Rambling man: Ben Fogle on why he keeps exploring

For Fogle, that year on Taransay didn’t quite turn into the adventure of a lifetime, but only because in the two decades since he has topped it with other achievements. He has taken part in the near-3000 mile Atlantic Rowing Race with Olympian James Cracknell, completed a six-day ultramarathon in the Sahara, raced to the South Pole (again with Cracknell) and last May he summited Mount Everest. But if building your own toilet and catching your own food doesn’t quite rank with climbing to the roof of the world, Castaway was a personal landmark for Fogle in other ways.

“It was so important in my life, it sort of defined who I am,” he tells me. “It set up the foundations for my principals on life, my love of nature, my love of the wilderness – everything was sort of born there. And let’s be honest, I doubt very much if I would have embarked on the career that I have had it not been for spending that year on the island. It was a tipping point in my life. I think it was the moment that changed everything and not just because it gave me an opportunity in television to be a presenter. I think I learned so much about myself.”

The show hasn’t always felt like a blessing, though. When Fogle returned from Taransay and put his newly-minted public profile to use working on programmes such as Countryfile, Animal Park (about Longleat Safari Park) and the long-lived One Man And His Dog, he bristled slightly at the “Ben from Castaway” tag he carried. “I tried not to let it define who I was.” Today, however, he admits to being “a bit frustrated” that people seem to have forgotten about the programme both in terms of its innovative qualities but also its hands-off approach to its subjects.

“Reality TV now is unreality TV. It’s heavily scripted, it’s produced. I don’t think TV execs have the faith in the genre to let it run its course without outside influence. But back then we really were allowed to – we filmed it ourselves, there were no planned storylines. It was very simple and innocent.

“The other things is that none of us went on that project for fame and fortune. It was serendipitous for me that that happened unexpectedly. But now when you look at reality TV projects, people go on them for fame and fortune. They become caricatures of themselves. They try to stand out. That’s not a criticism of it, but it’s an observation which I think differentiates it from what our project was about and maybe what reality TV is like in 2019.”

Fogle returned to our screens late last month in a new series of his show New Lives In The Wild. Broadcast on Channel 5, it sees Fogle travel the world meeting people who have taken themselves (and often their families) off grid.

In the opening episode it was Italian single mother Annalisa, living with young son Nico in sylvan splendour in Sweden and surviving by busking and “dumpster diving”. Then Fogle was in Ethiopia meeting Susan, a 69-year-old from Glasgow who had retired to the north of the country and set up a school and a restaurant.

When we talk he has just returned from visiting Fiji and New Zealand where he filmed the final episodes in the series. In New Zealand he met a family of environmental campaigners and who live in a yurt in the woods and encountered a group of men who undertake a weekly fire ceremony in which they sit around a fire in the open-air and simply talk to each other. There is a women’s version but this one is men only. “It’s not very 2019,” he says, “but I understand why it’s divided up”.

The point is to share anxieties and fears. No solutions are offered. “It’s like un-burdening yourself of the worries you have. What that showed to me is that all we need sometimes is to just press the pause button and take ourselves out of whatever is getting us down. If that is that you’re in a city and you’re pressured and burdened with work, it means pressing the pause button and just heading maybe 30 minutes out of the city to a slightly more rural area and just breathing. Turn your phone off. Don’t look at social media. Don’t look at the news. I think something as simple as that is all people need. But we’re living in such a high speed society now that people have lost the ability to do it and I think it’s having a detrimental effect.”

The stresses of modern life and their effect on mental health is a theme Fogle returns to several times during our conversation. He first mentions it when he’s talking about the pressures facing the participants in current reality TV hits such as Love Island. But among the wider public the same forces are at play and with the same detrimental effects. Fogle admits that not everybody can climb Everest or race across the Atlantic to gain a sense of achievement and self-worth, but his message is that even small scale adventures, explorations and expeditions are beneficial.

“We’re suffering a mental health epidemic right now and I think that’s borne out of a number of factors. People are stressed, people are under financial pressures, social pressures, there’s a lot of toxic news, I think people maybe we once looked up to we feel disappointed by their behaviour right now and it’s almost like we’ve lost our way as a society. For me, expeditions of all sizes – I’m not just talking about climbing Everest – but all expeditions are incredibly liberating and therapeutic”.

It's the reason he’s so keen to take his message into schools and try to parlay his own achievements and experiences – and, importantly, the doubts and fears which regularly beset him – into something which will motivate and inspire others.

“I had, and still have, a fear of heights. I suffer from vertigo. I have a fear of failure. And I think it’s very easy to not confront those fears, to sit back and take the comfort of knowledge and complacency and by not embracing risks, by not taking on things that you find fearful, we can’t really grow, we can’t really achieve.”

Doing that, he thinks, “has made me the person I am today despite failing all my exams and not being very academic. I’ve been able, through the wilderness, to learn and grow and that’s what I try to share with children. It’s not for everyone. But there are other people who I think can get great benefits from just immersing themselves in a slightly different world.”

Born in London in 1973 to Julia Foster, an actress, and Bruce Fogle, a Canadian vet, author, travel writer and sometime broadcaster, Fogle had a standard upper-middle class childhood – holidays in Scotland, prep school, public school, university. And like a lot of children, he aspired to follow the career of one or other of his parents. It didn’t quite turn out that way.

“I didn’t become a vet because I wasn’t clever enough. I failed all my exams. But I have an enduring love of wildlife and animals, and acting. I’d probably still quite like to be an actor, to be honest, but again I applied to all the drama schools and got rejected by every single one of them. They unanimously decided that acting was not my forte.”

Instead he followed school with a stint in the naval reserve but at the point at which he was selected for Castaway he was working as a picture editor at Tatler. He had initially been hired by the society magazine to work as a PA to AA Gill and Giles Coren, though even that was an unlikely fit: he had actually applied to work for Conde Nast Traveller magazine, part of the same group.

Today he’s a veteran of two decades of broadcasting, specialising in programmes about travel, the countryside and animals, and as well as penning regular newspaper columns he has written 13 books, among them a history of the Land Rover, a history of the Labrador (the world’s favourite dog, apparently), a series of children’s books (dog themed) and The Teatime Islands, a jaunt round some of the most far-flung of the remaining British Overseas Territories.

Among the places he visited were Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena and the Ascension Islands – none of them likely to be on the average Brit’s list of potential holiday places. He is, he says, “fascinated by the more obscure places and the remote islands in the world. Lots of those Antarctic islands, and South Georgia and the Sandwich Islands excite me. I just visited Siberia for the first time for New Lives In The Wild and I realised how huge that area is and how many other places there are to explore. I’d love to visit the Stans, I’ve never been to that part of Asia – Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan. Afghanistan. So I’ve got a long, long list of places.”

Home for Fogle is the terraced house in Kensington he shares with his wife Marina and their two children. So how does the family cope with his travelling?

“We make it work,” he says. “It can be challenging at times. I’m obviously away for long periods but when I am around we spend as much time together as we can. I’m very present when I am back at home. We go to Scotland, we go to Cornwall. We do all sorts of trips and go further afield. But it’s what the children have always known.”

Fogle’s latest venture, however, is a joint project with Marina. One of the luxury items he took with him to Taransay was his beloved Barbour jacket and over the years he has acted as a sort of unofficial ambassador for the brand, to the point where the company have asked him to design a range of clothes for them. And so was born The Wilderness Collection.

It’s an interesting name given that there’s less and less wilderness around to enjoy, whether clad in a £300 Barbour or a Primark cagoule. Pressure on green spaces and rural areas is intense due to the demands of housing, agriculture, industry and transport.

“There are still plenty of beautiful places to get away from it all,” he says. “Yes, it’s getting a little harder but it can easily be found, and I found my salvation in the Western Isles of Scotland where there are still some of the most beautiful, unspoilt places on earth. So it is still possible to find them.”

Salvation is a big word but Fogle’s attachment to Scotland is strong. He characterises it as “an enduring love affair” which started as a seven-year-old on a family holiday to Eigg, and he says he views the Western Isles as his “spiritual home”.

“My late grandfather, who lived to be 96, was from Glasgow and I still have lots of family in Glasgow. So despite the fact I’ve got this ridiculous posh accent I actually have quite a strong draw to Scotland and a love of Scotland, and I try to go back as much as I can. I feel very at home there.”

I wonder, though, if inveterate travellers ever feels at home anywhere or whether their perpetual restlessness makes it impossible. Certainly Fogle seems unlikely to hang up his wandering boots any time soon, even if the list of firsts available – first to climb this, visit that, cross the other – diminishes with every year that passes.

“Exploring is a very personal thing,” he says. “So we, as the seven billion people on earth, may have explored all the regions but on a personal note there are still huge areas to explore … So for me, I think the world is still a very exciting place. I’ve always loved the ocean and they offer a great green way of exploring the world, especially on a sail-boat. For me I think that’s probably the future.”

You don’t have to put your profession on your passport anymore, but if you did, I wonder, what would his say?

“Most people refer to me as a broadcaster but if I was to get to choose I’d probably say storyteller,” he says. “I take an experience, I take an adventure and I try to turn it into a story that might be useful to other people”.