Walking The Dog with Emily Dean - Kevin McCloud (Part One)

Episode Date: December 24, 2024

Join Emily and Ray for a very special walk with designer, writer and television presenter Kevin McCloud! The stunning backdrop for our walk with Kevin is the beautiful grounds of Goodwood House in East Sussex. Kevin has a very special connection with Goodwood - as he is the curator of their Barkitecture design contest - which is held annually in aid of charity during a wonderful event called Goodwoof.Kevin does claim to be able to speak dog - as he has three dog grandchildren, but his time at home is currently being taken up by two elderly cats.He tells us all about how he grew up surrounded by design, his year learning Italian on a Tuscan vineyard and how he felt he didn’t fit in at Cambridge University. Grand Designs celebrated its 25th year in 2024. You can watch every episode on Channel 4!Follow @Kevin.mccloud1 on Instagram Follow @goodwoofdogs on InstagramFollow @goodwood on InstagramGoodwoof will be taking place on Saturday 17th and Sunday 18th May 2025. Early bird tickets are available now here!  Kevin will be appearing at the event as part of Barkitecture. Thank you to The Goodwood Hotel for kindly hosting us in one of their lovely dog-friendly rooms during our trip to East Sussex. The Hotel has 12 dog-friendly rooms. Dogs are provided with a bed, bowls, bags and treats. The Kennels is the clubhouse for all of Goodwood Estate's members, a home away from home for those looking to relax and enjoy superb food in stylish surroundings.Dogs are welcome at The Kennels and can also join as members with a Kennels' Dog Membership. Dog members receive a personalised dog bowl and their membership helps support the work of The Kennels' chosen charity, Hounds for Heroes. Walking the Dog was given special access to the Goodwood Estate, exploring The Kennels, where Goodwoof is held. There are a number of permissive paths across the Estate – further details can be found here. We ask that dogs are kindly kept on a lead when walking on the Estate.Follow Emily: Instagram - @emilyrebeccadeanX - @divine_miss_emWalking The Dog is produced by Faye LawrenceMusic: Rich Jarman Artwork: Alice LudlamPhotography: Karla Gowlett  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So I think it's a great thing to be able to say, and it's all about delivery of this, isn't it? There's quite a big problem here. Meaning, the house has just fallen over. This week on Walking the Dog, because it's Christmas, Ray and I have served up a bit of a treat for you. We went for a walk with one of the nation's biggest national treasures, Grand Designs presenter Kevin McLeod. And where better to interview a national treasure than in the beautiful grounds of a stately home, the magnificent Goodwood House.

Kevin actually has a very special connection with Goodwood and their annual dog festival, Goodwuf, as he's the head judge of the Goodwuf Design Competition of Architecture, where architects showcase some incredibly unique kennel designs. So he took us on a tour of the grounds while we chatted about his childhood and his fascinating life and career and how his whole passion for design and architecture all started. Full disclosure, I absolutely love Kevin.

on Grand Designs. So whoever said don't meet your heroes is basically a liar, because Kevin turned out to be such a smart, funny, total joy of a human being. And he also totally won Ray over, which let's face it, is the only thing that matters. So I really think you're going to love this one. Huge thanks, by the way, to the fabulously dog-friendly Goodwood Hotel for hosting Ray and I overnight. Thank God he didn't disgrace himself. And you can find out all the information about Goodworth in the description of this episode. Ray and I hope you have a truly wonderful Christmas and thank you so much for joining us on all our walks this year. We've so loved having you with us. I'm going to stop talking now and hand over to the man himself. Here's Kevin and Ray Ray. Kevin, are you going to get Ray moving?

Ray, we're going to go. Come on. He's great. He just doesn't need any encouragement. Okay, we're going to tie you out, Raymond. Come on then. Raymond. Do you know, Kevin, when you, when you, you say it, I really believe you. What's there? Well, I don't know. You're quite commanding with my dog. I speak dog. Do you? Yeah. I've currently got two old cats, but I, and they're really, really ancient.

And they completely dominate our lives. And I, you know, there are no holidays and there are no trips away for more than one day because they're on different meds. And it's quite a struggle to keep them going. But they're so lovely, such lovely, lovely, lovely creatures. And I've learnt to speak cat, which is an entirely different language. And it's like the difference between Japanese and, I don't know, Icelandic or something. A dog is a really easy language to speak for me.

How would you teach that to someone, the language of talk? I really don't know. But what do you think the principles are? The principles are. So look, like cats, you put the food out for them. And they say, I don't want this. Go away. There's a lovely cartoon of cats, which is of a cat sitting in a window.

And the cat's sitting in the window and it's saying, I'm so lonely, I'm so lonely. And then this hand appears to stroke the cat, just, go away. And that's the cat. They're very contrary. And they're not domesticated in that way. They're wild and they're primal in their instincts. And they're very, very unpredictable in that way,

or rather predictable in their unpredictability. Whereas dogs, I find that just, they've worked and tried for, for millennia to be really hard human companions, really hardworking human companions. I think dogs really love being around us. They're pack animals and, you know, they are inside every dog. Inside Raymond, there is a wolf. I mean, it's hard to see, but inside Raymond as a little wolf. And the thing about little dogs is they think they're as big as a big dog. There's no, there's no difference. Do you not find? A hundred percent. I mean, I find it embarrassing, frankly, He takes on, he goes up to sort of Great Danes.

The worst is when he's barking at the TV and there's a lion or a panther. And he goes, because it's a cat. As if you could be able to take that on. Embarrassing. I'm embarrassed for you, Raymond, at this point. Well, what an introduction. I mean, never mind grand designs. You should be presenting a show on cats, dogs.

You can present a show on anything. Anything other than human beings, yeah. The thing about dogs is, it was explained to me, actually, by my son. Because I've got dog grandchildren, so I've got three, as well as two real human grandchildren, also got three dogs. And my son, who's got two of them, Arnie and Cubb, so he said, the thing about a dog, is that whatever you're doing with it, it's fun. And so it should be.

And it's the dog's favorite thing in that moment. And so literally, you know, you put the bowl of food out, that's my favorite thing. Ball! Oh, that's my favorite thing. Oh, walk! My favorite thing. And whatever it is, they just express this amazing unbounded excitement and enthusiasm for whatever it is that you're offering them that's good, you know. It's like an unspoilt heart, I call it, dogs have.

So they live in the eternal present and there's something very comforting and sometimes you need that because as humans we tend to be, have one foot in the past and one in the future. And I think they anchor us in the present. So there is this thing which underscores human depression and disappoint. appointment and which is our sense of our immortality. We know we're going to die and we're the only species I think on the planet and perhaps elephants I don't know or maybe whales but it's pretty one of the only species that knows it's going to die and know that things are not going to be great towards the end and animals don't have this dogs particularly don't have it and I I love that and I it's such a powerful idea I thought it would have a name that theory you know that like

So we had to call it something. Probably those in German. They've got to work for everything. 28 letters in it. Yeah. Okay, now, Schweize because stringy a kait to be shrankle. Whatever. But that is, that's an innocent soul, as you say.

But there's something very powerful, because people often say to me, you know, of course, the terrible flaw with dogs is that they leave us too early. Of course. And to which I always say, in some old strange way, that's their sense. superpower is that with humans, we bury that in the terms and conditions. We choose to ignore that. We know we're all, no one's going to make it out of here alive, but we can avoid that reality. Whereas with dogs, you enter into that contract from the minute you buy them. You can't avoid it. And I think that's why you value them and appreciate them more. Yeah. Because you know they're the

ends coming. Yeah, it's not long. Do you know what I mean? They have built in obsolescence and in a strange way it's their greatest flaw but it's what makes you appreciate them it shocks me always when you you know see people who you know five years on who've had a dog and the oh it's no longer there or or or it's so old as to be limping around you know and and i know my brother has a ancient lavrador it's really my sister-in-law's and and he's beautiful mirth he's stinky and aged and he's got he's got he's got a cataract in one eye and you know and he's kind of hoarsely out of breath and can hardly move, but he's still the same dog he was. And it's only five years ago, he's bounding around, you know, and going for a run with her.

So that's the difficult thing. It's the accelerated speed of it all. And it is, it's heartbreaking. Because as you say, I like the fact that you find some positivity in it, that you find an expression of hope in that and of joy in the moment. Well, I brought him into my life because of loss. And I'd lost my family, my sister and my parents died. And I thought, actually, I want something, I need joy in my house.

Yeah. And that's why I got little Raymond. So in a sense, I thought, well, maybe you learn, everything is learning experience. And I thought, well, what I've learned from this is maybe I would take that time back. And I would think, oh, I wish I'd have known, you know, that I'd only have a year with my sister or with my parents or whatever. I do know that with Raymond. So it's really amazing that I think he's giving me that chance, right? Yeah.

I don't want to get taken for a walk. Oh, but I may not have another summer, so I'm going to do that. that. Do you know what I mean, Kevin? I do. I love you already. We need to get walking. Come on, Kevin. I'm on the grass. Raymond is still on the tarmac. He refuses to leave the comfort. I'm going to reveal to our listeners where we are, which is pretty staggering. Oh yeah, we're outside an amazing building. We're combining dogs at architecture. And we are at Kevin McLeod. Do you want to introduce where you've lured me to for this dog walk? Yeah, I've learned you to. A long way from where I live, which is in Herefordshire.

I've lured you to East Sussex to actually a fabulous now private members club called the Kennels, right? And it is the old kennels on the Goodwood Estate. So if we stand with our backs of this beautiful building built in the 18th century by James Wyatt, fantastic architect, and it's built in brick and flint. And we look towards the house. You'll see the back end of the mansion of Goodwood House. And that's where the Duke of Richmond. That's where the Duke of Richmond lives.

This building behind us was built for his hounds. It's a very posh set of kennels built for his dogs. Or the second dukes, or third dukes dogs. I forget which. Didn't he love dogs so much that I understood that there was central, a sort of some form of central heating system in the kennels before there was in the main house? So this had one of the earliest form of Western,

we have to exclude Roman hypercourse, but one of the earliest forms of, in the modern age, of central heating. It was powered by fires in the basement which heated water, and they were pipes through great big metal tanks, radiators effectively, to keep the dogs warm. And the story goes is that guests in the house, which was not heated centrally,

and where the Duke didn't really care for their comfort too much, would look out of broken and correct windows in their bedrooms at this building, because you could see it, it says half a mile away, and in envy. So, oh Kevin, I'm following you. We're going to go down. This is the gentlest slope down here. Okay.

We're actually, you know, we're going to traverse this great big, well, what's the word for it? Open space, field, large lawn and the space to our left and this here. So these, I must be about 20, 40 acres or something like that in all, is completely covered in tents in May for a big event called Goodwuf. Well, do you know, Ray came to Goodworth last year and he was really living it up. As soon as he walked into Goodwood, it's like he looks at me as if to say, this is what I was born to. Exactly. And do you know every single dog that comes to Goodwood, to Goodworth, and there must be, I've never counted them. There are too many over the weekend, but there must be 20 or 30,000 of them.

I mean, maybe more. Maybe it's a huge number. And if it worked for the human beings here, and there are hundreds of thousands of those, you would see a sea of wagging tails because literally every dog that comes here walks in and says, this is for me. I'm with my mates. This is fantastic. And we've never, I mean, to my memory, I don't think we've ever had an incident.

We never had an incident. We had one really weird thing where the husband and wife were here with these two big dogs. And clearly the dogs belonged each to the husband and wife. And the husband and wife having this massive ding-dong. Oh no. Around the back of a tent, they were arguing about something. And the dogs were just glaring at each other. But that was the only thing.

It's the humans, as ever. It's the humans you need to worry about. It's always the humans, Kevin. Come on, Ray, Ray. So, Kevin, we're going to talk about your association with Goodwood and how you work with them. But I want to just get some early life of Kevin. Okay. Oh, look, we've got, what's this, some sort of tractor.

It's an estate vehicle. Oh, an estate vehicle. Hello. With a dog, two dogs in the back, two sheep dogs. Oh, of course. And who's this cat? There's someone else. Yeah.

We might see the juke on his early morning walk. You never know. So, Kevin, did you grow up with dogs? No, I didn't grow up with dogs. And this is then sort of near Luton, that kind of area? Yeah, Bedford Show, yeah. My family are all from Yorkshire. No, I mean, we won't dwell too long on why,

but my mum didn't really like animals too much. And my dad had had a dog when he was a young man. And he had a sort of Airdale Cross, a beautiful dog. And so when I got, I didn't get my first dog, when I first lived with a dog properly. Oh, I like live with. Well, it's like trees. You know, you don't own them.

You don't buy them. It's like land. You don't own, you simply, you're a temporary custodian. And with dogs, you're a sort of temporary companion. Come on, Ray. I've learnt this with cats, you know, because with cats, they said that you're the pet, they're the owner. Yeah, I suppose it's a form of trafficking, really, if you're going to say you are the owner. Exactly.

Possession. Yeah. So go on. So tell me, because I'm fascinated by your dad and your mum, because they were so creative and inventors. Well, they were mathematical. Really? My mother was a, yeah, worked in finance. And my dad, my dad went in account, finance is too posher word for it.

And my dad was an engineer and scientist and building rockets and stuff. So he was kind of like he was living in the white heat of technology in the 50s and 60s. That was his era and that was the area of that idea, the idea of the future that we'd all be wearing jet packs. flying into space for the weekend. Going to the moon to live. So we were brought up with ethics models and railways and technology and taking engines apart and dad's fixing the boiler. And I didn't realize there were trades until I was an adult

that you'd actually employ an electrician or a plumber or a plaster to do anything because dad did everything. If it wasn't a motorbike engine or a car gearbox in bits on the kitchen table, it was the boiler that he would be trying to service for my i think it drove her mad your mom yeah because she had four males in the house you know all different all but all essentially kind of trying to take the world to bits and then not remembering to put it fully back together again yeah and that's interesting mathematical parents yeah yeah i associate people like that i mean i have to say i love people like that because i grew up in slight artsy bohemian chaos and right yeah that was the opposite

of my upbringing. I'm assuming massy people I like because they're quite calm and quiet. Is that what your household was like? Well, my parents were both kind and nerdy. Yeah. And, you know, and of that time when nobody, nobody ever, particularly in Yorkshire, said the three words, I love you. Unless they were in the throes of some deep passionate moment. But I, you know, it really, it was not, you know, I remember, I shouldn't really say this, but my grandfather, my grandfather, my mother's father, who eventually came to live with us, gave my mom terrible blood pressure. So, he never forgave my father for stealing, his words, stealing his daughter from Yorkshire. Right?

I don't know what that was about. I can say this now because they've all passed away, you know, and I'm, I'm, I'm, sort of I'm slightly reconciling myself with with with my grandfather and and and you know and in a way trying to remember my mom and my my father as well because I've just been actually going through all the old family photographs my mom left because she died last year and they've the photographs of my grandfather in his first World War uniform and he looked after the horses he lost a leg in the First World War but he looked out the horses that's where he came back he wasn't killed and he said he was a big animal lover but for for afterwards he

never never kind of spoke about it like so many people didn't after that war and in Yorkshire again yeah nobody kind of could bear to talk well there was this whole generation of men wandering around with this unprocessed trauma yeah huge content and it for him it lasted him all his life yeah and it was about place and about connection and about knowing your place in the world And so when I got a place at university at Cambridge, that was too much for him. I mean, he was appalled. My father got to technical college, you know, to do a degree.

Well, this was for your grandfather, you know? It was all about station in life, you know. You don't rise above it. You stay where you are. Really? And were your family, would you have described yourself as middle class? Because it was educated. I think my family were lower middle class.

And my, yeah, I mean, my grandfather was a green grocer. So my other grandfra was a labourer and pretty well permanently out of work most of his life. But very smart. A lot of brains in your house. Yeah, a bit of intelligence here and there dotted through it, yeah, yeah.

You grew up in one of those. Was it quite a sort of 60s? I'm imagining one of those. Three bedroom detached 60s house all by itself on a corner. It looked like it needed to belong on an estate somewhere. But it was a kind of really badly built home

so Dad rebuilt it. He bought it. it unfinished and the builder went bust and dad finished it off maybe it dad finished it off really badly he always blamed the builder and were you always quite a smart child Kevin yeah I was a bit of a loner were you and yeah a disruptor in the class were you quite precocious yeah yeah I got bumped up a year or two and you know it was in primary school but finished school you know and all the time surrounded by I didn't know at the time but amazing I architecture, a 19th century model school, a 60s school full of Marymeco curtains and 60s

Alva Alto furniture. It's my primary school, right? It was like a sort of modernist mid-century dream, right? With a swimming pool in the middle of it. It was built around a swimming pool. It was an amazing little village primary school built in the 60s and it looked like it. And at the time, it was sort of weird and wonderful. My mum was buying wallpaper, you know, cheap old wallpaper of the designs from the Bauhaus by Gunter Sturltsl. So we were kind of, you know, like with my dad's view about where technology was going, we were really living the modern dream.

I was talking to my friend Tim the other day about this. He's a comedian. Because he lives in Australia where the Australian dream is so well evinced. And he was lamenting the fact that everybody these days is not talking about a dream anymore. We're all talking about the end declined in some way. But in the 60s and 70s, there was this sense that there was this amazing. future ahead of us and we were already living it you know what I mean yeah well it was

interesting as well because from taste was there was a lot more the sense of aspirational taste the right dinner service the right curtains the right whereas now I think it was all based on that it's sort of not you and non you that my mum used to talk about and now because class isn't really a thing anymore the class is yeah yeah so now everything's more homogenised It's a really interesting point because I recognise that having in the 70s and 80s seen it, seeing the parents of friends and how they furnished their homes and how they lived. Yeah, and you realise. They might even go skiing.

I don't even know what that was. Whereas we were in this mobile world where we were moving through the class system as a family, but culturally too. So what mattered to us was who designed this thing? Who made that thing? Where's that from? Should we, that's a really, that's a really unusual thing. And so it's a mix of kind of the trad, but also the new and the exciting. So there was that sense of movement.

Do you know what I mean, rather than stasis? I recognise that class system, but actually I'm a product of something else. It was something transitional and something in volition. Where's this bit, Kevin? Well, with these are, I think the stables here, this is a pretty epic. This is the stables. This is the stables. This is the stables.

isn't it, yeah. Wow wee. Right up to the house. And the house is a really unusual plan because it's sort of almost curved. We're going to pause briefly and I just want to explain your connection here because you are the, is head judge the way to describe it? Head judge. I'm the bit of telefluff, which... You're the bit of telefluff on a thing called bar architecture, which they do at Goodwood, don't then? It's like this thing they do every year for Goodworth. And all these architects get together. They take it really... seriously they don't phone it in these people yeah so and they design kennels for dogs yeah so Barcitecture is a design competition and the Duke asked me if I would help how did that work do you know the Duke then well I admit him a few times yeah he

seems really nice he is he's enormously organised and hugely devoted to this place and works incredibly hard it it's not for him a a dilettante or part-time operation. He is CEO of an extraordinary events organisation. I knew. Last year there was a bar architect to launch thing at Bonhams, which I think you were at I, obviously with Raymond.

And as soon as he walked in, I knew it was him. And it was a weird thing, because even though he didn't have a sash saying Duke, but I knew because of his clothes. And I can't explain. But it was to do with the. fact that they didn't look new, they looked so well made but bought like 20, 30 years ago by the best tailor. Do you know what I mean? Like I thought, I bet he's darned that pocket or something.

I bet he's repaired stuff. Anyway, sorry. Well, that's a really good point because I think he takes a very pragmatic and very steric view of the world. And yeah, I wouldn't presume to say anymore. But I I think he is, you know, he's incredibly driven. He's great to be so inspirational because he's great to be in the presence of because the ideas just keep flowing. But architecture was his idea. He came to see me. I was at the, you know, some car event and popped over and he just said, look, I just got this idea.

And I was thinking, oh, so he wants to be able to help, I don't know, with one of the buildings on the estate or something, you know. He says, it's a design competition, architecture. I said, okay. He said, it's for kennels. I thought, you've got kennels. You've got that amazing building on the hill over there. And he said, they were going to do this event called Goodworth. And he figured it all out.

So he asked you to head it up? The context rule of this is lockdown. So it was going to happen. Yeah. Goodworth was going to happen in, I think, 2021, 2020. So that was kiboshed, clearly. Yeah. You know, nothing happened.

And I didn't think it would sort of surface again, but it did. And I got the phone call. about it in the midst of not doing very much and not having much of a job and feeling of it, you know, fed up about the world, you know, because in lockdown, you know, I was shielding. And it was just an amazing opportunity. And I thought, oh, no, this is a joy. So it's actually for me quite special to be asked, to be involved in any way. I like your trajectory because you, you ended up going to Cambridge, didn't you? Yeah.

But initially, you spent a year in Florence. Yeah. Well, in the area, yeah, in Tuscany. And you were singing? I was, yeah. Raymond! Oh, Raymond! So, Ray, we're going a bit too fast for you, mate.

Ray, Ray, are you enjoying this walk? Oh, darling. Come on, then. Follow Kevin. Come on, Raymond. Come on, boy. Come on. Show Kevin how you run.

He's running. now. Every one step I take, he takes 16. This being Goodwood, there's obviously quite a few cars knocking about. There's always stuff happening here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, go on. So you did your singing and... Yes, I worked in a vineyard. Yeah. Which I didn't realise at the time was important for me. Hello? Hi. Listen to this.

That sounds like an amazing vehicle just going to be. by it's Italian little money. Go on. So I was in Italy. I got a place at Cambridge. I was going to go read languages. I knew nothing about the world. So I went to Cambridge and I did my interviews and stuff and they said, well, if you're going to come and read languages, you need another language. Oh, what have you got? I said, when I got, oh level German, said, well, you need something a bit more than that. So they said, go away for a year or so and pick up a language and then come back. So I went to live in Italy and go to Italian and then met some people and went to working a farm. got a place at the conservatory

which I know sounds really random but I did. I love it. And because somebody said you sing, I was singing around a piano around the fire, you know, with some people and they said, Italians and they say, oh, go and meet so and so, I know the director, do an audition, you know, and I did. And then I, you know, had a big existential crisis about where I was going to

study, but I didn't know what I was going to do in my life. And I ended up coming back. But the most important thing about the farm was, it was a biodynamic farm. So this is like practicing Roman methods of viticulture. And I knew, I didn't know this. I thought that's heavily grew grapes and made wine. And it was like living in the Middle Ages. It was amazing. I went to work on this farm. The family had been in Nepal. They brought back three Nepalese dogs, terriers. Yeah. And they were great. And I loved living with

them. And that's where I learned to speak dog. So I learned to speak Nepalese dog. You seem very curious about the world, and I know this from having watched you for years on Grand Designs, and you're very interested in, I think, consuming information about people and things you come across. That's true. You're a sort of information magpie, aren't you? Yeah, I used as a kid, I had this encyclopedia, my grandfather had given me, called Inquire Within. Huge two-volume thing. I used to, with a torch, get under the covers at night, and sit and just, I pretty well had read every entry.

I think by the time I was 12 and and memorize them you know so yeah that's true I love that that's probably one of my few

redeeming features is curiosity so here's the thing about the farm right so I was on the farm in Italy in Tuscany then in the mid-1970s can't speak for how it is now every year

hunters would come to shoot everything they could there were generally people from the city who in the winter would take some time off buy themselves a gun and a dog, head out to the country, find some wild boar, kill them, stab the boar to the roof of the car and then disappear off. And at the end of the season, they disappear off, having killed everything that was alive, sparrows, everything within however many square miles, and they would leave the dogs

behind. They'd let them run free. So we would have this farm, and Nardo, who I was living with, his farmer, he was so incensed by this that he fenced his whole farm. with a six-foot high railing fence so hunters could not come onto his land oh my goodness with their dogs but one day down the track came these two dogs lampo and stella and stella was black with a they were kind of lightweight dogs you know kind of she looked a bit like a collie wippet cross or something and he was sort of pure greyhound looking you know kind of hunting dog and he was this beautiful orange coat and he became my dog. So my very first dog was a stray hunting dog in Italy called Lampo. And it got me,

weirdly, it got me into reading a book by an Italian modernist author called Carlo Casola. There's a book written, I think, in the 40s called The Man and His Dog. And it's written, it's a biography of a dog and it's not, it doesn't have a happy ending. And it's, it's sort of about a dog who is, is, is set for it, is wild. He's, he's, he's, he's, he's, He's left, he's abandoned. And so I kind of got into it only because of Lampost story. You see, I love Kevin McLeod's Italian era, as I call it. Because you went, I feel you fully embraced it,

and you became a bit of an Italian gent. Yeah. And then that's where you learned to dress so naturally, I reckon. It was the making of me. And then, I think, well, it's like you did your own mini-grant tour, and I think... Yeah, I did, yeah. Actually, what happened?

is you came back, you went to Cambridge afterwards, and I wonder, was that a bit of a culture shock almost? Yeah, I got a bit of ribbing from friends of mine because I was so kind of didn't want to be there. I didn't fit in. Did you not? No, I didn't fit in. I didn't know the rules.

And they were all public school rules. And I'd been to a comprehensive. And no, I didn't fit in at all. I felt really fish out of water. I think it's very different now. It's very different in the college I went to because it was all mailed then and now it's mixed. Corpus Christi was it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And how did you cope with that, Kevin? When you're faced with the situation like that, do you go into yourself and become very studious or did you rebel almost? No, you find, I think you find, well, I certainly went, I went looking for places where I could fit. And I found it in theatre and I found it in music and singing and in design. and I

academically it was really checkered because I kept changing subjects and I was so kind of confused by what I should be doing but it turns out that's a well you'll know it's the most fantastic training for being a broadcaster for tele. The best thing is being a jack of all trades

and if you're curious and if you can remember stuff in the short term I've got a reasonable short term memory it's a bit like being a lawyer you know you can kind of gen up on a subject and kind of yeah because you changed didn't you kept shifting from there was You ended up with history of art and architecture. Yeah, yeah.

But the history of architecture. It wasn't, yeah. And you were in footlights famously. People often talk about this. Well, it wasn't. No, no. No, you weren't in footlights. You were a set design.

Yeah, yeah. I did scenery and posters and loads of design work and a bit of graphics and lighting. And I loved the theatre stuff. It was an opportunity to, I mean, I devoted too much time to it, really. So that's an interesting thing that you were there, obviously, at the same time as Stephen Fry and Hugh Lorry and. was Emma Thompson there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Emma, yeah. And Jan Ravens, who I'm very fond of.

But then you're the set designer, you're doing costumes and things, and what that tells me is that, I think that sort of in a strange way prefigures your career because you liked being surrounded by those people and you enjoyed, I imagine, the company of extroverts and you like the excitement and the adrenaline of all that, but you like to have a practical task.

Yeah. A pedagogic trust as well. I've always enjoyed teaching. And I come from, my cousin's all teachers. And I kind of think that's a, you know, nothing like being able to stand in front of a room pit of people who have told they have to be there who don't want to listen to you and then sound off for an hour. You know, it's a terrible trait.

But you did something practical, didn't you? You were making things as well, like your dad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you have the look at me, Jean? I don't even know what that is. What's a look at me, Jean? I know what to look at me houses. Yeah, and that's not a good thing.

A look at me, Jean, I don't think is a bad thing. It just means you see it with kids where maybe they're the kid that says, okay, Ron, come into the living room. We're going to do the Kevin MacLeod show. Oh, no, no. I was, as a kid, I was the opposite. I was shy. Oh.

I was, and I, even at university, I really struggled to get words out and ideas out. feel confident about expressing myself. And to an extent, again, the job is a wonderful thing to inhabit if, if and to do, it's perfect for me because it's other people telling me what to do. And I really, I've come to really like that because I'm naturally a little bit more chaotic and therefore I can do with the discipline. Oh, isn't that pretty, Kevin? And this is at the stables at Goodwood, is it? That's a... Don't you love that sound of bells?

I do. I've always loved it. I grew up in a village of the most amazing set of bells in the church which I could hear from our garden and it... I love it. Some people find it really insidious. But, you know, a little bit too, you know, the marking time, the kind of keeping, cracking the whip. It can be a bit of the beheading of ambulance. heading of Anne Boleyn. On the other hand, it sums up to me one of the reasons why I like

living in the UK. Yes. Feels something very British, you know. Yes, well just as I think when you hear the bells from a Catholic church in an Italian valley. Oh yeah. It's a different sound because it's usually one bell and it's a deeper sound. But it is part of my culture, yeah. hugely part of our culture. I really hope you love part one of this week's Walking the Dog. If you want to hear the second part of our chat, it'll be out on Thursday, so whatever you do, don't miss it.

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