Tales from the wilderness with Ben Fogle
I was lucky enough to have attended Ben Fogle’s latest show, Tales From The Wilderness. The show in Bath focused on what he has experienced as an explorer, writer and broadcaster.
Ben’s life was shaped early on, he struggled at school because of dyslexia leaving school with limited qualifications. This affected something people who don’t fit society norms struggle with, confidence.
His career started in Castaway 2000, which he described as the first reality TV series. Although the series aired after Big Brother, the series began filming on the 1st of January 2000 and ran for a year.
Ben found the advert aged twenty-five working as a writer in London for an experiment on an island for a year, he dreamed it would be something like a remote desert island. However, he and thirty-six men, women and children were abandoned on Taransay in the Outer Hebrides.
The format is very similar to The Island with Bear Grylls, no prize, filmed by the people themselves and the goal of building a community. Ben emerged as a natural presenter and while he expected to go back to work, he gained a position as a presenter of Animal Park.
He went on to present Countryfile, Countrytracks and Extreme Dreams with Ben Fogle, as well as working with the Duke of Cambridge and Duke of Sussex in Africa. As well as being a correspondent for NBC News.
Ben, however, was hungry for more, his Animal Park co-presenter Kate Humble would later describe him as “a baffling dumb blonde”. But his “ridiculous challenges” has become what he described as his praying, he says he doesn’t follow a religion his religion in a way has become the wilderness.
His first challenge was the Marathon des Sables, a six-day race through the Sahara Desert. The running equivalent of the Paris-Dakar Rally, a fifty seven-mile race across a week. Ben’s thrill for adventure was clear, his next idea was the Atlantic Rowing Race.
Two years before the race he signed up to enter and forgot about it, a year before the race, he met double Olympic champion rower James Cracknell. Thinking at a party “there is a man who can row.”
When they teamed up, Ben had done no training and prep and now had eight months to plan to row 3,000 miles from the Canary Islands to Antigua.
The press dubbed them the “odd couple.” The focused, two-time Olympian for whom anything less than a gold is a failure, and the have-a-go TV presenter with an inability to say no.
But in the first we division’s between Cracknell and Fogle emerge, James being an Olympian wanted to win while he just wanted to get to Antigua alive. The pair were first to cross the line, After penalties, they were placed second in the pairs and fourth overall.
But they both survived being capsized, living without water and crossed the line in 49 days, 19 hours, 8 minutes. This was the beginning of a friendship which would lead to two further adventures or ‘religious experiences’.
Ben and James teamed up again this time with Dr Ed Coats, in 2009, to take part in the first race to the South Pole since Amundsen and Scott. Preparations for this weren’t ideal while filming in South America ben had contracted a highly dangerous tropical skin-eating disease (Cutaneous leishmaniasis).
He went into the race being under pressure to perform having lost training time for chemotherapy for the disease. Ben, James and Ed all made it to the pole alive as again James pushed them to the limit. Again they finished second.
Despite these extreme races, he says that the most challenging was the loss of his first son Willem. Ben was off filming when Marina went into early labour and gave birth to a stillborn son. He believes that this was a turning point vowing to live for his son.
Disaster returned as Ben teamed up with James for their third adventure, they had intended to ride from Alaska through the Americas. While doing an eighteen-day ride James crashed into a truck in Arizona. Although his helmet saved his life, his accident left James neuro injuries and epilepsy.
But as soon as James’s wife called him at 1am American time, he knew something was wrong and within hours was flying to America.
The accident also changed their friendship and in an attempt to repair the friendship they took on the final challenge to cross the empty quarter alone.
This wasn’t a race and was to be a journey across the Empty Quarter in a bid to reconnect and push them to the limits. Again this wasn’t without drama, on the eve of the trip Ben’s drink was spiked in a bar.
The trip was postponed while Ben had a series of psychological and neurological tests, A doctor said he might have epilepsy. Ben and James did, however, complete the trek and repaired the friendship.
Ben admitted that he was still that shy boy who would get scared of public speaking. But over the last twenty years has despite his own learning difficulties, which like many of us impacts confidence, has emerged as a writer, broadcaster, explorer, presenter, husband and father.