Nick Knowles is a selfconfessed workaholic. He spends most of his life living in hotels while filming the many shows – DIY SOS, Real Rescues, Last Choir Standing, Wildest Dreams, to name but a few – which have made him a household name. “In the last 10 or 12 years, I’ve spent about four nights a month at home,” he tells me. “Since I’ve been with Jessica, I’ve tried to improve that, so now it’s maybe eight nights a month. It’s better than it was.” Nick, 48, a divorced father-of-three, has been with 23-year-old Jessica Moor for the past two years. Does she mind him being away from home so often? “She’s a social media consultant with her own business, so she quite often travels to where I’m staying and works during the day, and then we’ll catch up with each other in the evening,” he says. Nick says it was far more than Jessica’s stunning looks which attracted him. “It helps that she’s great to look at, but there’s a deliberation and a calmness about her, which is very handy for someone like me. She’s very independent and successful, she’s travelled a lot and has a good world view. There are a lot of things which are attractive about her – mainly her bum!” That is a typical Nick Knowles throwaway line – the slightly unkempt, streetwise Londoner with the designer stubble is often seen as the BBC’s bit of rough.

But he’s also intelligent, successful, versatile and driven; he’s presented everything from Saturday night quiz shows (Who Dares Wins, Secret Fortune) to wildlife films, history documentaries – as well as the ever-popular DIY SOS. And he’s far more than a presenter – he’s involved in developing most of the shows he presents, and began his career as a reporter and then director. He researched, wrote and presented the Historyonics series of quirky dramas, much used by history teachers to engage their pupils in 1066 and all that. He’s just co-written his first novel – a pirate adventure romp – and is trying to secure finance for a film, which will be a black comedy highlighting the plight of old people in this country, inspired in part by his friendship with a semiretired USAF pilot when he was growing up in Suffolk.

Nick was born on a council estate in Southall, west London, in 1962, and has a brother, who now has a record company, and three sisters, all of whom became dancers. But his life changed dramatically at 11, when the family left London and moved to Suffolk. His father was a 45-year-old civil servant when Nick was born. But in his 50s, he suffered two heart attacks and took early retirement.

“But he was bored, so he retrained as a careers officer and as a result, we moved to Mildenhall,” Nick tells me. It was quite a culture shock, swapping London suburbia for rural Suffolk, but Nick quickly adapted. “It was a real Famous-Five style youth,” he remembers. “I used to go fishing a lot in the rivers, and illegally catch trout from a trout river and sell them to a restaurant. I used the money to buy fish and chips!”

He attended St Louis Middle School in Bury St Edmunds (currently under threat of closure), where, he says, he discovered girls – “an expensive hobby of mine ever since!” But he also befriended many of the American kids whose fathers were serving with the USAF at the nearby RAF Mildenhall air base. “Many of them went to my school, and I used to swap dandelion and burdock for root beer!”

He has fond memories of his years in Mildenhall. “I loved living in Suffolk, and have often thought about moving back to the area,” he says.

After a few years, however, his father took a new job in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and the family uprooted again. “Every time dad retrained, we moved somewhere else, so we hopped around all over the place,” says Nick. “It was what started my gypsy lifestyle. It probably made me the person I am, and explains why I do the job I do. I’m very good at making new friends quickly, and making them feel comfortable, and that’s an important part of my job.” Nick went to Skinners, a boys’ grammar school in Kent, and was considered bright, but disruptive. “It was a very academic school, but unfortunately I wasn’t very good with authority, so I was constantly getting into trouble. I got eight O levels, but they refused to let me stay on in the sixth form because I was too much of a trouble-maker. I used to work out long vengeance campaigns on teachers who were bullies.”

He plotted for five months to take revenge on one teacher who had picked on a friend who had a stutter. The plot resulted in the teacher being suspended for a month. To this day, Nick detests bullying, and regularly supports the children’s charity Act Against Bullying. After quitting school at 16, Nick fended for himself in a bedsit. “It was time for me to get out into the world and do something with my life.”

He had a variety of dead-end jobs, labouring on building sites, working in a petrol station, selling shoes and carpets. But he dreamt of better things, having played in a band with his brother since he was 14, and constantly writing music, poetry and comedy.

Then an old school friend, who worked on a local paper, told him about a BBC2 programme in which kids were invited to make a video about their home town. He promptly wrote a script, and “they gave me a film crew to shoot all the film I wanted to make. I loved it so much I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do’, and I spent the next two years trying to get into television.”

He started as a runner for the BBC, and then went to Australia, where he became a TV news reporter, and later a producer and director. After a spell in Arizona, USA, he returned to the UK and joined TVS and later Meridian as a news reporter, producer and director. He became a presenter almost by chance. “I was directing one day and couldn’t get the presenter to do the piece the way I wanted, so I did it myself. The producer saw it and asked me to present other things. In the end I had to become a presenter as they were offering me a lot more money!”

He presented a variety of mostly daytime shows before being hired to copresent 5’s Company on the newlylaunched Channel 5 – a live 90-minute chat show.” I didn’t really want to be a presenter, I wanted to be a director, so I didn’t really care what I did on television,” Nick remembers. “If I got sacked, I’d go back to directing, so I was very relaxed – I was just having a laugh. I had a very casual, street style, which very few people had at the time – just me and Davina McCall, really.”

His laid-back style got him noticed, and in 1999, he was asked to present a new BBC series, DIY SOS. The show proved immensely popular, and is now in its 12th year. What does Nick think is the secret of its success?

“It’s genuine and honest rather than being pretend. Also, it’s very rude and funny, and we just get on and do things for real.”

Nick and his team of colourful builders genuinely get on well. “There are days when my sides hurt with laughing, and my cheeks hurt from crying with laughter with the guys I work with. We’re more like a family and we spend a lot of time together outside of work. On most television programmes, people pretend to get on, and as soon as the lights are off, they all go off in their different directions.” He also enjoys encouraging local volunteers to help, and gets a real kick out of handing over a finished house to people “who suddenly realise their lives have been completely changed” by the team’s efforts.

But, although he’s presented DIY SOS for so long, Nick has made a canny and risky decision to avoid being pigeonholed in his TV career. He’s always looking to try something new – hence the vast variety of shows he’s presented, from BBC1’s New Year’s Eve bash to Mission Africa.

Filming in Africa has developed his deep passion for wildlife, which began as a boy when he used to watch Jacques Cousteau programmes on TV.

“I just have an endless fascination for knowledge and experience, really,” he tells me. When he first went to Africa, he learnt how to track animals. He made a moving film about orang utans for the BBC’s Saving Planet Earth series, and in 2009, spent nine weeks in Africa filming Wildest Dreams with the BBC’s Natural History Unit.

While filming in Kenya, he became personally involved when he discovered a group of hippos dying because the springs had run dry and the grass they lived on had been eaten by cattle. Nick helped pay for hay and alfalfa to be transported to feed the hippos. “When you’re making a natural history programme, you’re not supposed to interfere in any way. But I decided it was a manmade disaster, as cattle had been allowed to eat the hippos’ grass, so we put together a manmade rescue plan.”

The supplies kept the hippos alive until the rains came, and Nick believes that a small population of hippos survives there to this day.

Of the many shows Nick has been part of, he is probably proudest of the Historyonics series he wrote, researched and presented back in 2003. He began by writing Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot for BBC1, which told the familiar story in a wacky and engaging way, and went on to script a series of funny but informative dramas telling the story of colourful historic characters from William the Conqueror to Mary Queen of Scots.

“Teachers use them in schools, and I’m really pleased about that, because I didn’t even take O level history, as the lessons were so dull. When I travelled to Australia and America, I became interested in the culture of their native people, and I realised I didn’t know much about my own. So I became a voracious reader of British history, especially Elizabethan and Roman periods. If I’m out with my family, I’ll tend to disappear up a hill to visit an Iron-Age fort!”

His love of history is evident in the book he’s just co-written (working title, “Ice Witness”), which is set both in the present and in the age of Elizabethan piracy. And the blackly comic movie he’s hoping to make, about the plight of the elderly, stems from his fascination with talking to older people about their memories of the not-too-distant past. He has a journalist’s curiosity about other people’s lives, and he think this is one of his strengths as a presenter and programme-maker.

“I’m interested in people and everybody I meet has something interesting to tell me.” he says. “I also think I’m just not very showbizzy. People come up to talk to me in the street and chat all the time. A lot of people who do presenting are not the same in real life as they are on the telly. I’m lucky I can just go to work and be me – and that’s quite unusual for television.”

Article entitled `Man Behind The Stubble' by Sandra Roberts on August 22nd 2011
Great British Life
Enjoying Life in Britain
www.greatbritishlife.co.uk