Jake Humphrey exclusive: I was bullied relentlessly at school – the social media criticism hurts

“A resounding success story, albeit tinged with a Marmite taste.” 

That is how one television insider describes Jake Humphrey, and an hour in the former BBC and BT Sport presenter’s company – complete with numerous book recommendations and doses of life advice – certainly confirms a rare energy and candour.

It also reveals a wider back story that, following relentless bullying as a child, is genuinely both harrowing and, yes, inspiring.

In the past year, Humphrey has stepped away from a dream job fronting Champions League football coverage to have more family time and further immersion into a world called ‘high performance’.

“I have always had this sense that time is going by really fast,” he explains. “And the longer I did the High Performance podcast, the harder I found being a football host. I was not always that comfortable. The lads-y banter thing is not for me. I struggle a bit with the modern world – where firm opinions are the thing we value more than anything.

“I often felt I was doing High Performance all week, and empathy and understanding and leaning into people. Then, on Saturday, I was having conversations about sacking managers and dropping players, criticising decisions made by referees. I’d been dreaming for a long time, but not brave enough to take a leap.”

Humphrey had already scaled back the previous year from presenting Premier League football, all while the High Performance podcast he co-hosts with Prof Damian Hughes had grown from its launch three years ago to 100 million downloads, sell-out theatre shows, learning hubs, leadership courses, star listeners as well as guests and a second book that will be published next month. 

And yet you do not have to search long on social media to find someone willing to take aim.

Humphrey stresses that, yes, of course he is well aware that certain postings – for example his regular rallying cry that A-level results need not define you, or his personal list of ‘world-class basics’ – will provoke a full myriad of reactions. But he will not be cowed.

“I think you would be a sociopath or something if it didn’t get through the armour sometimes,” he says. “I’ll never apologise for saying to anyone who is in a tough situation now, ‘It’s never over’. What’s the alternative? Saying to people with a difficult upbringing that you are a lost cause? I try to rationalise it. I think to myself, ‘Instead of worrying about what they said, try and think about why they needed to say that’. I would think about the things that have increased that criticism and try to work out what that tells us.”

He then recalls how he stood up so publicly for Karen Carney, his colleague on BT Sport, after she was subjected to “chauvinistic and nasty bullying” that forced her off social media, and received a barrage of abuse himself. “I’ve always thought that if you just let this stuff go you are as complicit as anybody,” he says. 

Humphrey also cites a recent description of the High Performance podcast as ‘cheap fortune-cookie wisdom’ and says: “I thought about the people we have interviewed in the last couple of months, Dame Stephanie Shirley, who fled from the Nazis on the Kindertransport and built a tech business that she sold for billions; David Smith, a former athlete who is now dying sadly of cancer; Sarina Wiegman, who is talking about how she has changed English football, and Prof Brian Cox.

“The only place that reaction happens is on Twitter. No one has ever stopped me in the street and said it. How can I make a credible product by Twitter comments? All I can ever do is share what I think. I am not fixed on any of these opinions. [But] when it’s the same messages from the same people, I just feel exactly like I felt when I got bullied at school.”

Humphrey stresses, however, that the formative influence of many guests are their “struggles” rather than successes and how they invariably also still share an enduring optimism. He is clearly a case in point and his honesty about past challenges, not least being bullied in secondary school, is stark.

“When we drop the kids off, I still get the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I see them walking off with the bag over their shoulder,” Humphrey says.

“It still triggers me to this day... god, the feeling of having to do that day after day after day, knowing what awaited. There were these two buses in the school car park and I’d go and sit in there on my own and just have my lunch. I think it’s the relentlessness of just having to go back and do that again and again. I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

“That is probably one thing from all the experiences I would hate to relive. At that age, particularly at that time, people didn’t really know how to deal with it. I was asked to stand up in assembly and the teacher said, ‘Can people stop bullying this guy?’ That just brings more heat.

“It lasted a couple of years and then I changed schools. It still fills me with a nasty feeling. But I think when stuff is difficult... I do think there is a real value in that. I’m not saying spend your days in toxic environments but I am saying, ‘Don’t constantly shy away from stuff that is difficult, or is a challenge or doesn’t necessarily feel like the right thing’.

“If I’ve learnt one big lesson from High Performance it is be thankful for all your collaborators. You might think of your first boss, great colleagues, some of the amazing people that have changed the way you view the world. But we also have to look at the people that bullied us, because they built our resilience. 

“We also have to think about the first boss that sacked us, because they made us realise how tough the world can be. We have to think about the people who criticise, because they build our coat of armour. Resilience is the most important thing that we possess.”

Of losing his grandmother, Ena, when he was studying for A-levels (which ended up with grades of U, N and E), Humphrey says: “She had been struggling for a long time with the death of her husband. He was disabled and she was his carer. That was, without knowing it, a really strong reminder of the fragility of life.

“I was pretty useless at school, pretty useless at sport, had very few friends, didn’t have any real passions, was quite a late developer, lived in a little village in Norfolk and then something happened. A fire was absolutely lit in me: ‘You don’t want to waste a second, you don’t want to waste a breath, you don’t want to do stuff that isn’t good for you... let’s go and make something happen’.”

Humphrey duly aimed for television and, after numerous rejection letters (which he has kept), secured work experience at Anglia Television. By the age of 22, he was presenting CBBC with Holly Willoughby, even if his breezy on-camera persona disguised significant mental health challenges. 

“I remember my parents driving off and I had a bit of a breakdown,” he says. “The first thing I did to reach out was to ring a number in the Daily Mirror... one of those 0891 numbers. I wasted a year not sleeping. My wife used to wake in the night and say, ‘Why is the bed wet’. And I’d say, ‘I think because I went to the gym earlier and I’m sweating’. But you are lying there panicking.”

With help, Humphrey would ultimately flourish and, by the time he was asked to front the new BT Sport channel, the BBC was offering a multi-year contract to present Match of the Day 2, Sports Personality of the Year, the World Cup, the European Championship, Formula One and the Olympic Games. He still wanted to join BT Sport, hoping to combine some of those roles, but the BBC enforced a clean break and, for good measure, ruled that he could not present that year’s SPOTY. 

In his new book, How to Change Your Life, Humphrey says that he was told he had not been loyal. “It was really painful,” he now says. “I guess you could say I was unlucky. I was the last person that really happened to. It wasn’t that long after that Gary [Lineker] came across to BT, started doing the Champions League, and it was still fine for him to continue.

“I’m not bitter. It’s worked out for everyone. If I was them – with this guy brought through kids’ telly, given a chance in sport – I’d probably have been like that.”

Humphrey would also co-found the production company Whisper TV (and is chair of a local sports charity) and, while he says that sports broadcasting has “never been more exciting”, seems to have found his absolute passion. “It’s still a bit confusing why High Performance has achieved what it has,” he says. “Almost every country in the world listens to it. I get stopped every single day. 

“Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition, listens to it on a regular basis. I have two or three Premier League managers messaging me all the time – a couple want us to go in and talk. I have regular texts from Gareth Southgate, giving me a little critique of each episode.

“Nobody asks me about F1 any more, nobody asks me about football presenting. They just want to talk about High Performance and the things it’s done for them. In that respect, High Performance is actually the first time I feel useful.”

As any listener of the show would know, Humphrey and Hughes always ask their guests for a definition of ‘High Performance’. In the unfamiliar role of interviewee, Humphrey needs no prompting.

“High Performance is actually doing the best you can, where you are, with what you’ve got,” he says. “I think a lot of us are delaying our happiness thinking there is a moment in our life when everything makes sense. The joy has to be found in the doing, in the struggle, in the hard stuff, in the good days. 

“I can’t therefore say that and then have a huge issue with someone dropping me some criticism. That’s all part of this journey. Do I get 100 million downloads with no criticism on Twitter? No. Would you take it in return for the impact you’ve had and the people you have helped? Yes, absolutely.

“I live in Norwich, which is the second-lowest city in the UK for social mobility. I’m a firm believer that you are not fixed in the situation that you are born into. 

“All of us really are judged by whether we put out an energy into the world that made other people feel good. There will always be people that don’t resonate with it, but I feel like I’ve found myself now and I’m really comfy in that place.”