Celebrity News:

You join me in the middle of nowhere and I really hope you’ve packed your wellingtons. To our left is a muddy field. To our right is another muddy field. In front, leading the way under cover of a line of beech trees, is a 68-year-old man in a camouflage outfit and a leather hat decorated with feathers in the hope that he’ll be mistaken for a large pheasant. Meet Johnny Kingdom, the west of England’s answer to David Attenborough, who is teaching me to stalk deer.

Not that we’re having much luck. We have circled wide across Exmoor to be sure the wind is in the right direction so that stags cannot pick up our scent. But I can’t help thinking that Johnny’s hearty laugh might have tipped off our quarry. For some reason, he is convinced that my coat smells of silage. The valleys echo with his amusement at this but my coat, although admirably rural, is later cleared of guilt.

Back to the stalk, though. We have covered up any bright clothing and I have even been instructed to tuck away my white notebook so that the deer won’t see it coming. We speak now in the quietest of whispers.

We crouch low and we try our best to avoid stepping on twigs. And we’d probably have got quite close if not for the herd of stampeding cattle. "I think the stags might have caught our scent," says Johnny, explaining the wind swirls on this part of the moor that might have given us away. My money, though, was on the cattle.

Kingdom spends hours, days even, up here on the moor with his camera and his patience is beginning to pay off. For years he sold video tapes at village shows. Now he is more likely to open fetes than man a stall. Last year his first series for BBC2, A Year on Exmoor, attracted 3m viewers. He has written a book, Johnny Kingdom: A Wild Life on Exmoor (Transworld, £7.99) that has recently come out in paperback and on Friday you can see him filming beaver, otter and reindeer in a BBC2 Christmas special: Johnny Goes to Scotland.

Back home on Exmoor he’s out on the moor as early as 5.30am to wait for deer, badgers, foxes, Exmoor ponies and the occasional boar. "I’ve got the patience of a saint," he says. "I’ve been up a tree for three hours, frightened to come down because there’s a great stag underneath me."

In October he spent 11 straight nights in a makeshift hide on the off-chance that he might film a wild boar. "I knew he was in the area," he says. "He came to me through the darkness and all I saw was those bloomin’ eyes. Far apart, like a cat. I thought he was the beast of Exmoor. And he was 3ft to the shoulder when he came into the light."

For the authentic Kingdom feel, you should read those words quickly in a rich accent that has been passed down over three generations in the same north Devon village.

Exmoor straddles the border of Devon and Somerset. It’s a former royal forest and hunting ground but is now a national park. It’s frequently wet and often so misty that you can barely see 10 yards in front of you. And if life had gone to plan, it’s unlikely that anybody outside this neighbourhood would have heard of Johnny.

He left school at 15 and worked at the local quarry with his father, who was in charge of the explosives. He did a bit of poaching - "taught by my father, just for the pot" - and later inherited the role of local gravedigger. He married his childhood sweetheart, Julie, had two sons and began work in the timber business: "It was piecework and I was earning £300 a week. That was good money back then."

Far too good to last, as it turned out. Working alone on his tractor one day, Johnny had his face smashed in by the vehicle’s hydraulic arm. He was lucky to escape with his life and his teeth were so badly damaged that he has only just finished the dental treatment, more than 30 years later. Worst of all, with a young family, he was off work for 21 weeks and plunged into depression. "My nerve went," he recalls. "I lost my confidence totally. I was having a nervous breakdown."

But then he had a stroke of luck. A friend lent him a video camera to go up to the moor to film the wildlife. Kingdom was not what you might call an instant success with the camera. He missed his first stag because he turned the camera off instead of on, but it was the beginning of a new career.

His recent success means that he has been able to buy 52 acres of land that in effect has become his own film set. There is a hide overlooking badger setts and he has built a pond to attract otters. As we walk through the wood he spots a tree where the bark has been scraped off by stags in the rutting season: "What he’s doing is marking his territory and the next thing you see is stags fighting. The same stag will come back to the same area year after year."

Unfortunately, that’s more than you can say for Johnny. Several neighbours seem to have banned him from their land. "It’s jealousy and it’s getting on my nerves a bit," he says. "They say I’m too big for my boots. But I’m here to help the Exmoor people. I’m a country man and I believe in country life."

Which, according to Johnny, is gymkhanas and shows, church and whist drives: "Some people come in and don’t even like a cockerel calling in the morning or church bells ringing. What sort of people is that?" He glances across at me. "Come on, write that down."

The moor itself has changed little since Johnny was a boy. He has noticed one thing, though. The rutting season, which once lasted from September until the end of October, is now a lot longer. "Last year I heard a stag at Christmas," he says. "The year before it was even into January." Which, says Johnny, just goes to prove that the climate is indeed changing.