‘It's my place to escape'

Chris Packham on revisiting the walk that changed his life…

- TESS LAMACRAFT

Many of us have a favourite walk. For Chris Packham, it’s a path that leads from the outskirts of Southampton towards Winchester Cathedral.

The popular Springwatch presenter, who grew up in Hampshire, first fell in love with this picturesque route as a child, and would go on to revisit it regularly throughout his teenage years and as an adult.

Now, Chris will be sharing the beauty of this trek, which follows the banks of the River Itchen, with viewers in his new BBC2 documentary, The Walk That Made Me.

Here, in an exclusive interview, Chris, 60, tells TV Times how this walk changed his life…

How would you describe this documentary?

It’s literally just me with a handheld 360-degree camera walking along, essentially chatting to myself from 6am to 9pm. There’s no film crew and no music added afterwards; it’s just the natural sounds and the people I bump into along the way.

I’d seen the Winter Walks programmes that producer Cy Chadwick and executive producer Tony Parker made [for BBC4] and I thought, ‘Wow, this is really good TV. It has a completely different pace to it; it’s so immersive.’

When I told them how much I loved them, they said, ‘You should do one!’ and the idea was hatched!

It’s a unique piece of TV with the gentleness, the pace, the calm and the quiet.

Why is this particular walk so special to you?

It’s the one place I’ve walked all my life and I’ve been there so many times; it has loads of memories and stories.