THE DAY I REACHED TIPPING POINT WITHMY FATHER

He was an aimless, scatterbrained teenager, now Ben Shephard is one of the safest pairs of hands in TV. And it’s all down to an almighty battle of wills, he reveals...

tate cancer survivor, something close to Ben’s heart after his own father’s brush with the disease and the recent loss of BBC Breakfast presenter Bill Turnbull. There’s a horsewoman offering equine therapy to the traumatised, a salute to the heroes of the RNLI in Cornwall where Ben has holidayed since childhood, a shoutout to campaigners against period poverty and substandard social housing, and a ten-year-old whose armchair exercise videos made for her granny went viral nationally.

Ben’s interest in them all speaks to a lifetime supporting charitable endeavour not by signing autographs and cutting ribbons, but by feats of endurance that have taken him to the limit. He’s run across England twice, climbed Kilimanjaro for Comic Relief, played for England at Soccer Aid and climbed into the boxing ring with singer Lemar for Sport Relief.

Fitness is still a massive part of his life. Given that he presents Ninja Warrior UK, I ask how ninja he is. ‘Really ninja,’ he grins, while admitting that these days he’s nursing an injury more often than he’d like. Currently it’s the fallout from the face flannel incident. ‘My best friend was moaning because his neck had gone and I told him I’d just done my shoulder wringing out a flannel. Such a middle-aged injury. If teenage me or twentysomething me knew I was using a flannel as part of a skincare regime, never mind that the flannel had attacked me...’

As an insurance policy, he’s taken up playing golf so there’s one sport he can go on doing with Sam and Jack as the years go by. ‘They’re such great company,’ he says of his sons. ‘We were lucky, they never turned into grumpy, odious teenagers.’

Well, Ben would know as he was one

My wife was out of my league. She’s steps ahead in life. I can only deal with things as I walk into them

ten himself, so tricky that when he was 19 he wrote a letter of apology to his father. He grew up in Essex, one of three children. His father, now 78, was an accountant while his mother, 76, was a hospital ward sister who worked evenings as a lecturer in performing arts. ‘I was very laid back and, in my father’s eyes, not taking life seriously. We clashed because he wanted me to be organised and prepared, not leaving things to the last minute.’ Like what? ‘On my gap year I got stuck in New Zealand because I didn’t know I had to save $5 for the airport tax.’

The clincher was another gap-year trip, this one to France to help with a wine harvest. ‘I didn’t have a map or even a plan of how to get to the vineyard. That’s what made me finally write the letter. I said I’d made life very difficult for us as a teenager but now I could see what he was trying to do, that I appreciated the value of it, that I could see beyond my own selfish needs.’ It’s only recently Ben learned that his father took that letter to work with him every day in his briefcase and that he still has it almost 30 years later.

‘My dad’s lesson instructed parts of who I am and will do for the rest of my life,’ he says, though he accepts he’s still disorganised beyond the laser focus you need for live TV. It’s the reason he doesn’t like his own company – he prefers to be surrounded by other people and kept busy. ‘Left on my own, wasting time could be my Olympic sport.’

With Tipping Point still riding high in the ratings, Ninja Warrior UK back on screen, Humble Heroes about to be published and his assured performance co-hosting GMB the day after the death of Her Majesty the Queen, there’s little chance of that. I ask him what he’d still like to try. A freestanding handstand, he says. Maybe brushing up his piano skills. (A music scholar, he played piano, clarinet and saxophone to Grade 8 and thinks classical music is ‘cool and sexy’.) Improving his ‘passable’ French. Then he remembers that GMB newsreader Marverine Cole is a qualified beer sommelier, and you can see him raising a mental toast to the idea of that as the credits roll on our interview.

Ben Shephard’s book Humble Heroes: Inspirational Stories Of Hope, Heart And Humanity, is out on Thursday (£20, Blink Publishing).

DIY? I’m about as useful as a handbrake in a canoe. And I did my shoulder in wringing out a flannel

Rude, silly and bitingly sharp, Channel 4’s irreverent period drama is a sexed-up version of 18th-century Russian history, depicting a power struggle between Emperor Peter III and his wife Catherine. Peter (Nicholas Hoult, below right) is portrayed as a man-child prone to violence and binge-eating, while Catherine (Elle Fanning, right) is our relatively sane heroine. Their battleground is a gilded palace, created from scratch at the 3 Mills Studios in London and filled with baroque furniture, luxurious fabrics and glittering lanterns found in Seville.

Production designer Francesca di Mottola was inspired by the couple’s real royal palaces, such as the Peterhof and Winter Palaces in St Petersburg, for The Great’s avant-garde sets, which earned her an Emmy nomination. She re-created the Cabinet Of Fashions And Graces, a hall at the Peterhof where the real Catherine installed 328 portraits of Russian women by court painter Pietro Rotari. The team were only allowed to display 20 reproductions of Rotari’s work, so commissioned artists to paint an additional 180 small portraits.

Like the show, Francesca’s designs prioritise character over historical accuracy. She re-imagined the royal palace as a modern apartment block where each character is represented by their own distinctive set of rooms. ‘Peter and Catherine’s apartments were designed in juxtaposition with each other,’ she explains. ‘Catherine’s tones are quite light to reflect her innocence and optimism, while Peter’s den is much darker.’ For Catherine’s bedroom the team used a chinoiserie wallpaper decorated with flying birds to evoke the sense of claustrophobia she feels in her marriage, and in Peter’s there’s a portrait of him standing over a bear and holding a melon to show he’s a deranged narcissist.

The second series begins as Catherine takes the crown (inset) and some of the sets were tweaked, such as the state room which becomes Catherine’s office, where books, philosophers’ busts and huge desks to reflect the new ruler’s progressive intellectualism were added.

When Catherine hosts a breakfast in honour of 18th-century French philosopher Diderot, Francesca draped the room in yellow to

reference the Age of Enlightenment, and hung Renaissance paintings such as a reproduction of Raphael’s The School Of Athens, that adhere to the Golden Ratio (a geometric principle employed by artists to achieve a sense of proportion) on the walls. By contrast, Peter’s rooms remain absurd and theatrical. When he throws a lavish party in his apartments, marble cherubs holding fabric clouds were hung from the ceiling and a fountain dispensing cherry vodka was created.

Elle Fanning has said The Great’s sets are some of the best she’s seen. Francesca is honoured. ‘The actors’ reactions are such a thrill,’ she says. ‘It’s part of the fun of the show.’

Shivani Kochhar Series 2 of The Great is on All4.