Jeremy Wade is a television presenter and author, whose worldwide hit TV series River Monsters ran for nine seasons. Other shows include Mysteries of the Deep and Jeremy Wade’s Dark Waters. Jeremy, 65, is single and lives in Somerset.

How did your childhood influence your work ethic?

Quite strongly. My father was a parish priest in Suffolk, which is not something you go into for the money.

I remember my mother used to go fruit picking to supplement the family income. She used to take the kids with her in the school holidays when I was about nine or 10. I just remember that as being very hard work. I got this idea from a very early age of work being something quite unpleasant, that you’ve got to do.

What was your first wage?

I remember being a farm labourer briefly. I think that was £14 a week.

Was there a time when you didn’t know how you were going to pay the bills?

Actually, it’s always been quite hard for me until very recently.

Very early on, just the idea of ever having a home seemed so out of reach. I decided that I would just live as cheaply as I could, try and find the lowest-priced places to rent, so I wasn’t spending all my money just covering housing, and I’d get some kind of surplus, to enable me to do what I wanted with my time.

I lived in some ridiculously cheap places. I lived in a place in London in about 1980, where the rent for the entire house was divided up among however many people live there. And at one point, I think I was paying £2.40 a week.

It was barely habitable. There were no banisters, there were no floorboards in the bathroom, and there was no glass in my bedroom window.

What were you doing before your TV career happened?

I was a teacher briefly in my early 20s. That was my first regular job. When I was working in London, after I left teaching, I worked as a motorcycle messenger for a year too.

After I travelled to India in my mid twenties, I wrote and sold a couple of articles for fishing magazines. I had a glimmer of an idea that here was something I might possibly be able to make some money from, doing something that I quite enjoyed.

Having said that, one of the articles they paid £40, and the other one was £20, the latter for which I have yet to be paid.

I never really had any sort of sustained periods of work. I did get a job in an advertising agency, so the longest I worked apart from now was three and a half years.

What has been the most lucrative part of your career so far?

Well, I guess that would be now, although, obviously with Covid things slowed down.

Since this sort of unbroken spell of television, which we’re talking about 12 or 13 years now, financially things got better for me.

Annually, depending on whatever the contract is, my income is comfortably in six figures.