The Princess of Wales once visited the home of U.K. radio host Roman Kemp’s parents, where she was visiting to film a video with Kemp about mental health. Speaking to The Times, Kemp explained that Catherine reached out after the airing of his 2021 BBC documentary, Roman Kemp: Our Silent Emergency, which spoke about the mental health crisis affecting young men in the U.K. Kemp was inspired to make the film, he said, after his friend and producer Joe Lyons died by suicide.
Receiving a call from Catherine was “an honor, but one of the weirdest things,” he said. “We had a Zoom call, just her and me. And she was like, ‘Oh, you know, I can come over to your place and do it there.’ And I just said, ‘No, let’s go to my parents’.’ It’s a bigger house. I don’t want to bring royalty to a flat in Vauxhall.”
Kemp—who is the son of pop stars Martin Kemp and Shirlie Holliman—said Catherine sat with the family, including their dogs, at the kitchen counter. “The funniest thing was she didn’t have any shoes on because she was respectful enough to take her shoes off at the door,” Kemp said. “That really stuck in my head because you never see royalty with no shoes.”
(Well, never might be an overstatement: per People, Catherine has removed her shoes for royal engagements, like at a visit to a museum in India in 2016, where she paid respect to Mohandas Ghandi. She also went shoeless at a point during a royal tour of Pakistan in 2019.)
A video released this past January shows Kemp and Catherine discussing mental health, relationships, and early childhood as a part of her “Shaping Us” campaign. “All you have to do is look around, especially, you know, at the country, and see people are not just struggling with raising kids, they’re struggling with just putting a roof above their heads, to be able to heat their house,” Kemp said. “So all of those things can come into play.”
“Yes, absolutely,” Catherine agreed. “And this is the thing, is that every family is different. The pressure we face are all different, whilst raising the importance of early childhood. This isn’t about putting extra pressure on families. It’s actually saying they need the support and help reprioritizing family life, home life, and all that it takes in raising children today, because it is tough. The relationships in a family or that’s surrounding a child is so important. The environment in which you bring up a child is as important as whereas the experiences you engage them with. It’s not about the number of toys they’ve got or the number of sort of trips that you go on with them. It’s just making sure that they’ve got the right emotional support around them, and that comes from the adults in their lives.”
In the video, Catherine and Kemp are seen walking around the grounds of his parents’ home (and yes, she put her shoes back on—as well as a cozy sweater and pants—as they walked outside). The two, per Us Weekly, discussed anxiety, depression, and suicide, with Kemp sharing that his friend’s passing “made me realize that, okay, if we really want to make a difference here, we’re going to have to go younger. That’s why I think your work is fantastic because, really, that’s who we need to be targeting.”
