He loves the smell of a river, is a self-taught weatherman with his head in the clouds and Nirvana’s would-be bass player. Meet Countryfile’s new boss Mark Beech
Interview: Annabel Ross Annabel Ross is a writer, BBC broadcaster and regular contributor to the BBC Countryfile Magazine Plodcast.
Unassuming and gently spoken, Mark seems to embrace the countryside wherever he goes, whether he’s filming on location in Oregon or swimming in the Thames. Being series editor for Countryfile seems to come naturally to him, another life experience he is quietly attaining. We met in Somerset’s Mendip Hills on a warm sunny evening in early autumn…
Are you enjoying working in Bristol?
“Yes, it’s an area I really love. I first came here when I was about eight. My grandparents are from Bristol and I remember them taking me on a day out to the Mendip caves and being struck by the countryside. It felt exotic. It was different because I’m from the Sussex coast, originally.”
What was the countryside like where you grew up? “We lived on the edge of where the residential areas ran out and the farmer’s fields began. So I’d spend a lot of my time in those fields. In fact, the first unofficial job I ever had was collecting unbroken clay pigeons for a farmer called Frank. He said ‘I’ll give you one pence for every clay pigeon you find that isn’t broken’. So I spent a lot of time scratching my shins in fields, collecting clay pigeons for a couple of quid.
“Growing up on the coast, the weather is so dramatic. It’s very different to being inland. It gave me a fascination for weather, and for most of my school years what I really wanted to be when I grew up was a weatherman.”
What was your first job? “When I was 16, I was lucky enough to do my work experience at the Met Office. It was quite something to go in there and meet the people and the machines working out the weather. But it destroyed my romantic idea of being a meteorologist. I’d thought, you wake up in the morning, check your Stevenson screen, tap your barometer, check which way the wind’s going, and then announce to the world what the weather’s going to be for the day.
“But even back then, in the late 1980s, this room was just full of computers doing all the work. And as someone who thought I could get into this as a career, it put me off instantly. But, I never lost my interest in meteorology and of manual forecasting – if we call it that – knowing what the clouds mean and so on. I love all that.”
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