Yes, exactly. He was born in Lagos and grew up on a council estate in Gateshead where the National Front attacked his family's house. He's a perfectly good broadcaster about history -- I haven't read any of his books. He's not precisely an academic in the usual sense, despite holding a professorship at Manchster, in that he doesn't have a doctorate (apart from honorary ones), and after a history degree from Liverpool, he did an MA in broadcast journalism at Leeds, and has always been primarily a broadcaster about history, specialising in imperial history and slavery.
But it's really interesting to me that so many people on these threads seem to see him as (1) from a privileged background and (2) regarding himself as an intellectual giant, only to be humbled by the fact that he turned out to not be very good at playing the game. He patently isn't. Does RP make people assume things?
Someone referred on the last thread to a 'WC rugby player versus two Oxbridge graduates', but neither Nick nor David are Oxbridge graduates. David has degrees from Leeds and Liverpool universities, Nick had a place at Cambridge but didn't attend, and then dropped out of a doctorate there.
Similar thing with Stephen Fry. Clare Balding has exactly the same educational qualifications as him (both have a 2.1 in English from Cambidge). Yet no one seems to think of Clare as unusually intelligent.