Kate Humble

About Kate Humble

Kate grew up in Bray in Berkshire and attended the Abbey School in Reading, Berkshire, where she admits she wasn't the best student the school had ever had.

After leaving school she travelled through Africa from Cape Town to Cairo, doing various jobs including waitressing, driving safari trucks, working on a crocodile farm and performing as a magician's assistant, where she was the girl who got sawed in half. In 1990 she appeared for the first time as an actress in a TV production The Secret Life of Ian Fleming - and was credited as "Lauren Heston .... The redhead". This later led to some mild embarrassment for her, due to the nude love scenes included in this production.

In 1994, she travelled around Madagascar, the subject of her first article for the Daily Telegraph travel section. Since then she has written articles about diving and cycling in Cuba, an 'exploding' lake in Cameroon, and hippopotamus conservation work in Ghana.

Kate started her television career as a researcher for the BBC, later transferring to presenting programmes such as Top Gear, Tomorrow's World and the 2001 series The Holiday Programme - You call the shots where the team travelled the world doing whatever viewers recommended using the then novel media of text messaging and emailing the team as they travelled.

Most recently, Kate has specialised in presenting wildlife programmes, including Animal Park, Springwatch with Bill Oddie, Wild in Africa and SeaWatch.

Kate presented The Blue Planet Live! on the 2008 UK tour at Wembley Arena, St. David's Hall in Cardiff and at Symphony Hall in Birmingham.

She occasionally performs on the lecture circuit with a show based on her experiences with wildlife, titled Harassed by Hippos and Battered by Cod: A Humble Way to Make a Living.

From 2000 to 2005, she presented a BBC series called Rough Science, in which a number of scientists were set various challenges to be solved using just basic tools and supplies.

On 29 July 2009, she was the subject for the programme Who Do You Think You Are?, where she discovered that she had family connections to the Hartley Colliery Disaster. Her paternal grandfather, Bill Humble, was a test pilot who tested the Hawker Tempest and her maternal grandfather, Stan Carter, served as an officer in the RAF and after being shot-down was held as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III at the time of The Great Escape.

Kate is married to television producer Ludo Graham. They first met when she was aged 16, married in Newbury, Berkshire on September 12 1992, when she was 23, and have two sons, Bertie (born 1994) and Lawrence (born 1996). They have recently (2007) moved from Chiswick, West London to the Wye Valley, where they have wanted to live for 'A very long time'.

In an interview in 2007, Kate revealed her enjoyment of public nudity.