'I didn't walk out, I left to satisfy my baby hunger!' Julia Bradbury reveals the REAL reason she left Countryfile and why she went to a psychiatrist after 'hitting the buffers'

Julia Bradbury reveals why five gruelling rounds of IVF forced her out the show she loved – and how her TV career was put back on track after she 'hit the buffers' and found herself walking into a psychiatrist's office... 

Julia Bradbury is wearing a pair of boots that were very definitely not made for walking. Full-length, velvet, gold-embroidered and with statement heels, they are a world away from her usual on-screen sturdy lace-ups.

'No Gore-Tex here,' laughs the presenter nicknamed 'the walking man's crumpet' – although she has turned up with a She Pee (a gadget for women to go to the loo standing up) in her Gucci rucksack.

It was travelling up and down the countryside and filming in all weathers for BBC's Countryfile that nailed Julia Bradbury as the nation's favourite cagoule-wearer

It was travelling up and down the countryside and filming in all weathers for BBC's Countryfile that nailed Julia Bradbury as the nation's favourite cagoule-wearer

This is the way we are more used to seeing her – and perhaps it's this nonchalance about mixing up countryside and red carpet that has made Bradbury the glamorous face of the great outdoors.

She had worked for Top Gear and Watchdog, but it was travelling up and down the countryside and filming in all weathers for BBC's Countryfile that nailed her as the nation's favourite cagoule-wearer.

Viewers loved her – and Bradbury adored the job. So there was something of a mystery about why she left the programme that made her a household name.

Now, however, Bradbury speaks for the first time about the 'baby hunger' that put her in conflict with her career, driving her through five gruelling rounds of IVF. Most crucially, the treatments clashed with her filming schedule.

It was in 2014 that Bradbury sacrificed her envy-inducing job on the show – sparking rumours she had defected to ITV. The truth was much closer to home as she and her partner, property developer Gerard Cunningham, had found themselves unable to give their son Zephyr a sibling. 'I was in my sixth year of Countryfile when we started down the road to IVF and I could not keep up with the schedule so I decided, for the first time in my career, to make a personal decision that overtook my work,' she said.

Now 46, Julia is a proud mum to IVF twins Zena and Xanthe, soon to be two, and their older brother Zephyr, five

Now 46, Julia is a proud mum to IVF twins Zena and Xanthe, soon to be two, and their older brother Zephyr, five

'With IVF you need to be somewhere every couple of days. There was a stage when I was filming in Scotland and I was desperately trying to find a GP who could take my bloods and feed the information back so my clinic in London could tell me what drugs I needed. I was in the Highlands, up a hill in a tiny surgery, with a doctor who did not understand what measurements they were looking for and I thought, 'This is not going to work'.'

She retells the story calmly. Time and distance have clearly drawn the sting, but it must have been cripplingly hard at the time.

Now 46, she is proud mum to IVF twins Zena and Xanthe, soon to be two, and their older brother Zephyr, five.

The BBC was not cross about her departure, she says, namechecking Charlotte Moore (today the BBC's influential director of content) in particular for her understanding.

She went next to ITV, simply because it was the first to offer her a job when she was ready to return to frontline broadcasting. Today she'd consider working for either Auntie or commercial channels, just as long as nobody suggests her walking programmes are merely prime-time entertainment.

But leaving Countryfile, and the painful rounds of IVF, was not the first traumatic event to impact on her flourishing career. In her late 30s she had an emotional wobble that drove her first to her GP and then in to the care of a psychiatrist.

By this time she had the big career and the loving family, the (mostly) good health and the good looks, but she was feeling mentally fragile. She was never officially diagnosed with depression but she reveals: 'I had been diagnosed with endometriosis. I had relationship difficulties, there were issues at work with a superior, a lot of things going on at the same time… I wanted to talk to a neutral person who was not invested in me, so I went to my GP and he signed me up to a psychiatrist.

'I went to see him – he was an older man – for four or five months, once a week. He was a confidential sounding board, someone to talk to without being judged and without burdening my friends and family. I had hit the buffers and I don't mind saying so because one in four of us will suffer from some sort of mental-health issue in our lives.'

The psychiatric sessions gave her space to think and breathe and, perhaps unsurprisingly, coincided with the beginning of the relationship with Cunningham that would lead to her becoming a mother. She admits: 'It dawned on me I had missed out on something incredibly important to me.'

The couple are not married and have no plans to change that. Cunningham stays out of his partner's spotlight. Although Bradbury routinely posts pictures of the twins on social media, she will stop when they are old enough to be recognised.

Bradbury began her journalistic career on cable TV and then broke into the big time as GMTV's LA correspondent in the Nineties

Bradbury began her journalistic career on cable TV and then broke into the big time as GMTV's LA correspondent in the Nineties. 'Ah, they were great days,' she laughs, recalling the week she spent rushing around sperm banks in Beverly Hills looking for Michael Jackson's sperm as news broke he was fathering a child through a surrogate mother. Her good looks did not go unnoticed: Arnold Schwarzenegger flirted wildly with her, saying: 'You are very yummy…'

Today she's evangelical about us all getting out more – even if, as she controversially tells Event, that means parents taking children away from school in term time. It's a topical declaration because it echoes the battle going on between parent Jon Platt and the Department for Education in the Supreme Court, after he refused to pay a £120 fine for taking his daughter on holiday during term time in 2015.

'Children spend less time outside every day as part of the school curriculum than prisoners do, which is a frightening thought,' she says. 'I would take them out of school, controversially, and look, I'll get told off for saying so. But I think if you, the parent, have the chance to do something or go somewhere then you should have the right to home-school them, to take them on an adventure, which will be educational and eye-opening.'

So would she draw the line at a cheeky term-time bucket-and-spade holiday on a beach?

No, she wouldn't.

'We as parents are penalised for taking our children away during holiday periods because travel companies jack up prices so ludicrously. It is completely unfair. It's a child tax – it's cynical and the [travel] industry needs to stop being so evil.

'If there is a family that cannot afford to go away because prices are four times what they would be in term time, then if I was in their position I would go to my headmaster or headmistress and say I don't have any other choice, so give me their homework.'

She's not advocating mass truancy, and concedes it could cause havoc with school timetabling – she's just saying that not all learning happens in the classroom.

Here Bradbury, current president of The Camping And Caravanning Club, is echoing the philosophy of one of her eminent predecessors, Lord Baden-Powell. He passionately believed a week's camping was worth six months' theoretical teaching.

Julia Bradbury with co-presenter Matt Baker on Countryfile in 2010

Julia Bradbury with co-presenter Matt Baker on Countryfile in 2010

It's a big stand to take but she's pretty fierce about getting children out and active. One doubts her three will get away with much couch-slouching as they grow up.

This month sees the publication of her fifth book, Unforgettable Walks, in paperback. She wrote it as a companion to her popular ITV show Britain's Best Walks, which concluded on Friday having drawn audiences of more than four million.

She is, as her Event shoot shows, a jolly good sport when it comes to her image. If you want a neat metaphor, when she agreed to spend a week sleeping rough on the streets for the BBC's Rich, Famous And Homeless, she planned to nip in to Boots to titivate herself using make-up counter testers but then found by day three that 'I just didn't give a s***'.

She agrees there are millions of MasterChef viewers who cook ready meals in the microwave and that much of the audience watching property programmes can't hang a shelf. But, she says, walking is different. It's easy, it's cheap and besides, there are people all over social media telling her what they've achieved.

Unlike many of those fans, she doesn't do marathons, triathlons or mountain challenges, sticking to boxercise once a week and a daily tallying of steps walked, courtesy of her pedometer.

Bradbury is not averse to an appearance on the cover of Hello! but does not consider herself a fully fledged celeb

Bradbury is not averse to an appearance on the cover of Hello! but does not consider herself a fully fledged celeb

She tries for 10,000 a day, walking everywhere except to smart parties where her rucksack would be unwelcome. She is a classic ectomorph, tall and slim (5ft 9in and 9st) with long arms and even longer legs. Given that a lot of her answers are spluttered though the crumbs of the giant croissant she's eating for elevenses, and that she glugs a cappuccino and then eats lunch less than two hours later, I'm inclined to believe her assertion that this is her, naturally.

Bradbury was brought up in Rutland, the daughter of a steel industry executive father and a fashion-designer mother. She is devoted to both her parents and her sister, who is ten years her senior and runs her website (the outdoorguide.co.uk). She speaks about her family so casually and so often in the course of the day it's clear they are embedded in each other's daily lives.

She is not averse to an appearance on the cover of Hello! but does not consider herself a fully fledged celeb. 'I could exploit my personal life a lot more if what I wanted was to be famous. There are some things that are off-limits. People might talk about their heartbreaks or the moment they first met or the inner workings of their relationship, but for me it does not have to be out there.'

Instead, she says, she speaks only about issues that have affected her such as IVF and later motherhood, in the hope her candour helps others.

Her life in west London sounds non-starry. If she's not going out she'll be on the phone in her dressing gown until lunchtime. Once dressed, however, she is never without her Dior bronzer and a Bobbi Brown rosy cheek blush, and she is a self-confessed shopaholic who wears Dolce & Gabbana, Chloé and Stella McCartney with high-street bargains from Zara and H&M.

She won't discuss money, other than to say she's not in the same league as Ant and Dec, but she has a rights company, the website and her own production company. She has made some savvy business decisions with the Bradbury brand and agrees that working for ITV makes it easier to monetise her profile.

Bradbury has made some savvy business decisions with the Bradbury brand and agrees that working for ITV makes it easier to monetise her profile

Bradbury has made some savvy business decisions with the Bradbury brand and agrees that working for ITV makes it easier to monetise her profile

'When you work for Auntie you are under the public gaze. People feel they have a right to comment on what you wear, what you earn, what you look like and whether or not that is an efficient use of the taxpayers' money.

'You are a public servant, so if a brand or an association came to me and said we want you to front this campaign for a few weeks and I was doing anything in a similar vein on the BBC in that time frame I'd have to say no. At ITV you are not as restricted.'

It means, for example that she is a roving ambassador for Ramblers Worldwide Holidays, though I imagine she'd be squeamish about working with a company or a product out of kilter with the Bradbury playbook.

She's adamant there'll be no pay cheque from I'm A Celebrity..., and one from Strictly Come Dancing is unlikely. 'Trust me, if I was in a real jungle I would survive but I'd be eating grubs and shrubs not kangaroo bottoms. I'm A Celebrity... is just really good panto and the thing that puts me off Strictly is the media exposure. Are you going to sleep with your dance partner? Will you leave your actual partner? What are you wearing? Did you stay up until 5am? Will you fall victim to the Strictly curse? All of which is exactly what I have avoided in my career so far.

'My friend Matt Baker [the Countryfile presenter] came through it unscathed but we had some conversations where I told him there were warning bells ringing and I was saying 'watch out, watch out!' She won't say what about, though.

Bradbury is currently in Australia filming a series of walks along the Margaret River. She's too canny to say what her next British show will be until the ink is dry on the contract, but it will be something that enables her to be around for her children and their milestones.

They crashed through a big one together last week: she was planning to take them to sleep under canvas in the New Forest, their first family camping trip. She was 'glamping' though, rather than toughing it out in a bivvy bag.

'Are you kidding?' she shrieks and then tells me that inflatable tents and heated carpets are the key to happiness when sleeping in a field. 'I love the outdoors. But I am brave, not mad!'

'Unforgettable Walks' by Julia Bradbury is out now in paperback, priced £8.99, published by Quercus 

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