Julia Bradbury interview: I worry my cancer caused my son’s anxiety

The intrepid presenter talks motherhood, a new approach to health and filming on one of Britain’s biggest warships

“Did you see me nearly get blown sideways into the ocean when that F-35 fighter jet took off?” grins Julia Bradbury. “The flight decks on the HMS Prince of Wales are only 70m wide and 280m long so when those jets take off they go from 0-160-odd mph in three seconds. Thrilling to witness, but the force almost knocked me off my feet. The naval engineer had to hold onto me to stop me getting blasted out to sea.” 
The 54 year old TV presenter – best known for co-fronting BBC’s Countryfile with Matt Baker from 2004-2014 may seem a surprising choice but she, alongside JJ Chalmers bring a complementary civvy/veteran energy to a new documentary Warship: Life in the Royal Navy, where they are given unprecedented access to the UK’s biggest and most powerful warship.
As a gung-ho TV adventuress of the Anneka Rice school – “the kind of person who went sky diving for fun before I had to jump out of helicopters for work” – Bradbury relished the opportunity to throw herself into the heart of the action. 
Countryfile viewers will recall her as a woman always game for a challenge. We watched her winched out of an air ambulance; climb a vertical 60m sea stack in Sutherland off the Scottish coast and – slightly more amusingly – stung in the face by a bee while recording a piece on natural beekeeping. “The beekeeper just marched me into her kitchen and slapped half an onion onto my cheek just beside my left eye. Apparently that makes the swelling go down.” 
Although Countryfile has its critics, Bradbury shrugs them off. “There are lots of BBC haters,” she says. “There is a school of thought that if you are working for the BBC, then individual licence fee payers feel you are working directly for them and beholden to them as a stakeholder.” But she stresses that “Back in the day when Matt Baker and I were fronting Countryfile, it was the best value BBC programme, per viewer. We cost so much less than Strictly’s.” 
Bradbury is all glossy hair and demure dangly gold earrings when we meet via video call from the Notting Hill home she shares with her property developer husband Gerard Cunningham, son Zephyr, 13, and twin eight-year-old daughters Xanthe and Zena. 
The girls were conceived after five gruelling rounds of IVF when Bradbury was aged 43 (“I live in central London where I am definitely not the oldest mum at the school gates”). She was admirably honest with the press at the time that her chances of conceiving at that age were around 5 per cent. 
After the birth of her “miracle babies”, in 2021 the presenter was diagnosed with breast cancer. But as a lifelong hiker (“even on set you’ll see me walking in circles as I rehearse what I’m going to say to camera”) she described how the great outdoors helped restore her to her current vitality in her 2023 memoir Walk Yourself Happy. 
Bradbury tells me she was surprised how her walking skills helped her fit into life on the HMS Prince of Wales – where she fell into step with the new recruits. “The marching felt really good!” she tells me. Although she only got a brief slice of the military discipline involved she felt that: “Drill practice is something that everybody in the services has to do. No matter who they are or what rank they hold. I completely get it. The physical act of stepping together? Great!”
In fact she thinks all businesses could learn something from the levelling routine. “It’s genuinely useful for the people higher up the food chain to do precisely what the foot soldiers are doing, along with them. Like in that show Undercover Boss. How often do we hear the managers say how good it is to be back on the shop floor? Being reminded about the day to day business? It makes you a better leader.” 
She was less comfortable handling a rifle, though. “I had five minutes of practice before they put me on camera and I wasn’t prepared for the 5kg weight of the weapon to knock me off balance. I was pretty crap with it. But not bad for the first time I’ve ever held a huge great bloody gun with a razor sharp bayonet blade sticking out the top of it.” She laughs. “I was lucky I didn’t poke my eye out – or anybody else’s eye!”
While Bradbury covered day to day operations on board the warship (breaking a rule by snaffling her uniform shirt home because “who else was going to wear a shirt with Bradbury stitched onto it?”) former royal marine JJ Chalmers revisited his old stomping ground, the Marine Commando Training Centre in Devon.
Chalmers, 37, was serving in Helmand Province, Afghanistan when he sustained severe injuries in an IED (improvised explosive device) blast in May 2011. He suffered facial injuries, lost two fingers and his right elbow disintegrated. He went on to win medals for cycling and running at the 2014 Invictus Games (to which he returned as a speaker in 2016) and befriended the Games’ founder Prince Harry, whose wedding he attended in 2018. 
“JJ didn’t talk to me about Prince Harry,” says Bradbury. “But he did talk about Afghanistan.” “I’ve had so many great TV ‘husbands’ but JJ was amazing. So kind and smart and with such mental fortitude to discuss his trauma. He was very candid about how there are bits of himself missing. He has lost half his hand. He has a massive wound across his stomach and the shrapnel is still working its way out of his body even now.” 
While Bradbury shudders at the horrors of combat – she’s relieved her own nature-loving son Zephyr shows no interest in playing with guns – she has her own scars. Like Chalmers she’s been very open about her battle with breast cancer, welcoming TV cameras into her life to speak about her diagnosis with a 6cm tumour, then a single mastectomy and reconstructive surgery in the powerful 2022 documentary, Julia Bradbury: Breast Cancer and Me. This “shattering” experience forced her to reassess the way she’d been living for the past five decades. 
Born in the Republic of Ireland but raised first in Rutland (where she still has a second home) with her older sister Gina (who more recently offered to donate fat from her own body to help rebuild Julia’s breast tissue) and then Sheffield, Bradbury is the daughter of a glamorous Greek, fashion designer mother and Derbyshire-born steel marketing executive father. 
She credits her “intense curiosity about the world” for helping her make the pivot from acting to TV presenting in her early twenties and tells me that, unlike many journalists, she was “always comfortable in front of the camera. I don’t know why but it never bothered me or made me feel self conscious.” 
Her first big break in television was working for Live TV with Janet Street-Porter at the helm, but it was in 1996 Bradbury that she got a big break as GMTV’s Los Angeles correspondent. “This was in the days when Eamonn Holmes and Fiona Phillips were the main faces, great days.” And working briefly as a co-host of the BBC’s motoring show Top Gear on which she teasingly referred to Jeremy Clarkson as “the fat bloke with the tyres”.  
Today she says she’s a fan of his Clarkson’s Farm show “because he is refreshingly honest about what bloody hard work farming is. I’m guessing though that he hasn’t taken a regenerative approach to farming and I’m all for that. We’re using too many toxic chemicals – the pesticides and herbicides – that are killing insects and invertebrates. The soil is dying, everyone. If we don’t have bees and we don’t have soil, we’re f—-d.” 
Looking back on her “ambitious” youth, Bradbury regrets “pushing myself to extremes. It’s a bit ‘cringe’ now, how pushy I was but also that’s what got me on in my work.” The TV-presenting life saw her tumbling into a relentless schedule “on and off trains, planes and automobiles. It was all great fun. But I wasn’t looking after myself. I would be up late. Keep on working and then go to the bar, out on the town. I did not give sleep the importance it deserves and I wasn’t eating healthily.”
She confesses to being a reformed “sugar addict”. Despite a figure that saw her earn the sexist title “the walking man’s crumpet”, Bradbury tells me that before her cancer diagnosis she was “an 11am doughnut woman. Chocolate brownie after lunch. Massive box of popcorn with Maltesers poured into it in front of the telly at night.” 
She was proud to describe herself as a “chocolate slut”, telling other journalists how much she “loved milk chocolate with very little cocoa and loads of sugar.” She shrugs. “Now that kind of chocolate makes me go – bleurgh! I’m living proof that you can change your palate.”  
Bradbury first noticed the lump in her breast while on a work trip two years before her diagnosis. In the ITV documentary she described how she was initially diagnosed with micro cysts and then a year later the lump became bigger and was painful to touch – and Bradbury decided to get a biopsy. 
“The first time I shed a tear in the cancer diagnosis was at the biopsy. The machine is so awful. It’s like that bolt they use to execute animals with.” 
She winces at the memory of the “horrible metal kerchunk noise” the machine makes as it yanks out a column of flesh for testing. “I thought somebody really needs to engineer a way to hide the noise – can’t we get Dyson or somebody onto this?”
Lying there on her side in the aftermath of that “kerchunk”, Bradbury recalls realising that “tears were just rolling out of my eyes as I thought about my children. I thought: I want to see them grow up. I want to live my healthiest life. Give up booze. Get enough sleep. Ensure my circadian rhythm is in check, do my weight training, do everything I can do to reduce my risk of recurrence.”
Bradbury admits she found it easier to be honest with the documentary crews who filmed her cancer journey than she did with her own children. Though she says: “You have to be honest with your children,” she says now. “But it’s very hard when they ask you horrible questions like: Can I still hug you? Are you going to die? Are you going to lose your hair? One of the toughest questions from one of my girls was: ‘Mummy what happens if you cancer comes back?’ That was like a bullet to my heart. We all know that if your cancer comes back that’s bad news, it’s more and more difficult to deal with.”
Unlike most women, Bradbury has actually run the genetic testing to establish the exact risk of her cancer returning. “It’s 13 per cent,” she says. “For most women in my situation that would be closer to 10 per cent. But I’ve still got an almost 90 per cent chance of survival. 
The fact that my parents are now in their eighties and have both survived cancer [her dad had prostate cancer and her mum bowel cancer] further improves my chances. My grandmother even lived until the age of 103, so that all bodes well”
Bradbury’s cancer journey has also found her challenging modern medicine and coming to the conclusion that the NHS “has things back to front. I was listening to a GP the other day and he was saying that medics get ‘points’ for diagnosing the correct illnesses and prescribing the right drugs. Surely we should be giving them more ‘points’ for preventing those illnesses without the expensive drugs?”
“I hate the industrial nature of hospitals,” sighs Bradbury who believes that, “Nature therapy could save the NHS millions. Things like green space, nasal breathing cost nothing. Even back in the 19th century Florence Nightingale knew the power of fresh air. I think there are some brilliant oncologists saying cancer won’t be cured by one approach. So it’s not don’t do chemotherapy. But I am saying: what are you eating and how are you moving while you’re doing the chemo?”
After her diagnosis, Bradbury committed herself to a routine she admits “may be slightly woo of me, but works”. These days she rises with the sun and absorbs at least 30 minutes of natural light before starting her working day “shift work is carcinogenic” she says “and we should all pay attention to our circadian rhythms”. She will also tuck into a plate of greens and some protein (chicken, fish or eggs) so that “my digestive system and my hormones are in the right place to launch into the day.” Her old sugar cravings are handled by coconut yoghurt, blueberries and – if needed – dates. “Dates are my new best friend,” she confides. “Yes they are full of sugar but they are packed with fibre too.” 
Bradbury is so committed to her new diet that she took a stash of healthy food onto HMS Prince of Wales. “I wasn’t allowed to take a mini fridge because you’re not allowed to plug anything into a naval ship that hasn’t been tested in case it is a fire hazard,” she explains. “They cleared some space in the fridge. I asked them to steam veg for me and I would carry my own food into the mess. I got some disapproving looks for breaking protocol. There was some tut tut tutting but who cares?”
This behaviour is evidence of the presenter’s belief that “we should all take responsibility for our own health”. She sighs at the “lazy” inclination to pop pills instead of making the effort to alter lifestyles and offers the popularity of new weight loss drug Ozempic as an example. “That pill has side effects galore,” she says. “We have no idea of the long term effects but it’s easy for lots of people to start getting a grip on their weight. I have a friend and we have very robust debates about this. He thinks Ozempic is great, but I disagree. I think it’s a drug that removes the individual’s sense of power and responsibility.”
Although she’s come across as a bit strict, Bradbury says she’s an open-minded optimist. “You’ve got to think positively!” she laughs. “When you get a cancer diagnosis it’s natural to feel fear, death, hair loss, but you have to rein all that in and be realistic. The more I learn the more I know there are certain cancers we can live with. There are great stories of radical remission. Stories of tumours that disappear. We don’t know how and why that happens. People have been told they are going to die and then they’re fine…” She shrugs. “I’ll never know how this has affected my children. Are the trials and tribulations they are going through now a consequence of that or not? Is my son’s anxiety caused by my illness or because of changing schools? Changing friendships?” 
Bradbury certainly has no intention of dying any time soon. “I joke with my kids that I’m going to be that bats—t mother who is still doing yoga at 90, embarrassing them by doing star jumps after every meal to keep my sugar spikes under control.” 
Warship: Life in the Royal Navy is on Channel5 and My5, Tuesday August 13 at 9pm