Clare Balding is regarded as a national treasure of TV broadcasting, but she was once in trouble for shoplifting!
Clare, 53, is on the box over the next two weeks presenting the BBC’s coverage of Wimbledon.
But away from her TV roles, Clare believes her teenage experience of shoplifting could also help direct others.
Clare Balding on shoplifting
Clare reflected in the summer of 2021 with MailOnline on being punished for shoplifting.
She explained she was suspended from boarding school after pinching from a local village shop. According to reports, Clare was trying to fit in with ‘three of the most wayward girls’ in her house.
Clare was reportedly suspended from Downe House in Berkshire and sent home to face her parents.
However, she believes her example – detailed in her motivational book Fall Off, Get Back On, Keep Going, aimed at kids – shows that “we all have bumps in the road”.
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On ‘bouncing back’
Clare said at the time she had no intention of shying away from the anecdote because that is what the book is about.
The TV fave – married to broadcaster Alice Arnold – insisted: “I could have written it in a preachy, didactic style — ‘Look at me, aren’t I good?’.
These are the things I got wrong.
“But by far the most effective way was to say: ‘These are the things I got wrong. Don’t worry if you feel left out, run into trouble or make a massive mistake because you can recover.'”
She also told the Rosebud podcast previously: “When I first went off to boarding school, I think I felt an enormous pressure to be one of the crowd.
“So I think I was very susceptible to peer pressure, so getting in with the ‘in-gang’ required doing quite daring things, one of which was shoplifting. And of course, I got caught, and I got suspended at only the beginning of my second year at school.”
She added: “And I remember that being so shameful, because also when I rang home my parents weren’t there. So Vicky, who was my father’s terrifying secretary – the scariest woman…
“Think of all those films. She came to get me. That was absolutely horrifying and the shame of it… I thought I was going to be expelled. So that was awful.”
‘I feel so much better now everybody knows’
Clare also opened up about her past in an interview with The Guardian in 2012.
She was asked: “Do you think people will be surprised to discover that you were a child kleptomaniac?”
Clare told the paper: “Yes, but in a way that was terribly cathartic because for a long time that was the most shameful thing that had happened to me, and I hated it if people brought it up, or if I thought it was going to be brought up. That was an awful thing. It was a shameful secret, so I feel much better now everybody knows.
“I was a shoplifter. There we are. Full stop. And I got caught.”
Clare hosts the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage all weekend.
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