Chris Packham urges people to open up about autism

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Chris Packham: Asperger’s And Me airs on BBC 2 on Tuesday, October 17.

I work every day: I work Christmas day, I work my birthday, I just work,” says the naturalist, shaking his head at the mere suggestion of a ‘break’. “I’ve got things to do. I can’t stop. I can’t stop...

“I was actually forced yesterday to take a couple of hours out,” he adds, almost surprised by his own declaration. “I had a load of work to do, but when I got to the hotel I couldn’t check in, so I went to the National Gallery. It was a good couple of hours.”

Packham puts his ability to handle such a gruelling schedule down to his autism, a disorder that in many ways has come to define him.

“Sometimes (I’m doing) two or three jobs a day, so it’s one of those times that the Asperger’s mind is actually probably the only way it would work,” explains the 56-year-old, who has lent his encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world to shows such as The Really Wild Show and Springwatch for over three decades.

Diagnosed in his 40s, the presenter — who went public with the condition in his 2016 childhood memoir, Fingers In The Sparkle Jar — is in London to discuss a candid new BBC Two documentary, Chris Packham: Asperger’s And Me.

In the one-off film, Packham invites viewers into his world to try to show them what it’s really like being him — from the devastating trials of his adolescence and daily struggles in social situations, to his bouts of depression, difficulty forming relationships, and heightened, often overwhelming, senses.

With scientific advances offering new possibilities to treat Asperger’s, he also travels to the US to witness radical therapies that appear to offer the possibility of eradicating autistic traits entirely. A journey that leaves him questioning whether he’d ever want to be cured himself, or whether, ultimately, Asperger’s has helped make him who he is today.

Hands tightly clasped on his lap, he talks of his decision to live alone in the middle of the woods with his “best friend”, Scratchy the dog, (as opposed to with his long-term
girlfriend Charlotte Corney) as it’s the “only place I feel normal”.

“I’m a lot less guarded with people I trust and know — invariably my family have always taken the brunt of that,” he confesses, pinpointing his battle to connect with strangers.

“There’s a certain amount of relief because if I make a mistake, people now understand why,” he muses. “They don’t have to just say, ‘Chris is a nuisance weirdo’.

“That doesn’t, however, mean that I can count on their tolerance,” he quickly adds. “Television is very much about effective teamwork and maximising and optimising what the team can achieve and I have to be an effective part of that team.

“I don’t want people to make excuses for me,” he finishes. “I can’t take my foot off the gas. I mustn’t relax. I don’t want to be an encumbrance to anyone.”

Now it’s Chris Packham’s turn to invite us to join him in the celeb clinic as he, with some discomfort, explains that he is “on the spectrum” as the phrase goes. Chris Packham: Asperger’s and Me makes for provocative viewing, especially when Packham travels to America to look at “transcranial magnetic stimulation”, that is claimed to be a treatment for the syndrome – which prompts the obvious question as to whether something so intrinsic to identity and personality can be a legitimate target for a “cure”.