Alistair Appleton has opened up about his first-ever TV presenting gig, and it sounds like it could have gone better! Chatting to Fantastic Man magazine, the Escape to the Country star revealed that he worked on the German show Deutsche Welle, and that he was "terrible".
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The opportunity came about while he was living in Berlin, and he explained: "In terms of TV presenting, it was the biggest baptism of fire you can imagine.
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It was live, no autocue, no earpiece. You had to write your own scripts and learn them, and there was simultaneously the problem of having to translate them into German. I was terrible, absolutely terrible."
He also spoke about the early days of his TV career in the UK, explaining: "I very quickly realised it’s only ever going to make me unhappy and the cost is going to be enormous.
I hated having an agent and I hated having to deal with TV commissioners and the whole TV business. I was never any good at it." Despite having success as a presenter over the years, Alistair has previously opened up about his career change.
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Alistair opened up about the early days of his TV career
He spoke about training to become a psychotherapist back in 2012, telling Hampshire Life: "I loved that work so much that I started to get a bit disenchanted with all the crazy schedules of TV filming and I decided five years ago to re-train as a psychotherapist. That was the best decision of my life and I think I've hit my 40s in much better shape than I hit my 30s."
Speaking on his Mind Springs blog, he added: "Television always comes with a shelf life anyway... Nothing goes on forever. You know, in my 20s all I wanted to be was a famous TV presenter, and by the time I turned 30 I was already seeing that was a very dangerous path for me because I knew that it would just mean more anxiety, more laying value on external looks."
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