Clare Balding has spoken about how her wife Alice Arnold warned her not to dance when she attended an event featuring Neil Diamond. Clare, one of the BBC’s most famous and renowned presenters, was speaking on the programme Inheritance Tracks when she discussed the first song that played.

The song was Sweet Caroline by Neil Diamond, a track often sung by England football fans during major tournaments such as the World Cup, although at this year’s tournament, Oasis’ Wonderwall has become the song fans sing after a match. Addressing the microphone and those listening to the podcast as the first notes of the song played, Clare, 55, spoke about how she had taken her mum to an event featuring Neil Diamond because she was a fan.

Clare said: “My mum is a huge Neil Diamond fan so we listened to his music an awful lot and, actually, she’s deeply unimpressed with everything I do and doesn’t really want to come to anything, but I once got offered tickets to an audience with and it was Neil Diamond.

“So I said to mum, ‘Look, do you want to come with me? We’ll go to this audience with Neil Diamond’ and it was very starry, it was filmed for tele and people had to do questions and I asked a question. And the one thing that Alice, my wife, who used to work for Radio 4. The one thing she said to me was ‘Do not get caught dancing to anything because you’ll just look stupid’. And of course, when Sweet Caroline came on, I couldn’t help myself.”

This isn’t the first time Clare has talked about her marriage and relationship with Alice and how it has been affected by outside events.

Earlier this year, Clare talked about how the pair grieved the loss of their beloved Tibetan terrier Archie who passed away in 2020. She said that while they are keen for a new dog in their lives, they want to do it at the right time. This isn’t the only major decision the pair have made in their lives after they moved from Chiswick, London to Esher in Surrey.

Speaking about the difficult decision of getting a new dog, Clare explained that her work meant she would be away for long stretches. She gave one example of this on the Alright, Pet? podcast in 2024.

She said: “Here's the thing about responsible dog ownership, I'm going to be away all this summer doing the Olympics and Paralympics, this is not the time to bring a dog into my life, our life.

“And we are also doing a big sort of house building project, so that we can move somewhere where we've got a bit more space, we're not close to a road, and we can have doors open all the time.”

Clare Balding is set to appear alongside other presenters in BBC One's coverage of the tournament today (July 11).