Adrian Chiles admits he found hosting The One Show and Match of the Day 'fantastically unfulfilling' despite earning £4.5M a year

TV presenter Adrian Chiles has revealed that he found his time hosting The One Show and Match of the Day 'fantastically unfulfilling'.

At the height of his career, Chiles, 57, was one of Britain's highest paid broadcasters, earning more than £4.5 million a year.

But he has now confessed that despite his huge salary The One Show wasn't the right job for him and not the kind of programme he would watch.

'Professionally you get drawn into jobs that you have to take – it might be money, it might be status, it might be natural progression, but you're drawn into doing stuff that probably isn't quite right for you,' he told Kaye Adams on her How to be 60 podcast.

'You can argue The One Show wasn't right for me. It was a success, but it's not the kind of programme I'd watch or the kind of programme I thought I would have ended up doing.

'Or even presenting live elite level football. I found it fantastically unfulfilling, in fact, arguably I became not very good at it because of that. 

'Towards the end of the time I was doing football I went back to doing radio doing 10/15 minute interviews, I felt the blood flowing back into my veins.'

Chiles' successful TV career saw him host BBC1's Match of the Day 2 for six years, before being poached by ITV to front their World Cup and Champions League coverage in a golden handcuffs deal worth £6 million over four years.

He also shared The One Show sofa with Christine Lampard from 2007-2010 drawing in audiences of seven million. But he now admits that the show's format didn't appeal to him.

'You go into this business because you like asking people questions, you're curious. Now in a three minute interview on The One Show, between two films about unrelated things, you don't get much space to exercise your curiosity, but ten or 15 minutes on the radio, it's a different thing,' he explained to How to be 60.

The presenter, who now hosts a show on Radio 5 Live as well as writing a weekly newspaper column, added: 'The same is true of columns, it's not as high profile and certainly it doesn't pay anything like as well, but it is undoubtedly more fulfilling.

'When somebody stops me in the street and says: 'I like your radio programme,' or: 'I enjoyed that column last week,' I just want to kiss them.

'If I could have written my ideal job down when I was 20, this would be it - a reasonably successful column in The Guardian and doing thoughtful speech radio programmes, which are quite fun at the same time.

'I would never have wanted or predicted the madness that has come in between – presenting World Cups and interviewing Michael Caine on prime time television for The One Show. I certainly would have settled for this.'

The Birmingham-born presenter began his TV career on Working Lunch, before moving to The One Show. He also spent four years hosting The Apprentice spin-off show You're Fired.

At the height of his career, he was one of the biggest names in BBC sport. As well as Match of the Day 2, he was a member of the BBC's World Cup team, and the main presenter on the BBC's Euro 2008 coverage and one of the anchors for the 2008 Olympics.

But he told Kaye Adams that his high-flying career didn't make him happy. 'I don't feel like an Alpha male, I don't walk round feeling like I'm a great success. I don't feel that at all in my bones,' he said.

'It brings a lot of adrenalin and excitement, but it also brings fame which just twists your mind in different ways. The problems I had really came when I was doing two matches every three weeks, but that's when I got most miserable. I just realised then that I'm not good with time on my hands, I need this kind of structure and I think that's an ADHD thing.'

The presenter, who revealed in 2020 that he had been diagnosed with ADHD, said the diagnosis had helped him, but he acknowledged that his health would be in jeopardy unless he did more to control it.

He explained: 'It's not going to help matters if it then just gives me a free pass to carry on being incompetent and just say: 'terribly sorry, you're going to have to accept my neurodiversity, I'm ADHD.'

'I want a level of understanding and sympathy, but also, I've got to put the foot down with myself and go - hang on a bit, you've got to really work on this aspect of it going forward.'

Chiles, who is married to Guardian editor Kath Viner and was previously married to radio presenter Jane Garvey, added: 'I won't make 70 otherwise, because I'll be so bloody stressed.

'This idea of being in a rocking chair just relaxing and watching something on the telly - I won't get there; I'll be too busy frantically looking for where I've left my slippers and my pipe. I've got to find a way.'

Kaye Adams: How to be 60 is available on all podcast providers.