Are you one of those people who always manages to wear the right thing on the right occasion? I am not. I am in the middle of filming a new travelogue series with my good friend of many years – Helen Skelton. She is one of those people. So far on the series we have been walking, cycling, climbing, caving, canoeing, mining, farming and sleeping outdoors and she effortlessly, and somewhat annoyingly, always looks cool.
Now don’t get me wrong… I am trying hard. I invested in some posh new leather walking boots from Le Chameau and sent the kids off to play in the tents for an hour at Go Outdoors while I replenished my “adventure wardrobe”. I have some new shorts with more pockets than all the other clothes I own. Despite the studious preparation, on the first day of filming, when Helen picked me up from Grindleford station as we started the journey from my house in Sheffield to hers in Cumbria, her first words were “Why are you wearing that?” My collared white shirt did not go down well.
I spend a lot of my life on telly, and I try to make sure that I always look half-decent. I am fortunate enough to have a few tailored suits from Liverpool (a tailor called Signature Bespoke) to wear on screen and I have spent a long time perfecting the art of a tie knot with a simple dimple in the middle.
But I haven’t been able to buy anything off a rack since I was about 14, which means I’m not very well-practised. I’m blaming my massiveness.
“You ruined my body” is what my mum often says – with a good slice of humour – when anyone in the family brings up the fact that I was born a significant 10lbs 10oz. I was jaundiced but I was so long they couldn’t fit me in a single incubator so, apparently, they put two together and I was laid across them for a few days.
I was already six foot plus as a teenager and have vivid memories of going into shoe shops and being told that they had nothing that would fit me. Size 12s are a lot easier to come by these days, but I remember having to go all the way to London to find a pair of Reebok Pumps that I could slip on comfortably. For a year, I had saved up all my pocket money for those bad boys but sadly they didn’t survive a particularly nasty incident on a bumper car a few weeks after I got them.
From the age of about 13 I just bought everything in XL to get the length right and accepted the billowing of extra material around the middle. I stood at the back of all photographs to stay out of the way and to conceal the fact that nothing I wore actually fitted.
The same was true when I went on Strictly Come Dancing. Vicky Gill’s brilliant wardrobe team were constantly making last minute adjustments to trouser and sleeve lengths. “How can your arms actually be this long?” was a regular refrain. The tail suit that I wore for our American Smooth in week eight was out of Ian Waite’s old cupboard with an extra two inches added on the inside leg and sleeves!
I love nice clothes, but I think all the experiences of my past mean I’m never entirely sure what to wear and when. I feel this is an issue which affects a lot of blokes – particularly in the summer. Winter is a lot simpler. You throw on a big coat and you’re off. I know men have it easy when it comes to weddings, events and parties – a damp cloth and we’re good to go – but I do struggle with with what to wear when the weather is warmer.
Hat or no hat? I am firmly in the no-hat camp. I once received a letter from a viewer asking me not to turn to the side on TV because she thought I had a “head shaped like a deformed cashew nut” and she found it distracting. As humorous as that sounds, Mrs Angry from Swindon did make a salient cranial observation: my head is not made for conventional hats.
The BBC once had a right palaver trying to find me a top hat for Royal Ascot that fitted. My bonce is not only nut-shaped, it is also surprisingly vast, so 99 per cent of headwear makes me look like I’m either a poor body double for Oddjob from James Bond, or trying to get a job as the fifth member of East 17.
Sandals are another issue. I am a member of a generation for whom sandals paired with socks will always be a no-no. I have far too many painful memories of my dad picking us up from school rocking some tasty ice-white Tesco two-stripes under his Nike Air Jerusalem’s. I also remain quite strict with myself when it comes to open-toed action. My feet aren’t Hobbit levels of hairy and horrible, but they are long, thin, unusually bony and – so white that they could cause snow blindness. They only come out on holidays so, if you do see me out and about the summer, they will be safely inside a shoe.
This week I have been…
Exploring. I mentioned the programme Helen Skelton and I are making, and we’ve been getting the miles in this week. The plan is to cover as much of the Pennines as possible – using various forms of transport – and meet as many people along the way as we can. Helen and I first met years ago, and we have been good friends ever since. Helen is very much at home in the countryside and seems to be related to, or share a mutual friend, with every single person that we bump into. The show is going to be a four-part series and it’ll be on Channel 5 later this year.
Supporting. Our eldest daughter has just finished her GCSEs so there has been quite a bit of stressful exam prep in the Walker household over the last few weeks. She was up crazy early on the morning of her final physics exam listening to a song about the electromagnetic spectrum. I remembered all my GCSE revision by putting it to music and we are really proud of how hard she has worked. She can now look forward to hopefully one of the greatest summers of her life… she has an awful lot planned.
Moving. I have spent a lot of the last week lugging a few boxes around Channel 5 towers in London as I’ve been moving dressing rooms/offices. I had a tiny little room next to the studio but as some of my colleagues asked to be a little closer to the action I have moved upstairs. It’s a lot further away from the studio but it is much bigger. There is even going to be a telly in there so I can watch The Ashes this summer and, although my boss has said “no” to my idea of a ball pit or golf net, any suggestions for what I could put in there would be more than welcome.