Interview: Nick and Eva Speakman

Steve Legg interviews the British writers, life coaches, therapists and TV presenters Nick and Eva Speakman.

Steve Legg (SL): I’ve watched them on the telly. I’ve loved them for years. They are a fantastic couple. I’m going to call them the dynamic duo. They’re the world’s leading life-change therapists. It’s Nick and Eva Speakman.

Nick Speakman (SL): Thanks, Steve. That’s a great introduction. You know what? I’m a Batman fan, you know? Funnily enough, I was scrolling through Tik Tok the other day. And I saw a clip where Batman and Robin are on the Batcopter and Batman’s hanging from a ladder. And there’s a plastic shark, and it looks so bad. He’s like, ‘Robin, pass me the shark repellent,’ He just happened to have a can of shark repellent in the helicopter. But honestly, amazing. It was so tacky, but I thought it was all real. And it was terrific. So yeah, looking back, it just shows how easily you can con children.

SL: So we’ve seen you on our TV screens on This Morning and all sorts of shows like that. But of course, the whole nation is now loving you on Celebrity Hunted.

Eva Speakman (ES): It is probably one of our lives most unbelievable, exciting, scary adrenaline rushes. Genuinely, we expected it to be easier than it was. It feels so real. So you have to remind yourself that you’re doing this for charity. This is part of a TV show. But you totally forget; it immerses you, and you genuinely feel like you’re a fugitive on the run.

SL: Was it really scary at times?

NK: Oh, Steve, honestly, it was. Part of that fear is born out of the fact that we are both competitive. And you know, we wanted to evade capture as long as possible. You know, I mean, everything. We create everything, you know, our thoughts, everything that we’re doing, the world we live in, is the world that we see. But we felt so under pressure because we just literally didn’t want to get caught up.

ES: The biggest pressure is you don’t know what anybody else is doing. And you want to avoid being caught first. And we are the more mature duo on the run. There was a principle behind that because I was like, Okay, I won’t be the first to go. And I couldn’t bear that thought. So that kept us going. And as I say, you have yet to learn how the other fugitives are doing. So you need to find out whether they are still all out there. In this case, you know that the Hunters are slightly thinner on the ground. Honestly, it was you bed down for the night wherever that might be. We slept in places that I never thought. In stranger’s gardens, at the side of roads. Like literally just wherever we landed and you get that moment of reprieve where you think I should be okay here for the night. And then the second your eyes open. You go. You need to get packed up. And it’s ‘let’s get out’. You have no clue where the hunters are.

SL: Did you use some of your tricks of the trade? You had us on tenterhooks at the end of the first episode. I thought, oh no, they’ve caught them.

NS: Absolutely. We did. Yeah. We tried to use a few tricks and we tried to think about what they were going to do next. And it served us quite well. Yeah, we just put ourselves into the Hunter’s shoes. That doesn’t mean that we didn’t have a few scrapes as well along the way, but we played the game. We didn’t want to just try and get to the end without being caught.

Footnote: You can read the rest of my interview with the Speakmans in the next edition of Sorted Magazine or tune in to my weekly radio show at Konnect Radio to hear the whole conversation.

Main photo credit: The Speakmans with American actor, Jeff Goldblum, courtesy of Nick and Eva Speakman.