TV presenter and interior designer Banjo Beale says whirlwind lifestyle is just the way he likes it

Mobile phone reception is hard to come by in a remote spot such as Ulva, which is why we’re catching up with Banjo Beale a day after we were originally scheduled to chat.

The gregarious TV personality and interior designer is on the tiny island off Mull, where he and his husband Ro have recently taken over the local cafe, The Boathouse, which reopened earlier this month.

“We threw our hat into the ring and ours was the only hat in the ring, so they had no choice but to give it to us,” Banjo laughed.

Ulva’s tagline is ‘A World Apart’, but moving to this part of the globe has given Banjo more opportunities than he could ever have imagined.

“When you move to someplace like Mull, you think you’re cut off from the rest of the world and that you’ll become a hermit, but for me it’s opened up my world. Not only are there so many opportunities here, but also elsewhere thanks to people watching me from around the world.

“I had a Zoom meeting yesterday with a virtual client in South Carolina, and I’m off to Zambia to work with someone who saw me on TV and asked if I would do up her house on the Zambezi River.

“I’ve been imported here and now I’m exporting ideas to elsewhere.”

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A couple of days before our chat, Banjo’s mum had reminded him it was the third anniversary of his first appearance on television. That was on Interior Design Masters, the reality competition he won and which turned his life on its head. Soon after he was asked to join Scotland’s Home of the Year as a judge, then he presented his own show – Designing The Hebrides – and he has written two books and is growing his business as an interior designer.

“It’s been a whirlwind ever since filming Interior Design Masters and I’ve not yet hopped off the rollercoaster because you never know when it’s going to end, so I say ‘yes’ to everything, which rolls on to the next thing and that creates another opportunity,” Banjo said.

Where he finds himself now – both literally and figuratively – is a long way from his former life in Australia. He grew up in a country town called Bathurst in New South Wales, where he was plain old Brendan (Ro christened him Banjo because he’s highly strung). The family home was a stone’s throw from one of the country’s most famous car racetracks, Mount Panorama.

“Every October, there’s a 1,000km race takes place and the population swells from 20,000 to 200,000,” Banjo said. “It’s rough and ready – lots of camping, burnouts, hot wheels. Lots of men and booze and revheads. Not really my thing but an interesting time. It wasn’t the environment for an interior designer to thrive!”

Banjo recalls rearranging the furniture at home every weekend as a kid and picking curtains for his mum when he was five, but he ended up in a creative corporate job after studying communications and advertising at university.

“It was very safe, and I got as far as I could in it, then I met Ro, a free spirit who was working in a fruit and veg store. Within two weeks of meeting, we had booked one-way tickets out of there to Sri Lanka. Four months later, we were backpacking around the world.

“If I hadn’t met him, I feel I could still be in that corporate job in Australia, but he opened my eyes. We roughed it through India for six months, snailed our way here and turned up as broke backpackers. It shifted my whole outlook; it made me more resilient and prepared me for wild island life.”

Banjo and Ro’s first stop in the UK was Brighton. “We looked down at the rocks on the beach, having just come from beautiful sandy beaches in India and Australia, and we thought it was the grimmest place on earth, so we bought a ticket to Morocco to regroup, with just a couple of hundred pounds left to our names.”

It was there where Ro revealed he had always wanted to be a cheesemaker in Scotland, specifically in the Highlands or islands.

“It was the first I’d heard of it,” Banjo continued. “Ok, strewth. I found an ad online looking for workers at a cheese farm in exchange for free room and board. I called them up and they said they hadn’t placed an ad. I’d become obsessed by the idea, so I begged her over the phone. It turned out her grandson had placed the ad so he could have some young people around.

“She said we could come but we’d be living in a banged-out caravan in a midge-infested field, and we’d need to clean out holiday cottages. I told her I loved midges! We arrived and we were clueless; it was a baptism of fire. But we also felt like we’d arrived home in a weird way.

“We tried to leave six years ago. We went back to Australia, but after six months we felt we’d made a huge mistake, so we came back with our tails between our legs. Now we’re here for life.”

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Banjo and Ro soon found their feet at Isle of Mull Cheese, befriending the owner, Chris. Ro learned to be a cheesemonger, while Banjo was able to indulge his interior design interest.

“Moving to Mull really got me into it. Chris is quite knacky – she weaves, upholsters, loves antique furniture. We’d hunt in the scrapyard out the back of the farm. I learned a lot about antique furniture and it’s where I got my ethos for repurposing things. Now I have a hangar on the farm full of my treasure.

“After we finish chatting here, I’m hopping in my car and driving eight hours to Newark-On-Trent, which has the biggest antique fair in Europe. I go a few times a year and load up my van with anything I think I might need in the future. I’m always collecting stuff.

“When you live on an island you can’t run down to the shops, so I like to have a nice little pool of things. People are constantly dropping items off to me or sending me a message asking if I want something. I’m a selective hoarder, but a hoarder nonetheless.

“When I’m not on the telly, I’m at antique fairs. I’ve been working on my business in the background – the TV and books might dry up, but I still want to be an interior designer.”

© Supplied by BBC

The television work shows no signs of coming to an end anytime soon. Banjo is back on our screens this week along with Anna Campbell-Jones and Danny Campbell for the seventh series of Scotland’s Home of the Year, his third season with the show. His playful everyman attitude has proved to be a hit with viewers.

“I’m nosey. I would never go on the show and let me into my house, because I do sneak a peek into people’s cupboards,” he grinned. “The contents of a fridge say a lot about a person too.

“I have an eye, but I’m representing the average Joe. I’m there to have a good time. I’ll let Anna drop all the names of the designers and the paint colours, and Danny can bang on about the architecture.

“I’m just there to have a snoop around and to judge them!”

‘The best home is a loved one’

Banjo says he loves trying to imagine what the property owners taking part in Scotland’s Home of the Year look like.

“We’re only given a tiny paragraph of information about the house beforehand and nothing about the owners, so I like to form a picture in my head and make up a complete back story about them,” he laughed. “My first question is usually, ‘Do they have a dog?’ If they do, that’s a good start.

“I can tell when I walk into a house if I’d want to be friends with them or if I’d run away from them at a dinner party!

“When it comes to the final and they’re all standing in front of me, I try to match the house with the people.”

He added: “With things like Instagram and Pinterest, people design what they think a house should look like, but the best ones are an extension of the people. The key is in the name of the show – it’s home of the year, not a grand design or an amazing, outrageous build.

“I do love nosing through a rich person’s house with fancy stuff, but I think reclaimed, homespun homes that are cobbled together and full of people’s history are the most interesting ones.

“It’s the feeling you get when you walk in and it feels like a real home, one where someone has poured a lot of love into it.”

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Scotland’s Home of the Year, BBC One Scotland, Monday, 6.25pm, and the iPlayer