'There was a time when I couldn't walk down the King's Road without being mobbed,' chuckles Levison Wood. This is no brag, though: it's said with the bemusement of a man who was catapulted to fame after his plan to trek the length of the River Nile made him into an unlikely celebrity alongside today's crop of modern explorers.

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We're delighted that Levison joined James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast this week, to talk about how his early life roaming Staffordshire morphed — via a stint in the Paras regiment — into a career trekking the world, from the jungles of South America to the freezing mountains of the Himalayas. His books and documentaries — one of which became the most-watched factual TV programme in Britain in 2015 — have made him a hugely well-recognised face, and he tells the tale of how his thirst for adventure, and his fascination with connecting with people around the world, brought him to where he is today.

That fascination with people also underlies his latest book, The Great Tree Story. He happily admits that he's no botanist, and couldn't tell one species of tree from another: instead, this is a tale of how the lives of people have intertwined with the trees around them for millennia. Take the yew trees that dot churchyards around Britain, for example: they weren't planted after the ancient churches were built; instead, the churches were built at the sacred spots where the oldest trees stood proud.

It's a fascinating listen; you can find out more about The Great Tree Story here.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Levison Wood

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

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What do catflaps and some of the finest carpentry in the land have in common? Bruce Hodgson, that’s what.

The man who founded Artichoke is our guest on the Country Life Podcast this week, talking us through the history of the brand, as well as his own personal journey as a craftsman, and what the future holds for heritage crafts.

Bruce’s journey to Artichoke wasn’t what we’d call traditional. After ‘being asked to leave’ school, and a brief stint in the army, he returned to the thing that made him happy as a child. But it wasn’t straight into the Country Life Top 100 for him — he spent 15 years working as a carpenter before Artichoke became synonymous with elegance, timelessness and quality.

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Bruce’s is a fascinating story, but he’s not done yet. Not satisfied with creating one of the country’s most well-respected interiors companies, he’s determined to put making and craftsmanship back into the spotlight.

Whether it’s little steps, such as re-framing woodworking away from being just ‘a hobby’ and to be taken more seriously as a career, to larger projects such as the Inspiring Makers conference, apprenticeships, work experience and the Artichoke School of Furniture, it’s clear that in Bruce, making has a fine champion.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Bruce Hodgson

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Anyone who loves P.G. Wodehouse knows Jeeves and Wooster, Blandings Castle and the Oldest Member golf stories. But what of the man himself? His early life as a sensation on Broadway? His extraordinary seven-days-a-week work ethic? The truth about his attempts to flee the Nazis, scuppered by an unreliable car, before he was interned and pressured into making wartime broadcasts for the German regime? His later life in the US, and his sadness at never returning to the UK — even to collect his eventual knighthood?

These are some of the things that fuelled a conversation a decade ago between Robert Daws and Stephen Fry, which set Daws off on a road that will lead him to the stage at the Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh this summer, playing the role of P.G. Wodehouse in a one-man show, Wodehouse in Wonderland.

'Stephen mentioned that very few people know anything about P.G. Wodehouse the writer,' he said. 'They might know about the scandal around him in the Second World War, but apart from that, not really anything. And we thought there should be something.'

That led to Daws speaking to William Humble, a friend, collaborator, screenwriter and playwright who happened to have been working on an unproduced screenplay about Wodehouse. The play Wodehouse in Wonderland was ready within weeks, went on tour a couple of years ago, and is now back on stage at the Edinburgh festival to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Wodehouse's death.

We're delighted that Robert was able to join us on the Country Life Podcast to talk about Wodehouse's life and career, from his little-known start as a writer of smash-hit shows on Broadway — he was a huge success before he wrote a single word about Jeeves and Wooster — through to his final years living in the US.

Wodehouse in Wonderland is at Tabard in London from July 20-22 and at The Assembly Rooms in Edinburgh from July 30 to August 25, 2025.

Episode credits

Host, editor and producer: Toby Keel

Guest: Robert Daws

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Back next week: James Fisher

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How do you come to a point in your life when you find yourself swimming with great white sharks?

And how can it be that when you do, you find that moment 'completely normal'?

Dan Abbott — aka Shark Man Dan — answered these and many more questions when he joined us on the Country Life Podcast at the beginning of 2025.

In the six months or so since then, Dan's career has taken a huge upswing after he ended up as one of the stats of Netflix's All The Sharks, a unique blend of nature documentary and reality TV contest which has become something of a sensation in just a few days, hitting the Netflix Top 10 in more than 44 countries at the time of writing.

So we thought it would be a great time to look back on this recording to share it once again. It'll be a treat for those who might have missed it first time round, and just as much of a treat for those who revisit this truly fascinating interview.

All The Sharks is out now on Netflix and you can follow Dan Abbott on Instagram @sharkman_dan.

Episode credits

• Host: James Fisher

• Guest: Dan Abbott

• Producer and editor: Toby Keel

• Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

'We still see people out wearing colours which we know for a fact we haven't produced in 15 or 20 years,' chuckles Marcus Janssen, head of Schöffel, as he speaks about the company's gilets — the 'Chelsea Lifejackets' — to James Fisher on this week's edition of the Country Life Podcast.

Marcus took over at Schöffel after a career as a countryside journalist, stepping in to a role as head of a family-owned business which has been going for well over two centuries.

His love of the British countryside shines through as he talks to James about how a South African journalist ended up running a much-loved countryside brand whose roots are in Germany — and many of whose customers wear their gilets as much in the streets of SW3 as they do in the fields of Scotland or Gloucestershire.

Marcus also talks about the recently-inaugurated Schöffel Countryside Awards, run in partnership with the GWCT.

Episode credits

• Host: James Fisher
• Guest: Marcus Janssen
• Editor and Producer: Toby Keel
• Music: JuliusH via Pixabay
• Special thanks: Adam Wilbourn

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Corinne Fowler has never been one to shy away from straight talking.

The Professor of Colonialism and Heritage at the University of Leicester made headlines for weeks back in 2020 after co-authoring a report for the National Trust on how the history and creation of many of our great houses are bound up with the history of slavery, conquest and colonialism. She was vilified in the right-wing press and accused by Nigel Farage of 'trashing our nation'.

Her response does her huge credit. Instead of launching in to stoke this battle in the culture wars any further, she embarked upon a new project which became her latest book, Our Island Stories. Embracing the spirit of 'show, don't tell' the book is structured around a series of walks in Britain, taken in the company of people whose lives have been shaped by the tales the route, and the places along it, have to tell. It's a book that has won enormous praise, being described in The Observer as a 'compassionate, measured account — which does not shy away from the inevitable controversy of its subject, but never embraces easy or pat answers — [which] offers an eloquent vision of how imperialism has come to define our green and pleasant land'.

We're delighted that Corinne joined James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast to tell her story, and explain more about how so many of the tales of our island nation — and how it became the country it is today— have been hidden in plain sight for generations. It's an absolutely fascinating look at a side of Britain that has been all too often overlooked for so long, from the true source of wealth creation in 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to the places across the country that were far more diverse centuries ago than almost any of us realise.

Our Island Stories by Corinne Fowler is out now in paperback.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Professor Corinne Fowler

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The adventurer, broadcaster, scientist and writer Steve Backshall has been a fixture on TV screens in Britain for nearly three decades — and we're absolutely thrilled that he joined James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast.

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Steve talks through some of the highlights of his amazing career, from coming face-to-face with tigers and great white sharks to discovering ancient ruins while diving in flooded cave systems. But as well as a globetrotting naturalist with a gift for overcoming his natural fears, he's also a natural raconteur who shares and why he's determined that his kids should have a wonderful childhood spent outdoors — just as he did.

Steve is now sharing his lifetime of adventures on a new podcast called That's Just Wild, which he presents alongside biologist Lizzie Daly and environmental journalist Sarah Roberts, with two episodes each week from wherever you get your podcasts.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Steve Backshall

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

‘I thought, okay, well it worked for Lady Godiva, didn’t it? This whole naked stuff? So let me give that a try. I felt like it was the only option.’

Just as it worked for Lady Godiva, so it has for Hannah Bourne-Taylor, the campaigner, naturalist and writer who has spent years fighting for change to help Britain’s bird population — and particularly the swift.

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After spending years overseas in places where she was surrounded by birds and nature, Hannah was dismayed on her return to see how little is being done to help preserve wildlife — and particularly with regard to her favourite bird, the swift. And after deciding to do something about it, she launched the campaign which has now taken years of her life — and which, as she tells James Fisher on the Country Life Podcast, has seen her enjoy a blaze of publicity by marching up and down Whitehall without a stitch on, in a desperate, yet wildly successful, publicity stunt.

She tells James about the swift, their plight, and how the simple introduction of one or two ‘swift bricks’ added to each new build house could have an enormous impact at negligible cost, by providing safe nesting for birds whose former favourite spots have increasingly disappeared due to modern construction techniques.

Hannah also talks about her love of nature in general and the struggles she’s faced, from battling apathy and indifference to hastily adjusting a stick-on G-string in the House of Lords toilets. She also tells a tale from an earlier time in her life, when a tiny lost fledgling nested in her hair as it recuperated before rejoining its family.

It’s a fascinating glimpse in to the mind of a woman who is in equal measure strong, brave, eccentric and passionate. Once you’ve listened, we’d highly recommend Hannah’s books for more: her latest, Nature Needs You, about her battle to save the swift, and Fledgling, her story that rewrites ‘the conventional boundaries of the relationships people have with animals’.

Episode credits

Host: James Fisher

Guest: Hannah Bourne-Taylor

Editor and producer: Toby Keel

Music: JuliusH via Pixabay

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.