Jake Humphrey: ‘This is the first time in my whole career that I feel useful’
Jake Humphrey has a question for me. For all of us, really. But first the context: a couple of months ago,
the BT Sport presenter and co-host of The High Performance Podcast – an interview show about successful individuals telling their stories, from
Jonny Wilkinson and
tech pioneer Dame Stephanie Shirley to
Matthew McConaughey and
Sir Keir Starmer – shared his morning routine on social media.
“Good morning from my sofa. It’s 5.12am. The family is asleep. I’m not. I never am at this time. That is because I have 3 World Class Basics that I start my day with,” Humphrey wrote. “5am alarm call; water and vitamins; 10 minutes spent planning a list for that day.”
World Class Basics, he explained, are “a daily reminder that to achieve the things you want in life, it isn’t about the huge leaps of faith [...] it’s simply breaking your day down into the smallest parts possible and asking what each one says about your self-worth.”
It went on for another couple of paragraphs. A bit annoying, a bit worthy, but a lot of people on social media are annoying and worthy. Yet Humphreys was called a “spanner” (that’s one of the kinder responses) and is, to this day, mocked relentlessly for it. He still doesn’t quite understand why.
“I probably didn’t get the message quite right. I probably didn’t say what I wanted to say. But who’s flawless?” The concept of World Class Basics was, he explains, shared on The High Performance Podcast by
Sir Ian McGeechan, the legendary rugby coach.
“Now, if you hear it from those people, you go ‘Wow, that’s good messaging.’ [But] when you hear it from a guy who presents football, you go, ‘What are you talking about?’ And send a meme of Alan Partridge or David Brent…” Humphrey looks crestfallen for a moment; he is trolled a lot. “I think that’s partly a reflection of society putting somebody in a box. What do you reckon?”
Humphrey, 44, is not always as earnest as this, but it’s a mode he increasingly falls into, especially since trying to move from the box of “that bloke off the TV” to something more impactful, and the kind of man who quotes
Olaf, the snowman from Frozen (“Just do the next right thing”) in conversation.
In a boardroom at his management’s offices in central London, where he’s travelled to from his home in Norfolk for an awards ceremony, he still can’t quite believe how the podcast has grown.
It is not, he’s at pains to point out, simply a place for rich and famous people to lord it over those who aren’t. That kind of behaviour leads to people being called spanners. “It’s never that. For me, High Performance is not a set manifesto; all we’re really doing is taking people who’ve led interesting lives, and hopefully having conversations with them you don’t hear elsewhere,” he says. “It’s brilliant to disagree with them, it’s also brilliant to hear stuff that resonates to the point of adopting some of those things into your own life. It is an offering of somebody’s lived experience.”
It’s true, it’s definitely no recommendation for fame and fortune. Wilkinson talked about how the greatest moment of his life, dropping the goal to win the Rugby World Cup in 2003, was in some ways also the worst. McConaughey, who admittedly talks only in aphorisms, talked about “looking for life’s green lights” amid the bad.
Dame Stephanie Shirley described arriving in Britain on the kindertransport, eventually making millions, only to give most away to charity. And Starmer compared his job to that of the England football manager. Which was curious, as if anything he’s surely the Shadow England football manager.
The Labour leader’s team approached them, Humphrey says. Podcasts are increasingly on the radar of politicians’ communications teams. It’s easy to understand why. The conversations on those programmes are often long and scantily edited, while the audience is often composed of young professional, politically centrist types there for the electoral taking. You may see them on the commuter trains in the morning, these Podcast Men: headphones in, gilet on, look of mild epiphany etched across face as they realise Starmer’s father worked as a toolmaker.
“We sat around and wondered whether it would be something we’d consider,” Humphrey says of the Starmer invitation. They’d received the same request from Hancock. “But we felt that High Performance might have been a challenge to that conversation…”
On balance, Starmer’s undeniably impressive pre-politics career secured it for him. “I wouldn’t be averse to having a Tory on,” Humphrey says. Rishi Sunak? “Yes, I would.” OK, Boris Johnson? “Hmm, no. But then, should I say no?” King Charles? “Yes!”
“I had a really horrible time with my own mental health when I first came to London, and it was weird. I was earning £40,000, which felt like the greatest riches in the world. And the outside world would go, ‘Bloody hell, you must have been the happiest you’ve ever been’, and in fact it was the saddest I’ve ever been. But we have this expectation that when things are going well, we have to be happy.”
A decade earlier, his grandmother had taken her own life – something that he has said “created a weird relationship with suicide for me.” At one point he explored the idea of hiring a bodyguard to make sure he didn’t do anything silly. Eventually, thanks to therapy and other support – including that of Harriet, then his girlfriend, he improved. But he still has flare-ups.
“That’s an important message for me. Things are not fixed. Like that [World Class Basics] thing, that definitely is the biggest source of my mental health challenges now, this sense of criticism from people who don’t even understand what you’re trying to do. They just revel in it,” he says.
Some football fans have always given him a hard time, as they do almost all presenters who try to impress some personality on the job (
Gary Lineker possibly gets away with more, thanks to his past as a player). “I try not to take it to heart,” Humphrey says of the abuse.
He cannot see himself doing a Lineker and “presenting football forever”, it seems. “I’ll be doing the Champions League final again in a few weeks. And I still love that job, for sure. But I’m still quite a restless soul. I’ve done 10 years of live football now, and maybe I’m starting to wonder what else is out there.”
A few weeks ago, Humphrey and Hughes played the 2,000-seater London Palladium, the biggest of the half a dozen venues they’ll play across the country this summer. In some ways it was like a two-hour, live LinkedIn post (inspirational quotes on PowerPoint slides featured heavily, along with interviews with remarkable people and a lengthy Q&A), in others like a hip evangelical church service.
But once you park your cynicism and accept that Humphrey and Hughes are simply nice, normal blokes offering nice, normal life wisdom and wellbeing advice to people who are perhaps more likely to take it on board if it’s given in this format – by heroic athletes and business people, then packaged by two talented communicators, as the presenters are – you can understand why Humphrey is so exasperated by his critics.
Undeterred, he and Hughes are now establishing The High Performance Foundation to get the message into schools. “My dream is that it’s on the national curriculum, and every kid in every class in the country does an hour of High Performance every week. We’ve already got three years’ worth of content.”
A portion of the live show is simply Humphrey flashing up abusive tweets he’s received – and still receives – from keyboard warriors who take against his well-meaning side. They are, admittedly, quite brutal, especially given his mother, wife and kids were in the audience at the Palladium. But today he takes out his phone to show me the specific inbox for the High Performance Podcast. It’s full of people thanking him and Hughes for changing their lives.
A few months ago, he says, a message landed from a listener who told them he had recently climbed into his car to contemplate taking his life. At that moment, his phone connected via Bluetooth to the car’s speakers and started playing an episode of the podcast. It made him stop, listen and think. Eventually, he wrote, he decided to live another day and went to pick up his children from school instead.
“That is the kind of thing that gives you goosebumps, but it adds to the sense of responsibility,” Humphrey says. “It’s what we need to focus on: I never want it to be something that makes people feel inferior.”
