The Covid-19 pandemic may have made travelling the planet a bit tricky – but that hasn’t stopped adventurer Simon Reeve from making remarkable television.

Cornwall with Simon Reeve, which aired in November last year, was a fascinating investigation into the future of the county as it emerged from the first UK lockdown.

And now there’s a new, four-part BBC Two series in which the 48-year-old presenter and author takes a look back at some of the most remote destinations he has visited – from Arctic glaciers to tropical reefs – while reflecting on what he has learned from his extraordinary travels.

what was REACTION TO CORNWALL WITH SIMON REEVE?

It was slightly overwhelmingly brilliant, to be honest. I think people felt that it painted a more accurate picture of Cornwall than a lot of the programmes that are filmed there.

YOU VIDEO CALL JAHANGIR, WHO YOU MET AS A 10-YEAR-OLD IN BANGLADESH IN 2010...

I had a right old sob about little Jahangir – now Jahangir the dad, who’s building a new and better life for his family.

Knowing what had happened to him was very powerful, and seeing and hearing what he’s doing was even more intense, both for me and for Jonathan, who was the cameraman who filmed me for this Incredible Journeys series, but he also filmed me with that lad Jahangir more than 10 years ago in Bangladesh in that glass factory.

YOU ALSO OPEN UP ABOUT YOUR PERSONAL STRUGGLES?

I think it’s always been good when anyone who’s had a tiny modicum of success opens up about their luck and their difficulties.

HOW DO YOU THINK SHARING YOUR STORY WILL HELP PEOPLE?

I think there is merit to people knowing, at a time when we’re a very unequal country, that my background was more ‘normal’ – if you want to put it that way – than most. I managed to leave school with basically no qualifications and went on the dole and was in serious risk of falling into long-term unemployment and welfare dependency, and drugs and everything else that you can get when you’re a slightly lost lad growing up on the edge of inner-city London. And I was lucky!

And what I hope partly, I suppose, is that it helps people to be a little bit more understanding of those who slip off the path, and deserve help and guidance to find their way back on.

ARE PEOPLE SURPRISED TO HEAR YOUR HISTORY?

Well, I suppose there’s a bit of an assumption that people naturally make that some bod on the telly who goes off on these journeys is going to be yet another public school-educated bloke from a connected family. And that is not my background at all.

It did wind me up a little bit because sometimes people would say it overtly. I would meet them, and there’d be this bristle because they thought I was from a particular background. But I’d just say a few things that humanised me a bit more and made them realise I wasn’t a toff.

Incredible Journeys with Simon Reeve, BBC Two, Sunday, 8pm