Matt Baker – “The countryside made me”

In his first book, Matt Baker celebrates his rural roots and chronicles a year spent transforming the family farm. He chats to Margaret Bartlett about sheep, sketching and new beginnings

- Margaret Bartlett

Of all the things that I’ve achieved and all the people I’ve met and all the places I’ve been, I really started to realise there is no place like home. I’ve been everywhere and this is the place for me.”

When Countryfile presenter Matt Baker, 43, talks about his family farm – an organic sheep farm in the Durham Dales – you know there really is nowhere else in the world he’d rather be. Now those 40 hectares are centre stage in his just-published first book, A Year on Our Farm: How the Countryside Made Me.

While he describes the book as “not quite an autobiography”, in it the presenter, sports commentator, stage performer and producer pays homage to his rural roots and writes about the upbringing that shaped his life. After leaving The One Show and its five-days-a-week schedule in March 2020, after nine years co-presenting with Alex Jones, he has had time to reflect.

“In the past year or so, the amount of time that I have been spending not in the television studio makes me realise exactly how the countryside has made me who I am. I’ve had such a rapid time in my career – from heading off to Blue Peter, getting Countryfile up and running in those early days when it moved to its evening slot, and with The One Show – and now I’m at the time in my life when I start to look back on those things that have shaped me,” he says. “At the heart of the book is the fact that every story of mine springs from growing up on the farm. So I started telling these stories and sketching on the way.”