“The countryside made me”

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 and its five-days-a-week schedule in March 2020, after