Helen Skelton is one of Britain’s most beloved and versatile television presenters — a Cumbrian farmer’s daughter who has become a household name through nearly two decades of broadcasting that spans Blue Peter, Countryfile, BBC Olympics coverage, Morning Live, Channel 5’s On The Farm, and a runner-up finish on Strictly Come Dancing 2022. Born on July 19, 1983, in Carlisle, Cumbria, the 41-year-old is equally celebrated for an extraordinary record of physical challenges undertaken for charity: kayaking the entire 2,010-mile Amazon River in 39 days, running a 78-mile Namibian ultra marathon, tightrope-walking between Battersea Power Station’s chimneys 66 metres above the ground, and cycling to the South Pole. This comprehensive guide covers everything about Helen Skelton: her farming childhood in Kirkby Thore, her career journey from BBC Radio Cumbria to national television, her five years presenting Blue Peter, her Guinness World Records, her Strictly 2022 runner-up story with Gorka Marquez, her marriage and split from rugby player Richie Myler, her autobiography In My Stride, her life as a solo parent to three children in Cumbria, and her current work on Morning Live and Countryfile in 2025. Whether you’ve followed her since Blue Peter or discovered her through Strictly, this is the most complete Helen Skelton resource available.
Who Is Helen Skelton?
Helen Elizabeth Skelton was born on July 19, 1983, in Carlisle, Cumbria, and grew up on a dairy farm in the village of Kirkby Thore near Appleby in the Eden Valley — a detail that has shaped her personality, career interests, and personal values in ways that remain visible throughout her public life. She attended Kirkby Thore Primary School before moving to Appleby Grammar School and ultimately graduating from the Cumbria Institute of the Arts with a BA degree in journalism — a qualification she put to use quickly, beginning her broadcasting career while her peers were still considering their first steps. Her upbringing in the Lake District’s rural margins gave her an outdoors disposition, a groundedness about what matters in life, and a comfort with nature and farming that has made her particularly suited to the rural and outdoor dimensions of Countryfile and On The Farm.
She has described her childhood on the farm with consistent warmth — the outdoor freedom, the physical demands of dairy farming life, the simplicity of measuring a day’s success by whether the silage was ready or the animals were settled. One of her most frequently repeated anecdotes is from her childhood farm job of lying in the middle of a field to check whether the grass was long enough to cut: if she couldn’t be seen from the edge, the silage was ready. This grounded, practical farming background contrasts sharply with the globe-trotting adventures and prime-time television career that followed, and the contrast between who she is and the extraordinary scale of what she has accomplished is central to her public appeal. She is a qualified tap dance teacher — a detail she has consistently offered as her alternative career choice — and has said that if she were not a broadcaster she would be a teacher.
Early Career and Broadcasting Beginnings
From Radio Cumbria to Newsround
Helen Skelton’s broadcasting career began in the region where she grew up, a foundation that she has spoken about with genuine gratitude as the right place to learn the craft without the pressure that would have accompanied an earlier entry to national television. After graduating from Cumbria Institute of the Arts — during which time she had worked as an extra on Coronation Street and the drama series Cutting It — she worked briefly in public relations before deciding that journalism was where her heart lay. She joined the newsroom at CFM Radio in Carlisle, developing the fast-paced, accurate communication skills that local radio demands, before moving to various programmes at Border Television, the regional ITV franchise for the area.
Her appointment as a breakfast presenter on BBC Radio Cumbria in 2005 was a significant step — she was one of the youngest breakfast slot presenters in the BBC network at the time, a distinction that speaks to the quality recognized in her early work. Breakfast presenting on BBC local radio requires a specific combination of reliability, warmth, quick thinking, and versatility that produces some of broadcasting’s most complete practitioners, and the discipline of that format served Skelton well in everything that followed. From Radio Cumbria she moved to reporter and presenter positions on children’s news programme Newsround and its weekend sports-based version Sportsround — regional broadcaster to national children’s programme in a progression that reflected consistent quality at each stage.
The Path to Blue Peter
The Newsround experience placed Skelton in the BBC’s children’s broadcasting environment and gave her visibility with the Blue Peter production team at a time when the show was preparing for a presenter change. Her combination of journalism training, outdoor enthusiasm, physical capability, warm communication style, and natural rapport with younger audiences identified her as an ideal Blue Peter candidate. She was revealed as a new Blue Peter presenter on August 28, 2008, replacing Zoë Salmon and becoming the 33rd presenter in the history of the world’s longest-running children’s television programme — a landmark that carries genuine historical weight given Blue Peter’s position as an institution of British childhood for more than six decades.
During her time at college she had worked as an extra in Coronation Street and Cutting It, and this early on-screen experience, combined with her radio presenting background, gave her a composure in front of the camera that new presenters often take months to develop. The Blue Peter role required exactly the combination of skills she had been building across her early career — the ability to be simultaneously informative and entertaining for children, to handle live television without a safety net, and to approach physical challenges with genuine enthusiasm rather than performed bravado. From her first appearance, she demonstrated all three qualities, and the public response was immediate and warm.
Blue Peter: Five Years of Adventure
Joining as the 33rd Presenter
Helen Skelton’s five years on Blue Peter from 2008 to 2013 represent the foundational chapter of her career and the period during which she became a household name for a generation of British children. Blue Peter, which had been broadcast continuously since 1958, had produced some of British television’s most beloved moments and most famous personalities — Peter Purves, Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, Peter Duncan, Anthea Turner — and Skelton joined a lineage that is genuinely significant in the history of the medium. She became the 33rd presenter of the programme, taking on a role that the previous holder, Zoë Salmon, had occupied since 2004, and she entered a show that was simultaneously navigating the challenges of a modern media landscape while maintaining the values that had made it enduringly beloved.
Her Blue Peter tenure coincided with the programme’s move from London to Salford in September 2011, when it relocated to the BBC’s new MediaCity UK complex alongside other BBC programmes in the corporation’s commitment to decentralisation. From 2011 onward, Skelton and co-presenter Barney Harwood formed the show’s core presenting duo, supplemented by guest presenters for specific topics. The move to Salford was a significant moment in the show’s history, and Skelton’s established relationship with the programme and its audience helped smooth the transition. She announced her departure from Blue Peter on air on August 8, 2013 — after five years and a collection of challenges and world records that had added significantly to the show’s legacy — to be replaced by Radzi Chinyanganya.
World Records and Physical Challenges
The physical challenges Helen Skelton undertook during and around her Blue Peter years have become the most frequently referenced dimension of her career biography, constituting a record of genuine athletic and adventurous achievement that most professional athletes would be proud of, let alone a television presenter. The first and most extraordinary of these came in early 2010, when she kayaked the entire length of the Amazon River for Sport Relief — 2,010 miles (3,230 km) of solo paddling from Nauta in Peru on January 20 to Almeirim in Brazil on February 28, taking 39 days to complete the journey. The achievement earned her two Guinness World Records: the longest solo journey by kayak and the longest distance in a kayak in 24 hours by a woman.
The Amazon kayak was exceptional not just for its distance but for the conditions encountered throughout the 39-day journey. The Amazon basin in January and February includes stretches of genuine wilderness, navigational challenges from currents and tributaries, extreme heat, wildlife encounters, and the physical and psychological toll of solitary paddling for extended periods. Skelton completed the journey in conditions that would test professional expedition athletes, doing so at 26 years old while also continuing her Blue Peter commitments and maintaining the public communication that fundraising events require. The achievement generated significant media coverage, an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons tabled by MP Nigel Evans congratulating her, and an enduring place in her public identity as someone who genuinely means it when she takes on a challenge.
The Namibian Ultra Marathon and South Pole
The Amazon kayak was not Skelton’s only extraordinary physical achievement during the Blue Peter years. In April 2009 — a year before the Amazon — she became only the second woman ever to complete the 78-mile (126 km) Namibian ultra marathon, finishing in 23 hours and 45 minutes, just 15 minutes under the maximum allowed time of 24 hours. The Namibian ultra is one of the most demanding desert running events in the world, and becoming only the second woman to finish it at 25 years old placed Skelton in genuinely elite company as an endurance athlete. She told Newsround at the time: “It was a gruelling experience, but one I’ll never forget. There were tough times but also amazing times.”
In 2012, Skelton achieved another landmark — becoming the first person to reach the South Pole by bicycle, covering a route that involved cycling 329 miles by kite ski, 103 miles by regular bike, and 69 miles by cross-country ski across one of the most extreme environments on Earth. She also claimed a Guinness World Record during this challenge for the fastest 100 km by kite ski, completing the distance in seven hours 28 minutes. The South Pole bicycle achievement added to her accumulation of firsts — first person to the South Pole by bike — in a way that placed her alongside professional polar explorers rather than mere television personalities dipping their toes in adventure. For Comic Relief 2011, she added another striking challenge: walking a 150-metre tightrope between Battersea Power Station’s chimneys, 66 metres above the ground — a height and exposure that few trained aerialists would voluntarily face.
The Malta Dance Competition
A less frequently discussed but revealing detail of Skelton’s Blue Peter years was her participation in and victory at the Malta Open Dance Competition in December 2008 — winning the event with a 16-year-old wheelchair user named James Ireland as her partner, defeating 100 other competitors. The achievement reflected Skelton’s qualification as a tap dance teacher and her general comfort with dance as a physical discipline, a background that would prove directly relevant to her Strictly Come Dancing journey over a decade later. Her victory at a genuine competitive dance event — not a celebrity charity event but an actual dance competition — also demonstrated that her physical achievements during Blue Peter were not limited to adventurous outdoor challenges but extended to technical performance disciplines as well.
Post-Blue Peter Career: Countryfile and BBC Sport
Countryfile and Rural Broadcasting
Since leaving Blue Peter in 2013, Helen Skelton has established herself as one of BBC One’s most prominent and distinctive rural affairs presenters through her long-running involvement with Countryfile — the Sunday evening magazine programme that explores British countryside, farming, environment, and rural communities and regularly attracts audiences of five to seven million viewers. She began contributing to Countryfile as an occasional reporter as early as 2008, while still presenting Blue Peter, and became a more regular presence from 2014 onward. Her genuine farming background — the dairy farm childhood in Kirkby Thore — gives her credibility in conversations with farmers and rural communities that a purely urban presenter would struggle to match, and the authenticity of her interest in agricultural and environmental subjects is visible in her presenting style.
Her Countryfile contributions span the programme’s full range of subject matter — farming economics, rural social issues, environmental challenges, seasonal agricultural stories, and the general texture of life in Britain’s countryside. The programme’s Sunday evening schedule and family-accessible format make it one of British television’s most genuinely inclusive programmes, and Skelton’s warm, accessible, inquisitive presenting style suits both the content and the audience well. Countryfile’s importance in contemporary British public life — it reaches audiences across the demographic spectrum and provides a weekly reminder of the agricultural and environmental dimensions of national life that urban-centric media often overlooks — makes Skelton’s long involvement with the programme a genuinely significant contribution to public service broadcasting.
BBC Olympic Coverage: London 2012 and Rio 2016
Helen Skelton’s BBC Sport career has included significant Olympic Games broadcasting — a context that places her work on a national stage for some of British television’s most watched moments. She was a reporter for the BBC at the London 2012 Olympics — the most-watched British television event of the modern era — a role that exposed her to the full scale of national sporting occasion broadcasting and to the production standards of the corporation’s flagship sports coverage. The London 2012 role established her BBC Sport credentials and led to a more prominent appointment for the Rio 2016 Olympics.
At Rio 2016, Skelton hosted the BBC’s swimming coverage alongside Rebecca Adlington, Mark Foster, Andy Jameson, and Adrian Moorhouse — an expert panel whose swimming credentials are impeccable, and among whom Skelton’s role as anchor presenter required the ability to manage expert conversation, connect technical analysis to accessible public understanding, and hold live coverage together across the inherent unpredictability of major athletics broadcast. Swimming is one of the Olympics’ highest-profile sports in UK terms given the consistent success of British swimmers at major championships, and the BBC’s coverage of the Rio swimming events attracted significant audiences for whom Skelton was the familiar, trusted face. She also covered the 2016 European Swimming Championships and the 2017 World Aquatics Championships in a similar presenting capacity, establishing swimming as one of her BBC Sport specialisms alongside her rural programming work.
BT Sport Women’s Football
After her Blue Peter departure, Skelton became a presenter of live FA Women’s Super League football matches for BT Sport — an appointment that added women’s football to a broadcasting portfolio that already spanned rural affairs, Olympic sports, and children’s television. Her WSL presenting role coincided with a period of rapidly growing public interest in women’s football in England, as the Lionesses’ international success and the development of the WSL as a professional, well-resourced league transformed the sport’s media landscape. Skelton’s involvement with WSL coverage contributed to the normalization of women’s football as a mainstream broadcast product, and her comfortable engagement with the tactical and competitive dimensions of the game demonstrated a sports broadcasting versatility beyond the generalist presenting profile that some might have expected.
Channel 5’s On The Farm
A Natural Fit
Since 2019, Helen Skelton has been the main presenter of On The Farm — Channel 5’s highly popular documentary series that follows the working lives of British farmers across the seasons, covering the economic realities, physical demands, and extraordinary human stories that characterize agricultural life in the United Kingdom. The series has been a significant success for Channel 5, regularly delivering strong viewing figures in a landscape where genuinely popular factual television is increasingly competed for across multiple platforms, and Skelton’s involvement has been central to that success. Her authentic farming background distinguishes her from the many broadcasters who cover rural subjects from an outsider perspective, and the farming communities she visits for the programme quickly recognize that she understands their world in a way that is not merely performed.
On The Farm’s format — following real farmers through genuine seasonal challenges, with Skelton as the accessible, curious, empathetic narrator and interviewer — suits her presenting strengths well. She brings genuine enthusiasm for agricultural subject matter, the ability to engage serious practical conversations about farming economics and animal husbandry without simplifying them for effect, and the physical comfort with outdoor and farm environments that comes from a childhood spent exactly where these families live and work. The series has covered sheep farming in the Scottish Highlands, dairy operations in the Welsh Valleys, arable farming in East Anglia, and numerous other agricultural environments, with Skelton providing the connective narrative thread across diverse farming contexts.
Strictly Come Dancing 2022
Joining the Competition
Helen Skelton’s announcement as a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing Series 20 in August 2022 came at a moment in her personal life that gave the decision particular resonance and public interest. She had announced her separation from husband Richie Myler just four months earlier, in April 2022, and was navigating the early stages of solo parenthood with three young children — including a baby daughter, Elsie, born on December 28, 2021, just months before the separation. Her decision to join Strictly in these circumstances reflected what she later described as a need to “jump on the opportunity and chance to put a big smile on your face” at a difficult time, and public sympathy for her personal situation combined with admiration for her resilience in choosing to embrace a new challenge generated exceptional warmth toward her from the competition’s outset.
She was partnered with professional dancer Gorka Marquez — a Spanish dancer from Zaragoza who had been a Strictly professional since 2016 and had been a finalist or semi-finalist in multiple previous series. The Skelton-Marquez partnership was quickly identified by viewers and judges as one of the series’ most promising and enjoyable pairings, combining Gorka’s choreographic quality and technical teaching with Helen’s natural physical capability (rooted in her dance teacher qualification and long history of physical challenges), and a personal warmth and genuine friendship that made their partnership compelling to watch throughout the competition.
Joint First on the Leaderboard
The highlight of Helen and Gorka’s Strictly 2022 journey came on Saturday, October 22, during the week celebrating the BBC’s 100th anniversary — a special programming occasion that gave the competition a heightened emotional context. Skelton danced the Charleston to the Blue Peter theme tune, a choice of music that represented a deliberate and emotionally resonant connection to her personal history and to the Blue Peter legacy. The performance achieved a joint first place on the leaderboard — the top score among all couples competing that week — and generated one of the competition’s most emotional moments, with the Blue Peter theme providing a musical and personal thread that connected her childhood, her broadcasting career, and her Strictly journey in a single performance.
The response from judges and viewers was rapturous. The performance demonstrated that her dance teacher background and five years of competitive dance experience — including winning the Malta Open Dance Competition — had given her foundations that most celebrity contestants lack, and Gorka’s choreography made full use of her natural capability. The image of Helen Skelton dancing to the Blue Peter theme — just months after a very public and painful life disruption — became one of 2022’s most memorable television moments, and it crystallized for many viewers why they had taken her to their hearts so completely throughout the competition.
The Strictly Runner-Up
Helen Skelton reached the Strictly Come Dancing 2022 final, finishing as runner-up to Hamza Yassin — the BBC Wildlife cameraman and animal presenter partnered with Jowita Przystal, whose extraordinary popularity throughout the competition translated into a decisive final vote. Her runner-up finish was an exceptional achievement for someone who had joined the competition just months after significant personal upheaval, and the public outpouring of support for her throughout the series — she consistently generated one of the highest vote totals of any non-winning finalist in recent Strictly history — spoke to a connection with viewers that went beyond dancing quality to encompass genuine affection for who she is.
In interviews after Strictly, Skelton was characteristically direct about what the experience had meant to her in the specific personal context of 2022. She described the competition as giving her back confidence at a time when it had been shaken, and spoke about the importance of having something to focus on and prepare for intensively during a period when the alternative was to be consumed by the grief and practical challenges of her separation. She also acknowledged, with characteristic honesty, that she had not initially been convinced the BBC would want her — an admission of self-doubt that made her eventual runner-up finish feel all the more deserved and all the more emotionally significant.
Personal Life: Marriage, Split, and Solo Parenting
Marriage to Richie Myler
Helen Skelton married Richie Myler — England rugby league international and Leeds Rhinos player — in December 2013, in a ceremony that was covered in Hello! magazine as befitted two significant figures in northern British public life. Myler, born in 1990, was a prominent Super League rugby player whose career had taken him to clubs including Warrington Wolves, Widnes Vikings, and Leeds Rhinos. The couple had been based primarily in Leeds during their marriage and built a family that both publicly celebrated: Ernie, their eldest son, was born on June 19, 2015; their second son Louis was born in April 2017; and their third child and only daughter, Elsie, was born on December 28, 2021. The family’s Yorkshire home — an eight-bedroom, six-bathroom property valued at approximately £1.8 million — spoke to the comfortable life they had built together and to Skelton’s significant broadcasting income across nearly two decades of television work.
The marriage’s end, when it came, was sudden and public. Skelton announced via Instagram on April 25, 2022, that she and Myler were no longer a couple: “Very sad to say that Richie and I are no longer a couple. He has left the family home. We will be doing our best to co-parent our small children.” The statement’s directness and brevity were characteristic of Skelton’s communication style, but the circumstances were devastating: Elsie was just four months old, and Skelton described feeling “blindsided” in her subsequent autobiography, In My Stride, published on October 12, 2023. Her account of the separation — her shock, her focus on the children, and her determination to rebuild without self-pity — resonated deeply with readers who had experienced similar situations.
Life as a Solo Parent in Cumbria
Following her split from Richie Myler and the sale of their Leeds home, Helen Skelton returned to her roots — initially moving back in with her parents on their farm in the Lake District, then finding a new home for herself and her three children in the Cumbrian countryside. The decision to return to Cumbria reflected both practical considerations (the support of her family nearby) and deeper values about the kind of childhood she wanted her children to have — one connected to the land, to outdoor life, and to the farming community from which she came. Her children Ernie (10), Louis (8), and Elsie (3) as of 2025 are growing up in an environment that mirrors the rural upbringing that shaped their mother, a choice Helen has described as deliberate and meaningful.
Her approach to solo parenting has been characteristically open and honest in public interviews while carefully protective of her children’s privacy. She has spoken about the “real juggle” of a high-profile broadcasting career alongside raising three young children without a partner in the home, acknowledging the practical and emotional demands without dramatizing them. In her 2025 Hello! interview she reflected: “My mum has always told me you get out of life what you put in, and if you want to have a good relationship with your kids, then you’ve got to invest in them and make sure they know that they’re the priority.” Her relationship with her children — regularly glimpsed through carefully managed social media posts showing them harvesting vegetables in the garden, watching football, or engaging with the farm animals that are part of their Cumbrian environment — depicts a family whose connection and warmth is visible regardless of the difficulties that have preceded it.
Richie Myler’s New Life
Richie Myler moved on quickly from his marriage to Helen Skelton, beginning a relationship with Stephanie Thirkill — the daughter of Leeds Rhinos president Andrew Thirkill — by mid-2022, shortly after the separation was announced. Thirkill and Myler welcomed their first child, a daughter named Olivia, in May 2023, and a son named Freddie in 2024, bringing Myler’s total to five children across his two families. The Myler divorce was finalized in January 2024, and his rapid establishment of a new family added publicly visible dimensions to the separation’s narrative that have been widely covered in British media. Helen Skelton’s consistent public response to questions about Myler — measured, focused on the children’s welfare, declining to engage in publicly visible bitterness despite what her autobiography describes as a painful experience — has reinforced the public respect for her that her Strictly journey had generated.
Books and Autobiography
Amy Wild: Amazon Summer
Helen Skelton’s first novel, Amy Wild: Amazon Summer, was published in May 2015 — a children’s book inspired by the spirit of adventure that had characterized her own Amazon kayak journey. The book’s protagonist is a young girl named Amy Wild whose experiences in an Amazon summer provide the framework for a story designed to inspire children to approach life with curiosity, courage, and a willingness to engage with the natural world. The book drew directly on Skelton’s intimate knowledge of the Amazon basin from her 2010 kayak journey, providing authentic geographic and environmental detail alongside an accessible narrative aimed at children of primary school age. Its publication reflected both her connection to her Blue Peter audience — whose age range was exactly the target readership — and her desire to use her experiences in service of something lasting beyond the individual challenge itself.
In My Stride: The Autobiography
Helen Skelton’s autobiography, In My Stride, was published on October 12, 2023, and became one of the most discussed and widely read celebrity memoirs of that year. The book covers the full arc of her life from her Cumbrian dairy farm childhood through her broadcasting career, her physical challenges and world records, her marriage to Richie Myler, and with particular emotional directness, the separation of 2022 and the experience of navigating solo parenthood in its aftermath. The title’s dual meaning — making progress in life, and literally the stride of a runner or walker in one of her many athletic challenges — captures the book’s integration of external achievement and internal resilience as complementary themes.
The publication’s timing — a year after the separation and a year after her Strictly runner-up finish — placed it at a moment when public interest in her story was at its peak, and the critical and commercial response confirmed that her frankness and self-awareness had struck a chord with readers. In My Stride received widespread positive reviews for its honesty, its lack of bitterness, and its consistent focus on what the various experiences in her life had taught her rather than on grievances or self-justification. Skelton’s decision to write about the separation with candor while carefully protecting her children’s privacy and avoiding direct attacks on Myler was specifically noted as a mark of her character, and the book reinforced the public image of a woman who processes difficulty through action, perspective, and a fundamental refusal to define herself by what has been done to her.
Morning Live: Helen’s Current TV Home
BBC One’s Morning Live
Since 2023, Helen Skelton has been one of the central presenters on BBC One’s Morning Live — the early morning weekday programme that provides a mix of health, wellbeing, consumer affairs, human interest, and live discussion content for audiences beginning their day. Morning Live, which typically broadcasts from around 9:15 AM following Breakfast, reaches several million daily viewers and has established itself as one of the BBC’s most important daytime properties since its launch in 2020. Skelton brings her characteristic warmth, directness, and natural ease in conversation to a programme format that rewards exactly those qualities, and her co-presenting relationship with Gethin Jones and Michelle Ackerley has been one of the show’s most praised on-screen dynamics.
Her comfort level on Morning Live reflects two decades of live television experience — the ability to respond to unexpected moments with composure, to hold complex conversations about sensitive topics with genuine care, and to shift register between lighter entertainment segments and more serious consumer or health topics without jarring transitions. The programme’s commitment to accessible, practical content — consumer rights, health information, home management — aligns with Skelton’s values as a presenter: she has consistently been more interested in useful, real-world content than in celebrity spectacle, and Morning Live’s format suits that preference well. Her involvement with the programme appears set to be a long-term chapter of her career.
Gethin Jones and the Romance Speculation
One of the more persistent stories surrounding Helen Skelton in 2025 has been media speculation about a potential romance with Morning Live co-host Gethin Jones — speculation that Helen has addressed clearly and directly. Gethin Jones, who is 47 and previously hosted Blue Peter from 2005 to 2008 (just before Skelton joined), shares a long pre-professional friendship with Skelton and co-presenter Michelle Ackerley that predates their Morning Live work together. Skelton has told The Mirror: “We just work together, we are not together. No, no, no. We are just work friends.” She has added that she, Jones, and Ackerley have been friends for approximately 25 years, with herself and Ackerley having been flatmates when living in London, and with Jones’s Blue Peter tenure overlapping with her arrival at the programme.
The public’s appetite for romantic storylines involving public figures who have recently navigated separation is both understandable and sometimes frustrating for the subjects of those stories, and Skelton’s direct, unapologetic corrections of the record about her relationship with Jones have been consistent with her broader approach to her private life: clear boundaries, honest communication, and no encouragement of narratives that she has not authorized. Her public statement that her priority in 2025 is her three children and her career rather than romantic speculation reflects the same focus on what actually matters that has characterized her approach to the years since 2022.
Helen Skelton’s Sporting Legacy
Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins
In 2020, Helen Skelton appeared on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins — the Channel 4 series that puts celebrities through a brutal selection process based on SAS assessment principles, led by former special forces personnel including Ant Middleton. The programme is one of the most demanding celebrity reality formats in British television, requiring participants to undergo sleep deprivation, extreme cold water immersion, high-altitude challenges, and sustained psychological pressure designed to test character under stress. Skelton’s physical preparation from years of endurance challenges made her better equipped than most celebrity participants to manage the programme’s physical demands, and her performance confirmed the genuine athletic capability that her Sport Relief challenges had demonstrated in a different context.
The Celebrity SAS experience added another dimension to her public profile as someone who does not merely discuss physical courage but demonstrates it consistently in formats that make it impossible to perform or manufacture. The programme’s format requires genuine engagement with discomfort and uncertainty that cameras capture unflinchingly, and Skelton’s willingness to enter that environment — particularly given the show’s reputation for eliminating participants who are insufficiently prepared — reflected the same values that had sent her onto the Amazon in a kayak and across Antarctica on a bicycle. It was a reminder that her Sport Relief record was not the product of exceptional production budgets and safety nets but of an individual with genuine physical resilience.
Three London Marathons and More
Beyond her record-breaking adventures, Helen Skelton has completed the London Marathon on multiple occasions — including confirmed completions in 2009, 2014, and 2019. The London Marathon is one of the world’s major distance running events, typically drawing over 40,000 participants, and completing it three times across a decade reflects both the sustained physical conditioning that her active lifestyle maintains and the consistent commitment to charitable causes that has motivated her athletic participation throughout her career. Her marathon finishes have been done primarily for charitable fundraising rather than competitive purposes, and the London Marathon’s enormous charitable fundraising ecosystem makes it a natural fit for a broadcaster whose public profile can generate significant sponsor interest.
She also won a celebrity boxing match against Camilla Thurlow in 2018 — an event organized for Sports Relief that required genuine boxing training rather than simply the willingness to step into a ring. Thurlow, who had appeared on Love Island, was not a trained boxer, but the match was competitive enough to require Skelton to prepare properly, and her victory reflected the combination of physical fitness and competitive instinct that characterizes her approach to every physical challenge she takes on. The breadth of sporting formats she has engaged with across her career — ultra-marathon, kayaking, cycling, boxing, dance competition, and multiple others — speaks to an athlete whose physical versatility is as impressive as her individual achievements in any single discipline.
Helen Skelton: Role Model and Public Figure
Inspiring a Generation
Helen Skelton’s significance extends beyond her individual career achievements to encompass her role as a model of what is possible — specifically for young women and girls who see in her story a template that begins in rural, working-class circumstances and ends in extraordinary professional and personal achievement. Her Blue Peter years reached millions of children at exactly the ages when impressions of what is achievable begin to form, and her habit of undertaking physical challenges at the very edge of human capability — presented to her audience not as exceptional feats by a superhuman but as things that preparation, courage, and determination make possible — provided a fundamentally different message from the beauty and popularity-focused narratives that compete for children’s attention.
Her own analysis of why the challenges matter is typically grounded and unpretentious: she does them because they test her, because the charitable cause is real and important, and because the experience of pushing past what she thought possible is genuinely formative and valuable. She has never framed her achievements as feminist statements — she simply does extraordinary things and describes them as honestly as she can. The impact, particularly on young female audiences who watched her on Blue Peter, is arguably more powerful for that lack of explicit framing — the message is demonstrated rather than asserted.
Honest About Difficulty
One of the most distinctive dimensions of Helen Skelton’s public persona is her willingness to be honest about difficulty — whether the difficulty of an extreme physical challenge, the difficulty of a public relationship breakdown, or the difficulty of managing a demanding career alongside three young children without a partner. British celebrity culture often rewards either relentless positivity or dramatic victimhood, and Skelton occupies neither position — she acknowledges when things are hard, refuses to pretend otherwise, and then describes how she has dealt with the difficulty through action and perspective rather than through either denial or self-pity.
Her autobiography In My Stride exemplifies this quality. She describes being blindsided by the end of her marriage without minimizing the pain or indulging in extended bitterness. She describes the challenges of solo parenthood without claiming to manage them perfectly. She describes her Strictly journey as genuinely helpful to her in a difficult year without overstating what a television competition can achieve in the context of a life’s disruptions. This combination of honesty and perspective — being truthful about difficulty while maintaining proportion — is both a personal quality and a professional asset, explaining why audiences trust her in a media landscape where authenticity is rare and valuable.
Farming Heritage as Identity
Throughout her career, Helen Skelton has maintained her identification with her farming background in ways that are not merely nostalgic but actively shape her professional choices and her public values. Her work on Countryfile and On The Farm is not simply a career niche that her background makes her better at — it is a genuine expression of connection to an agricultural way of life that she believes is undervalued and misunderstood by the majority of British people who live in cities. Her decision to return to Cumbria after her separation, to raise her children in the same rural environment that formed her, and to describe that choice as one of the best she has made, reflects a continuity of values across the decades of change her life has brought.
The farming community’s response to her work on Countryfile and On The Farm has been notably warm — farmers recognize in her not the familiar pattern of an urban broadcaster learning about agriculture as an exotic subject but someone who understands the rhythms, the economics, the language, and the culture of farming from the inside. This insider understanding makes her farming broadcasting qualitatively different from what most of her contemporaries can offer, and it represents a dimension of her professional profile that is genuinely irreplaceable — no amount of research or preparation can fully substitute for a childhood spent on a working dairy farm in Cumbria.
A Record of Physical Achievement
Helen Skelton’s physical achievement record is, taken in its totality, genuinely extraordinary — one of the most impressive in British broadcasting history and competitive with the records of professional adventurers and endurance athletes who train full-time for their exploits. The Amazon kayak alone — 2,010 miles in 39 days, two Guinness World Records, completed at 26 years old — would constitute a career-defining achievement for most athletes. Added to it: the second-ever female completion of the 78-mile Namibian ultra marathon (23 hours, 45 minutes); the first-ever South Pole by bicycle; a tightrope walk between Battersea Power Station’s chimneys at 66 metres; four London Marathon completions (2009, 2014, 2019, and one additional occasion); seven Comic Relief challenges in 2013 of which she completed five; and a celebrity boxing match win against Camilla Thurlow in 2018.
These achievements were undertaken for charitable purposes — Sport Relief, Comic Relief, Children in Need, and other causes — but the charitable framing does not diminish the physical reality of what each involved. Running 78 miles in desert conditions is genuinely dangerous and demands months of preparation; kayaking a river system as vast and complex as the Amazon requires not just physical conditioning but navigation skills, emergency preparedness, and the psychological resilience to continue alone through weeks of extreme conditions. Skelton’s physical challenges should be understood as genuine athletic and adventurous achievements rather than as celebrity television stunts, and her willingness to engage with real physical jeopardy in service of raising money and inspiring others reflects a consistent set of values about what broadcasting can mean at its best.
The Ribbons Sculpture Recognition
In 2024, Helen Skelton’s name was included on the Ribbons sculpture — a permanent public artwork unveiled in 2024 that commemorates significant British women whose achievements merit enduring recognition. The inclusion on Ribbons placed Skelton among a distinguished group whose contributions to British public life across various fields have been formally recognized through this permanent installation, a distinction that goes beyond the transient recognition of television awards to something more lasting. The specific achievement that most obviously merited this recognition was her Amazon kayak Guinness World Record, but the Ribbons recognition can also be read as acknowledgment of her broader contribution — as a role model to young people, particularly young women and girls, showing that extraordinary physical and professional achievement is possible from any starting point.
Practical Information: Helen Skelton’s Programmes
Watching Morning Live
BBC One’s Morning Live airs weekdays from approximately 9:15 AM, available live on BBC One across the UK. It is free to watch on any television with a valid TV licence and is also available on BBC iPlayer for catch-up, which is free to access for UK licence fee holders on all major devices including smart TVs, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Morning Live episodes remain available on iPlayer for 30 days after broadcast, making it easy to catch specific appearances or segments involving Helen Skelton on days when live viewing is not possible.
For those particularly interested in Helen Skelton segments within Morning Live, the programme’s official social media accounts — including the BBC Morning Live Twitter/X account and Instagram profile — regularly share clips from specific segments, often including Skelton’s contributions to consumer, wellbeing, and human interest discussions. Following these accounts is the most efficient way to stay updated on her Morning Live appearances without watching the full programme daily.
Watching Countryfile
BBC One’s Countryfile airs Sunday evenings at approximately 6:00 PM — one of the BBC’s most reliable prime-time scheduling positions, reflecting the programme’s consistent audience of five to seven million viewers. Like Morning Live, it is free on BBC One for any UK TV licence holder and available on BBC iPlayer for catch-up. Countryfile episodes typically involve multiple reporters and segments, and Helen Skelton’s contributions vary by episode — checking the BBC website’s Countryfile programme page in advance provides information about which presenter is leading which story in any given week.
On The Farm on Channel 5
Channel 5’s On The Farm, on which Helen Skelton has been lead presenter since 2019, is available on Channel 5 free-to-air and through Channel 5’s streaming platform My5, which is free to access via the website my5.tv or through the My5 app on smart TVs and mobile devices. No subscription is required. The series typically runs in a daytime slot, and the programme’s accessible format and genuine agricultural content have made it one of Channel 5’s most consistently popular factual series. Past series are available on My5 for a period following broadcast, providing access to previous seasons’ content for new viewers discovering the programme.
Following Helen on Social Media
Helen Skelton maintains an active presence on Instagram, where her account features professional updates alongside personal glimpses of her life in Cumbria with her three children. Her Instagram content is carefully managed to balance public and private — she shares enough to maintain connection with her audience while protecting her children’s privacy and her own personal space from intrusion. She previously had a Twitter account but closed it in 2012 after finding it difficult to manage negative comments, and has not returned to the platform in its subsequent form as X. For the most current information about her career projects, public appearances, and upcoming broadcast work, her official Instagram account and the social channels of the BBC programmes she presents are the most reliable sources.
FAQs
Who is Helen Skelton?
Helen Skelton is a 41-year-old British television presenter born on July 19, 1983, in Carlisle, Cumbria, best known for co-presenting Blue Peter on BBC One from 2008 to 2013, presenting Countryfile since 2014, appearing on Morning Live, and reaching the final of Strictly Come Dancing 2022 as runner-up. She is also celebrated for a remarkable record of physical challenges including kayaking 2,010 miles of the Amazon River for Sport Relief in 2010 (earning two Guinness World Records), becoming the second woman to complete the 78-mile Namibian ultra marathon, and being the first person to reach the South Pole by bicycle in 2012.
Was Helen Skelton on Strictly Come Dancing?
Yes. Helen Skelton competed in Strictly Come Dancing Series 20 in 2022, partnered with professional dancer Gorka Marquez. She entered the competition months after separating from husband Richie Myler and became one of the most popular contestants in the series. She achieved joint first on the leaderboard with her Charleston to the Blue Peter theme tune during BBC 100th anniversary week, and reached the final, finishing as runner-up to Hamza Yassin and Jowita Przystal.
What has Helen Skelton done for Sport Relief?
Helen Skelton’s Sport Relief achievements are among the most extraordinary in the campaign’s history. In 2010, she kayaked the entire 2,010-mile Amazon River solo in 39 days, earning Guinness World Records for the longest solo kayak journey and the longest distance kayaked in 24 hours by a woman. In 2012, she became the first person to reach the South Pole by bicycle. She also completed the 78-mile Namibian ultra marathon (for a separate charity), walked a 150-metre tightrope between Battersea Power Station’s chimneys for Comic Relief 2011, and completed seven challenges for Comic Relief 2013, succeeding in five.
Does Helen Skelton have children?
Yes. Helen Skelton has three children with her ex-husband Richie Myler. Ernie, her eldest, was born on June 19, 2015. Her second son Louis was born in April 2017. Her daughter Elsie was born on December 28, 2021. Skelton has been raising all three children as a solo parent since her separation from Myler in April 2022, initially living with her parents on their Cumbrian farm before finding a new home in the Cumbrian countryside.
Why did Helen Skelton and Richie Myler split?
Helen Skelton announced on Instagram on April 25, 2022, that she and Richie Myler were no longer a couple and that he had left the family home, just four months after the birth of their daughter Elsie. She described feeling “blindsided” by the end of the marriage in her 2023 autobiography In My Stride. Richie Myler subsequently began a relationship with Stephanie Thirkill, the daughter of a Leeds Rhinos president, and the couple have had two children together — Olivia (2023) and Freddie (2024). The divorce was finalized in January 2024.
How old is Helen Skelton?
Helen Skelton was born on July 19, 1983, making her 41 years old as of 2025. She grew up in Kirkby Thore, Cumbria, on a dairy farm, attended Appleby Grammar School, and graduated from the Cumbria Institute of the Arts with a BA in journalism. She began her broadcasting career at BBC Radio Cumbria in 2005, aged 21, making her one of the youngest breakfast presenters in the BBC network at the time.
Does Helen Skelton have a Guinness World Record?
Yes — Helen Skelton holds Guinness World Records for her 2010 Amazon kayak for Sport Relief. She was awarded the record for the longest solo journey by kayak (2,010 miles, 3,230 km, in 39 days) and the longest distance in a kayak in 24 hours by a woman. She also set a Guinness record during her 2012 South Pole bicycle expedition for the fastest 100 km by kite ski, completed in seven hours and 28 minutes.
Is Helen Skelton in a relationship in 2025?
Helen Skelton has addressed media speculation about a relationship with Morning Live co-host Gethin Jones by clearly stating they are friends and colleagues. “We just work together, we are not together. No, no, no. We are just work friends,” she told The Mirror. She has explained that she, Jones, and fellow presenter Michelle Ackerley have been friends for approximately 25 years — with Jones and Skelton overlapping at Blue Peter and Ackerley being Skelton’s former London flatmate — and that their on-screen warmth reflects genuine long-term friendship rather than romance.
What is Helen Skelton’s book about?
Helen Skelton’s autobiography In My Stride was published on October 12, 2023, and covers her life from her dairy farm childhood in Cumbria through her Blue Peter years, world record challenges, Amazon kayak, marriage to Richie Myler, separation in 2022, Strictly Come Dancing runner-up, and life as a solo parent. The book received widespread praise for its honesty, warmth, and resilience, specifically for its candid account of the separation without bitterness or attacks on her ex-husband. Her first book was the children’s novel Amy Wild: Amazon Summer, published in May 2015.
Where does Helen Skelton live?
Helen Skelton lives in Cumbria, having moved back to her home region after her separation from Richie Myler in 2022. She initially moved in with her parents on their dairy farm before finding a new family home for herself and her three children in the Cumbrian countryside. The decision to return to Cumbria was both practical — the support of family nearby — and values-based, reflecting her desire to raise her children in the rural environment that shaped her own upbringing. She and her children are reported to have settled happily in their Cumbrian home.
What is Helen Skelton’s connection to Blue Peter?
Helen Skelton was the 33rd presenter of Blue Peter, joining the programme on August 28, 2008, replacing Zoë Salmon and departing in September 2013 to be replaced by Radzi Chinyanganya. Her five-and-a-half years on the show included the 2010 Amazon kayak, the 2012 South Pole bicycle challenge, the 2011 Battersea tightrope walk, and numerous other challenges and records. She danced the Charleston to the Blue Peter theme tune at Strictly Come Dancing 2022 during BBC 100th anniversary week — her highest-scoring Strictly performance — in a moment widely celebrated as one of the competition’s most emotionally resonant of the series.
What is Helen Skelton’s TV job now?
In 2025, Helen Skelton presents BBC One’s Morning Live (weekday mornings from approximately 9:15 AM, alongside Gethin Jones and Michelle Ackerley), BBC One’s Countryfile (Sunday evenings), and Channel 5’s On The Farm (which she has presented since 2019). She also voiced the character of farmer Annie Morris in the children’s animated series Fireman Sam from 2023 and has appeared in Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins (2020), Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, and various BBC Sport events. She left her BBC Radio 5 Live Sunday morning show in August 2023, citing the need to spend more time with her three children.
To Conclude
Helen Skelton’s story is one of British broadcasting’s most compelling — the arc from a dairy farm in Kirkby Thore, Cumbria, to national television presenter, world record holder, Strictly finalist, published author, and solo parent, covers a range of experience and achievement that few lives in any field manage to encompass. What makes it specifically remarkable is the consistency of the values that run through every phase of the story: the physical courage that produces Guinness World Records, the journalistic curiosity that makes her Countryfile and Morning Live work compelling, the authenticity that earns genuine public affection rather than manufactured celebrity, and the resilience that has met each of life’s challenges — whether an Amazon river or a public separation — with the same fundamental refusal to be defined by difficulty.
She is now 41, settled in Cumbria with her three children, presenting two of British television’s most consistently watched programmes, and identified by the permanent Ribbons sculpture as a figure whose achievements merit lasting recognition. The Blue Peter theme Charleston on a Strictly Saturday night, the image of a kayak making slow progress along an Amazon tributary, and the warmth of a Morning Live sofa morning are three completely different pictures — but they all show the same person, shaped by the same farm, the same values, and the same fundamental conviction that you get out of life what you put in.
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