Ask Julia Bradbury about the short walk she took in ungainly snow shoes and sub-zero temperatures, and sheâll tell you it changed her life.
At Paradise Harbour, on the western tip of Antarctica, the ultra-fit TV presenter did a mini hill hike, pitched her tent and then sat down in the snow to let the scenery soak in.
âThatâs when the tears started to roll down my face,â she says.
‘After a breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy in 2021, I didnât think Iâd ever be brave enough to leave the safety of my home and family to do something like this again.
‘I was so weak physically, and so emotionally raw, that the idea of testing myself, of making this kind of TV show and being so far away from my partner and our children seemed impossible.
‘To achieve it five years after cancer felt like a pivotal point in my recovery, proof I could return to the adventures that I love.â
Julia Bradbury has revealed why she broke down in tears when filming her new show in the Antarctic
The journalist and presenter, 55, is fronting upcoming Julia Bradburyâs Wonders Of The Frozen South
In recent years, Julia has faced challenges such as a breast cancer diagnosis and mastectomy in 2021
It was such an intense moment that her production team asked if they should stop the cameras.
âI said no, because it felt OK to tell the truth,â says Julia. âThe sky was pink in the Antarctic summer, there were icebergs on the horizon and a solitary humpback whale, idling about and blowing spouts.
I was sitting there thinking, âWhen Iâm old, this is something I want to tell my grandchildren aboutâŠâ and that made me realise that I was living my second life, the one after cancer, to the full.â
Her new three-part ITV series, Julia Bradburyâs Wonders Of The Frozen South, is a joyous exploration of the worldâs last great wilderness.
From the Falkland Island sheep shearers working to banging house music to the humpback whales with tail fin marks that are as individual as a human fingerprint, Juliaâs bringing the bottom of the world closer to home.
Despite driving snow, brash ice (small chunks that clink around the bays of the Southern Ocean) and a wind chill that made Antarcticaâs summer temperature feel like -20°C, she was only thwarted by one thing.
âI love hugging trees and I went to Antarctica hoping to hug an iceberg. Actually I wanted to dive under one to see it in all its majesty but I was told, âNo way, theyâre too unstable. They creak, they calve, they flipâŠâ
âAs if on cue, while we were filming, this enormous chunk of ice plunged into the ocean right behind us.
‘We could feel its wake juddering us as we started speeding off. It was one of those moments you donât expect to capture on camera.
‘We were lucky to have been there â and lucky to have been 30 seconds away in the right direction or we might have got a lot wetter. But what a privilege to be able to see that.â
She was, however, able to fulfil another ambition: following in the footsteps of the explorer Ernest Shackleton. Julia retraced the final hours of his 800-mile journey from Elephant Island, where his ship Endurance had been lost to the ice, to the Stromness whaling station on South Georgia in 1916.
‘Shackleton and his men had been on a lifeboat for days with no shelter and terrible clothing, not the Gore-Tex jacket and heated mittens I take for granted.
‘They landed on South Georgia without a map and navigated over a mountain range hoping to find rescue.
Julia formerly presented Countryfile and currently specialises in consumer affairs and documentary programmes for the BBC and ITV
‘We all know the history of their heroism, thereâs an air of romance and adventure about it, but I donât think any of us can imagine what they must have gone through.
‘Seeing the whaling station as they would have seen it more than a century ago, the same Southern Ocean views, the same frozen landscapes, isnât something Iâll ever forget.â
Julia boarded the ship MS Fram in Punta Arenas, Chile, then set course for some of the worldâs most treacherous waters.
Her first stop was the Falkland Islands, where she tried sheep shearing (âI doubt any of my fleeces will be making their way to market!â) and fell in love with the rockhopper penguins, whose tiny size belies their ability to leap 1.8m in one bound.
âPenguins are often thought to be monogamous but Iâm here to tell you thatâs not strictly true, thereâs a lot of flirting, cheating, penguin divorceâŠâ
Sailing on to South Georgia, she passed A23a, once the worldâs biggest iceberg, roughly twice the size of London. Her destination was the Grytviken whaling station, which processed more than 175,000 whales during its 60-year life (it closed in the 1960s).
âWhales are a critical part of the Antarctic ecosystem because they hold carbon, theyâre living carbon sinks. We need them the way we need the Amazon rainforest,â says Julia.
âMy hope by filming in Grytviken, where they were once dispatched at the rate of 25 a day, is to highlight the need to protect them now.â
Julia was able to get close to four-tonne elephant seals and visit a 100,000-strong colony of king penguins. She saw a rare albatross, the great sea birds that can go for years without resting on dry land, and a forest of giant kelp so big itâs visible from space. âThese are the kinds of things I wanted to show in all their beauty and complexity,â she says. âI was trying to convey my own sense of awe and wonder, and how much we need Antarctica, because of the role it will play in our planetâs future.
âWhat I hadnât expected was for it to have such a huge impact on me personally, in my life after cancer, that Iâd come home with a new sense of what I can do in years to come.â
