Chris Packham, 65, is unrecognisable in exclusive 'prehistoric' Radio Times photoshoot and reveals having "loathed his body" since he was 16

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Every day is a school day for Chris Packham. As he leans forward to meet the gaze of the Radio Times photographer, he adjusts his modesty pouch to make sure said modesty is fully contained. And shortly after doing so, it becomes clear that two hours dressed (or, rather, undressed) as a version of his prehistoric self has given him food for thought.

“What would it be like to have looked like that?” he asks himself before running through the available data: “We need to dispel the myth that cave men and women were hairy savages, eating raw food. To imagine they were covered in mud and unshaven slobs is nonsense. They’d have been groomed; they’d have had hairstyles tied to certain rituals or maybe time of year.”

Once the prosthetics – which took two make-up artists almost two hours to apply – are finally removed, Packham is keen to make it clear that this has been no minor undertaking “for a 65-year-old man who’s loathed his body since he was 16”. If he’s happy to be the story on this humid afternoon in east London, it’s because of the altogether grander story his new series is here to tell.

In Evolution, his epic new BBC documentary series on how life has changed on Earth over more than four billion years, Packham shines a spotlight on five creatures (the elephant, ostrich, bat, dolphin and horse), whose existence is a triumph of that change. Some selections – such as the famously flightless ostrich taking centre stage in the second episode – are far from obvious, but what’s just as important is the creatures you meet along the way, both those that became extinct and those that adapted to survive.

Take, for instance, the Vetulacolian, a sort of deep-sea castanet that walked – or, in this case, swam – as the ostrich could run.

Many might say that Packham’s own evolution is a no less likely success story to that of the ostrich. If you had to design a national treasure by committee, it’s unlikely that you would come up with a neurodivergent ex-punk who claims to have no close friends, struggles to make eye contact, spent a measurable chunk of his teenage years sharing his bedroom with injured foxes and kestrels and says he’s “more attracted to wildlife than humans”.

It might just be though, that our love of Packham isn’t contingent on him loving us back. At the recent opening of More Beautiful Than You – an exhibition of his wildlife photography – the attendees included Emma Thompson, Gary Lineker and Ed Miliband (with a DJ set from the Clash’s Paul Simonon). None of them seemed to care that he’d rather be out in the woods near his Hampshire home with his dogs Sid and Nancy.

The story told in Evolution seems to be one that has consistently rewarded outliers and the apparent imperfections that, over time, turn into strengths. For instance, feathers that were once symmetrical become uneven and, in doing so, allow their prehistoric owners to take to the skies if flapped vigorously enough – a major factor in explaining why birds have outlived dinosaurs.

With their giant brains and their extensive vocabulary of clicks – “the soundtrack to a thriving underwater society” – one imagines dolphins pretty much selected themselves as the stars of episode four. The experience of swimming with a family of spotted dolphins, off the coast of the Bahamas while filming the series, has clearly left its mark.

“I was using an underwater scooter to move around, and the dolphins absolutely loved that, to the point that if you turned it off, they would disappear, but the minute you switched it on again they would come back. I was surrounded. If you’d have told the six-year-old Chris in a Southampton two-up, two-down, looking at some crappy encyclopedias that this was going to happen, he would have burst.”

But if you know Packham, you’ll know that such moments aren’t restricted to the so-called higher life forms. With the possible exception of Ant and Dec (we’ll come to them shortly), he has never encountered a creature that hasn’t thrilled him in some way. “Warthogs! So ugly that they cross that line back into being beautiful,” he exclaims as he takes us on a wild ride from the prehistoric lungfish to the elephant.

Along the way, the series also gave him pause to place his own neurodiversity in an evolutionary context. “I mean, why wouldn’t we be neurologically diverse, so that in a time of crisis, a percentage of our population would be better equipped to deal with it and more likely to survive? Neurodiversity must have been advantageous throughout the course of our species’ history, and I cannot imagine, therefore, that it doesn’t exist in other species.” He describes his own autism as a present – and, as with all presents, “sometimes you open it, you don’t get what you want – so that’s what you have to accept”.

In Packham’s case at the age of 44, a diagnosis of autism gave him a framework with which to understand that difference. As a child, he would walk out of lessons that held no interest for him. At the supermarket, carefully stacked displays were a frequent casualty of his “complete overwhelm”. It wasn’t just the fluorescent lighting but the convergence of different smells.

Even now, you’re unlikely to find him pondering the cold-pressed olive oil options in a crowded aisle: “You’ve got fruit and veg and fish and meat – along with humans, who also smell. Why would you put all those smells in one place?” The way he describes it, I tell him, is like a Hieronymous Bosch depiction of hell. “Exactly that,” he confirms.

But, over time, you develop strategies. Packham doesn’t want me thinking he isn’t conscious of the fact that he has hardly looked at me during this interview. I want to tell him that every time he has looked at me, it’s when he’s drawing on his own specialist knowledge.

The first time it happens, he’s explaining why, in evolutionary terms: “You couldn’t have a head until you had an arse – because as soon as you had a through-gut, that meant food had to come in one end and poo had to come out the other. So it made sense to have the sensory organs at that end and then speed of transmission means that’s also the best place for the brain. Suddenly, boom! You’ve got a head!”

A 2015 clip of Packham on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is especially fascinating precisely because of the intensity of Packham’s eye contact with Fallon. The difference? He’s holding an African Porcupine that he wants Fallon to smell.

Packham first met his partner Charlotte Corney 20 years ago while recording a voiceover for a programme about a zoo she inherited that she has turned into an animal sanctuary. If the couple’s first few dates are anything to go by, it sounds like he should have brought his support porcupine with him.

“Charlotte said to me, ‘It was really weird going out with someone for six months that didn’t even look at me, because I didn’t know if you fancied me or not.’” He had gone to unprecedented lengths to ask her out. “She said no the first ten times,” he recalls. How did he go about declaring his interest? “In the most inept and fumbling way that you can imagine.”

Packham has said he never wanted children because he hasn’t liked himself enough to reproduce and yet Megan McCubbin, his 31-year-old stepdaughter from a previous relationship, has spoken movingly about his effect on her life. “Megan has grown up in a space where I let the guard down, so she’s been as close to the real me as it’s possible to be,” he says.

His connection with nature is perhaps matched only by his connection with young people. In 2023, with the BBC cancelling Autumnwatch (following our interview it was announced that Winterwatch will be replaced by a video podcast, Naturewatch), Packham plunged £50,000 of his own money into a free-to-view version, 8 Out of 10 Bats. His co-presenters were under the age of 25. “If you say you believe in the power of youth, you have to walk the talk,” he says.

Inevitably, you can’t bring every viewer with you. It’s with mild incredulity that Packham mentions the complaints on social media after he picked up pine marten poo on this year’s Springwatch. “What’s skin for, for Christ’s sake? Skin has evolved as a remarkable barrier against disease and infection! I’m 65, I’m not going to start putting gloves on to pick up s**t!”

A few grumbles about poo aside, numbers are up for Springwatch on last year, alongside 41.5 million hits on the show’s social media feed. Why wouldn’t the BBC double down on its investment in Packham? It can’t do any harm that one of Packham’s most notable advocates is the man he will surely one day succeed as our most celebrated living naturalist.

“Some years ago, Sir David Attenborough said that I was the agent provocateur and he fully supported and understood that that was my job. He doesn’t expect me to behave in the way that he does. He does a brilliant job of talking to Obama and opening the COP26 summit [in 2021]. But occasionally, he needs someone to sue the Government and stand outside the Royal Courts of Justice with a placard. And I’m happy doing that.”

That kind of activism will have driven some sensitive conversations with the BBC in recent years? “Yeah, of course,” he says, “I have a job outside of the BBC to try and drive change, often drive it quicker than most people want it. But I can have productive conversations with the BBC and we have a protocol whereby we can minimise conflict.”

Perhaps the line running through both Packham’s activism and his television work is the conviction that animals must never be defined by our attitudes towards them. And when other television programmes lose sight of that, he can’t help but speak up.

That’s why, when I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! returns to our screens, Packham will do what he has done with every series. He’ll write a letter to its hosts Ant and Dec objecting to a programme “which reinforces negative stereotypes about [certain] sorts of animals, where animals are being used purely for entertainment”. And if his previous letters are anything to go by, he will receive no reply.

I tell him that there’s a certain irony here. In the first episode of Evolution, we see Packham sacrifice himself to a colony of ants, carefully extracting them from his bloodied arms as he praises their ability to act as a collective mind. For Packham though, this felt like anything but a “trial”. This was clearly the completion of a circle that started back in childhood when, as he puts it, “I used to lay down alongside wood ants’ nests and they’d get in my armpits. That’s living for me.”

As he recalls this formative moment of communion with nature, he looks about as happy as I’ve ever seen him look. Perhaps Packham’s greatest gift is that he makes us want to experience nature the way he does. And when you think of it like that, it becomes clear that some achievements take a lot more than a modesty pouch to conceal.

Photography: Richard Ansett @richardansett

HMU and Prosthetics: Bryony Blake @bryony_blake

HMU and Prosthetics: Anna Lingis @annalingis

Retouching: Joe Thomas

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Evolution begins at 9pm on Monday 13 July on BBC Two and iPlayer.

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