Interview: Clare Balding, broadcaster

Though the analogy is pure cheese, it’s a dead cert that if medals were bestowed upon Olympics presenters for services to the viewing public, Clare Balding would have scooped gold. Throughout the BBC’s fortnight of coverage, she was reliably personable, enthusiastic and warm, and exceptionally knowledgeable. Her star shone so brightly that even notoriously acidic Melanie Phillips singled Balding out for praise in her newspaper column.

“She was so nice about me,” says Balding, when we meet at her agent’s smart offices in Chiswick, “and went the whole way through the article without mentioning that I was a lesbian. Now that takes a lot! Not that it’s relevant in any way. Actually that’s the thing I’m proudest of, that in terms of the Olympics coverage, and people’s reactions, my gender and my sexuality were both irrelevant. What people reacted to was someone who knew stuff.”

At the time of our conversation Balding was gearing up for the Paralympics, which she covered for Channel 4, for whom she’ll also present horse racing from January next year. But by rights, we’re not really here to talk sport, for Balding has written a memoir, My Animals and Other Family, recounting stories from her childhood through the prism of the animals she lived with, loved, and learned about life from. It is as warm and big-hearted as she is, and nicely judged, using humour to balance the pathos. For her upbringing was often emotionally stark, and Balding and her younger brother Andrew came well below the family’s animals in the pecking order.

In contrast, acquaintances begged me to slather Clare Balding with love, which prompts a laugh – something she does easily and often, as comfortable talking into a microphone as she is wielding one. “I’ve realised that people don’t necessarily remember what you said, but they remember how you made them feel. You want to make them feel as if they’re with you at the event – you’re not talking at them or judging it for them, just saying, ‘Come to it with me and I’ll try to help you enjoy it even more than you would if I wasn’t here.’

“Obviously I did a hell of a lot of homework.” She waves a large black and red notebook filled with spidery handwriting. “The swimming suited me quite well. I’d go to the morning session with a fair amount of information, and then I would spend four or five hours before the evening session, reading everything, not just the big homework book. Because a lot of it was written months ago, it was the up-to-date stuff I wanted, and things that had been said in press conferences. I kind of love nerdy off-the-wall information, and luckily that connected with a lot of people. They want to know what the bloody flowers were made of, so I made sure I found out – because I had wondered, too.”

With hindsight she realises the BBC were grooming her, sending her around the world to cover swimming these past three years. “Swimming and athletics are the big gigs at the Olympic games. Cycling and rowing are pretty big for Britain, but globally the two big things are athletics and swimming. I’d [already] interviewed all the swimmers quite a lot, and that makes a big difference. And then I got lucky with a couple of things. One was Chad leClos’s dad, Bert. For me, that’s almost the best moment of television I’ve ever been involved in.”

It’s peculiar meeting Balding, because she and her partner Alice Arnold, a newsreader and member of Radio 4’s continuity team, feel so familiar from Twitter. “Do you know, that’s the other thing that played into my hands really well – this was the first Twitter Olympics. It meant if you did get anything wrong, you could go on straight away and correct it. It can be dangerous too, because if the ‘twitchfork’ mob are out, you can feel their rage.

“My rule is I’ll never say anything on there that I wouldn’t say on the radio, because for me, radio is the most intimate form of media.” More than television? “Oh my god yes! It’s so much less distracting. If I’m on the radio, all you’re thinking about is what I’m saying, and you’re drawn in by it. You’re not looking at my hair, my hat or what I’m wearing. You are with me, and you tend to be on your own. Very rarely will you listen to the radio in a judgmental way, the way you’ll watch telly.”

Her two favourite mediums are radio and writing, and her dream, when reading English, at Cambridge, was to write for a living. Now, at 41, she’s produced her first book, and tells me that while pondering what to write and how, she found inspiration in everything from Gerald Durrell’s My Family And Other Animals (seeking his widow’s approval for her spin on that famous title), James Herriot, David Sedaris, and Dawn French, who advised: “You don’t have to be chronological; you don’t have to tell everything. You reveal as much as you want to reveal, it’s your book. And don’t be afraid to exaggerate – you can exaggerate as much as you like, it’s poetic license. Go for it.”

Each chapter centres around a different dog or horse who played a major role in Balding’s life, beginning with Candy, the boxer, whose face is the first she remembers seeing.

Balding’s own pedigree is gilt-edged. Her maternal lineage reaches back to the Earl of Derby on one side and the Plantagenets on the other, and the family are linked to Robert, Earl of Huntingdon – who may have been Robin Hood. Her American-born father, Ian, played rugby for Cambridge, as well as cricket and polo, and was a good amateur rider. He came to Park House Stables at Kingsclere as a young trainer, and went on to become one of Britain’s most respected horsemen. His horse Mill Reef, won the Derby in 1971, a fact Ian Balding finds easier to remember than the birth of his first born that same year. He’s also the Queen’s trainer, which meant regular visits from the Queen and Queen Mother throughout Balding’s childhood.

Ian wound up marrying his boss’s clever daughter, Emma, but he was even closer to her mother, Priscilla Hastings. They ate breakfast and dinner together every day, using the time to discuss the running of the stable. When he rang the United States to tell his mother of his marriage, she replied, “So which one did you choose, the mother or the daughter?”

Fairly breathtaking, I say, and Balding replies that these are the family stories as they’ve been passed down to her. Yes, that is the breathtaking bit, I rejoin, not the comment itself. Especially because throughout this memoir, Emma Balding comes across as leading an intensely lonely life.

“It kind of sounds like an arranged marriage,” Balding acknowledges. “It was certainly a marriage of convenience.” Ian Balding’s work was so demanding and time consuming – and he wasn’t and still isn’t one for cosy domesticity – that Emma’s brother took her to a Boxer breeder, to choose a puppy, to combat the newlywed’s loneliness. Her daughter writes, “A life without a boxer dog is a life without laughter. I know this because after Candy died, and age had finally caught up with Flossy, my mother stopped laughing. She still smiled, she still enjoyed life, but she didn’t laugh the way she used to.”

Balding sighs. “I might have overplayed that one. I think she’s really very happy now, happy with grandchildren, with the house they built. My mother doesn’t emote. And she’s very funny. For example, the Olympics. I was deliberately not reading any of the reviews. On the second Sunday, reading about the modern pentathlon in the Telegraph, I came across the panel of experts’ views on the best moments. For Presenter of the Games, all five said me. I texted my mother asking her to keep the paper for me. She texted back, ‘Ah, I wasn’t going to tell you about that.’ Then I saw her a week after the games finished. She hands me a bunch of papers, and says, ‘Those are all the articles that I could find.’ She kept them all, but she didn’t want to tell me during the games. That’s my mother all over. She is hugely proud, but doesn’t really want to tell me. She hates going anywhere where I’m recognised. She doesn’t enjoy that, and what she won’t enjoy about this book is that she’s public property now.”

But it struck me there was a lot of cruelty in Balding’s upbringing. Feelings were never spared, and rarely indulged. Her size was regularly and unfavourably commented on – never more so than when she became an amateur jockey and had to starve herself to the point of fainting to make weight.

She says: “To some extent, I think [my mother] made sure I could live the life she wasn’t allowed to. She wasn’t educated, was married at 20, then had me the day after her 22nd birthday. That’s incredible, how are you meant to know who you are, or anything? I used to be very hard on dad, and I still am hard on him to his face, because I’ll pull him up on things like not loading the sodding dishwasher. Seriously! And my mother just laughs, then does it for him. So it’s half her fault and half his fault. It’s not the relationship I would choose, but how dare I judge them?” With that she breaks off to text a subtle message, reminding her father that his wedding anniversary – number 43 – is the  following day.

Her uncle’s saying, “Women ain’t people”, was often repeated and truly believed. When she was born her maternal grandmother said, “Oh, it’s a girl. Never mind, you’ll just have to keep trying.” (A year later, Andrew arrived.) So how did this rampantly sexist family cope not only with her increasingly vocal feminist sentiments, but with the announcement that she is gay?

“Dad is a really surprising guy. Every time I think he’s going to be useless, he ends up doing something amazing and saying exactly the right thing. I remember when I split up with the Army boyfriend I talk about in the book [and whose proposal she rejected]. I was kind of seeing him on/off after that, and he rang to tell me he was getting married. I rang home to talk to my mother, and dad picked up [and asked me] ‘What’s the matter?’ I said, ‘He’s getting married,’ and Dad said, ‘Well, I’m glad it’s not you.’ That was so not the reaction I was expecting: as far as I was concerned, he was the perfect sporty boyfriend in my father’s eyes. That was so much what I needed to hear. A couple of other times he’s been really, really good – and they adore Alice.”

When she came out to her parents her mother simply asked, “’Why, is it going to be in the paper tomorrow?’ It wasn’t, for another year and a half, but I said I think it’s important that you know. And they’re not idiots. I hadn’t had a boyfriend for seven years and was going on holiday with the same woman all the time. The clues were there! I talked about work a lot!”

It transpires that her amusing domestic exchanges with Alice via Twitter are something of a statement of intent. “One of the reasons Alice and I tweet each other is quite deliberately because growing up we never saw a lesbian couple – not talking to each other. How  could you? That stuff is really important for people  to see.”

Having studied her book intently, I’ve compiled a list of Lessons Clare Balding Learned from Animals, which I read aloud: Ask nicely to get what you want. Never use your stick in anger. Never judge anyone on looks alone. Be confident, and others will be confident in you. Be consistent. Be fair and be honest. A horse will be your honest mirror. A horse judges you in terms of sensitivity, consistency and patience. They demand standards of behaviour and levels of kindness that we, as humans, then strive to maintain.

Did I leave anything out? “Also that you can love something without it having to tell you it loves you back. That’s quite a big gift. Particularly when you’re young, you’re terribly flattered by people who like you, so you think you love them. Add that into what I now live with in my job. Do I love myself more because I suddenly seem to be popular? Of course I don’t. Does it mean I love more people because of it? No, I love the people I always loved and who deserve my love. Have I changed? Maybe. I think I’m a bit surprised by it. I think that’s a big lesson, that the love that you give is yours, it was not created because someone else said, ‘Oh I really like you.’ You’ll make up your own mind.”

I think it’s safe to say that we have, Clare, we have.

• My Animals and Other Family is published by Viking, priced £20, hardback.