, at 20, that I’d end up presenting flagship natural history television, I’d have thought you were insane,” she laughs. “But can you name any female wildlife presenters that came before me?” I can’t. “See! I didn’t plan any of this. But I took the opportunities and I hope I’ve opened the door for other women.” She nods and allows herself a moment of pride. “I’ve been an accidental pioneer.”

‘Not Just a Wild Life’ tours the UK from 13 April (awildevening.co.uk)

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