Celebrity
TV presenter Julia Bradbury on why she loves exercise, but would never go on Britain’s best-loved dance show
Like most in television, Julia Bradbury’s career contains many rich and diverse chapters.
In the mid-90s, the focus was entertainment and she spent a year in the US as GMTV’s LA correspondent before helping to launch Channel 5 in the UK, she then presented motorsport for Channel 4, but it was as the host of UK Living talk show Moral Dilemmas, Julia caught the eye of the editor of Watchdog, which she went on to front for four years alongside Nicky Campbell.
It was an invitation from a BBC commissioner in 2009 to host BBC4’s Wainwright’s Walks: Coast to Coast, following fellwalker Alfred Wainwright’s favourite mountain routes, that paved the way for other naturalworld presenting work, including Countryfile, Britain’s Best Walks and, most recently, Julia Bradbury’s Irish Journey for Channel 4, where she returned to the country of her birth.
Now 53 – an age at which in the past some women in the industry have struggled – Julia’s career is brilliantly buoyant because of the booming wellness market and popularity of outdoor therapy.
‘I’d love to say it was a grand plan. It wasn’t, but there are so many topics to do with the countryside that are very relevant today,’ she explains. ‘Walks, the natural world, mental health, the physical activity you can do outside, conservation, sustainability. The different branches of the outdoor world – pardon the pun – are huge. So I’m hoping that I can carry on going for at least another 20 or 30 years!’
While Julia’s passion for walking was first ignited during childhood family walks in the Peak District, her adoration for Mother Nature properly grew after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in autumn 2021. After a life-saving skin and nipple-saving mastectomy – all filmed for a deeply moving ITV documentary Julia Bradbury: Breast Cancer and Me – Julia overhauled her lifestyle to minimise the risk of breast cancer recurrence. The basics, she says, are simple.
‘It’s about me rediscovering healthy ways to live that I can implement into my everyday life – adding movement into my day, walking extra steps and building in meaningful exercise – and working on building my muscles, eating the right levels of proteins and vitamins and taking the right supplements,’ says Julia, who shared her insight within the pages of her bestselling health book Walk Yourself Happy. Now she is taking the next step by launching a series of wellbeing retreats, where she and experts featured within the book bring to life the book’s content in greater depth.
‘The
