He is the very model of a modern TV historian

At Cranfield University he is Professor Holmes. Members of the Territorial Army salute Brigadier Holmes. Petty criminals in Hampshire know him as Richard Holmes JP. On TV's `War Walks', he rambles around famous battlefields. Jasper Rees found him a congenial cove...

There's a problem of protocol when you shake hands with Richard Holmes. How do you address a man with fingers in so many pies?

Holmes is the sort of dilettante presenter that television doesn't take a punt on any more, the type with a deep fund of expertise whose entirely comfortable relationship with the camera stresses his roughness rather than smoothness. Nowadays all educational entertainment is safely fronted by a comedian on their day off, or someone called Carol. Either may be polished and competent, but both almost always fail to bridge the credibility gap that tells you they haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about. Look no further than the recent Game Of War, Channel 4's gimmicky battle reconstruction series in which Angela Rippon lost the fight to present herself as a serious warfare enthusiast.

Like other telegenic experts, from the charismatic steeplejack Fred Dibnah to the enthusiasm of Sister Wendy Beckett, Holmes has a lusty understanding of the need to show off. He togs up in armour, prances about on his redoubtable grey steed Thatch, wades about in khaki up to his waist in water, and seems to do an inordinate amount of wassailing. He has done battle at Hastings, seen the King get his deserts at Naseby and this Friday will be unravelling the impenetrabilities of the Battle of the Boyne. Just don't mention the E word to him.

"If I ever thought I was being eccentric I think I'd probably stop. One doesn't want to be deliberately eccentric, because that's cheesy and it shows. But I think it's very important to try to give the viewer a feel for what it's like to carry a musket or to charge up the slope at Naseby. And you want to give the viewer a feel for what it's like, then do it."

I met Holmes in the first week of his new job at the Ministry of Defence. He is the director of reserve forces and cadets, responsible for "the implementation of policy: a lot of that is long-term development of things like pay and conditions of service, but clearly we also have an interest in the Strategic Defence Review".

Not a lot of television presenters can make that sort of claim, and it's not even his principal job: he spends more of his week at Cranfield, lecturing in military history, security policy, operational doctrine, "and that sort of thing". Holmes nursed an ambition to join the regular army, but after studying history at Cambridge, an offer of a year's study in Illinois took him inexorably down the academic route. He stuck with the TA instead - "the dear old Essex yeomanry" - whom he had joined while still at school. "I have spent almost all my territorial career in the infantry quite deliberately because I didn't want to grow into a frowsty old academic, lungs full of dust from archives. I wanted to get the wind in my hair and the frost on my moustache." He was soon teaching at Sandhurst in the week and sleeping under a hedge at the weekend.

There was one period of over two years when he gave up academe to command a battalion. "I felt that command was such a privilege and such a rarity and there were lots of ways in which I could cock it up but I didn't want one of those ways to be lack of time."

It was only a matter of time until someone lobbed television into this juggling act. The communication skills that are the common denominator of all Holmes's jobs were first deployed in Tales From The Map Room, and the VJ Day film Burma: The Forgotten War. He had also just published Fatal Auenue, about the defenceless corridor of France's eastern border of which De Gaulle once said: "It is in this fatal avenue that we have just-buried a third of our youth."

"I was phoned up by the BBC who said `Any chance of putting together the Fatal Avenue idea and some of the presentational skills that you used for the Burma programme?' I thought, to start with, that they'd be put off by the fact that I was quite interested in doing really a very personal series. But curiously that's just what they wanted."

Holmes's theory is that "you could easily say that in some respects I'm a regular officer manque". In fact you could say nothing of the sort. While he would appear to belong to a sporadic line of military broadcasters - Sir Brian Horrocks and Field Marshal Montgomery both had fleeting careers on the small screen - there is little of the ramrod spine and clipped vowels in Holmes's persona. As he drinks mead from a horn-shaped goblet on the field of Hastings, or munches the whiffy cheeses once scoffed by Henry V's lot on course for Agincourt, there is something thespian about him bordering on the luvvie. Call it his own brand of military camp.

"The problem with Hastings is I was in the grip of an extraordinarily powerful emotion," he explains. "You're sitting on a bit of ground where this wonderful Saxon host must have known that even with the best will in the world they wouldn't live to see another sunset."

Stripped down to its essentials, War Walks is basically about England's confrontation of the unknown quantity from across the channel - he has renamed our Norman conqueror "William the lucky bastard" - so we may as well know where he stands on the ERM. Is he as far to the right as most media-friendly historians? "Oh goodness," he says. "I really haven't got a view on that. I'm very much a pragmatist and I'd want to make my mind up closet to the time."

In fact Holmes is not only Francophile but even partly French. "I'm Huguenot on my mother's side. I did my PhD in Paris on the French army of the Second Empire. I am extraordinarily fond of France and the French. We are the worst of friends or best of enemies at times - remarkably close and yet at times very distant. I don't subscribe to the view that we are so culturally different and are always going to be hostile. I rode Thatch four-and-a- half years ago from Mons to Fontainebleu following the British army of 1914 and I just felt so close to the landscape. At a little village where a whole battery of the Royal Horse Artillery was wiped out on 1 September 1914 there was a level of contact, a level of understanding, which has got nothing to do with politics. A delightful French farmer came over and gave us some hay and said, `I know why you're here. They were brave fellows'. It was something that touched my heart."

War Walks, BBC2, Friday 8.00pm.