I’m just wild about Ben
CREDIT where credit’s due, the latest series of BEN FOGLE: NEW LIVES IN THE WILD (Channel 5, 9pm) is the real deal. It’s a catch-up affair but not the lazy, half-baked kind we’re so often fobbed off with.
Ben really has ventured out into the wilderness again, travelling thousands of miles to the middle of nowhere, reuniting with some of the hermits, recluses and loners (I have a feeling those all mean the same thing, but having invested in this thesaurus I’m determined to use it) that he first met some years back. This demonstrates true commitment, wouldn’t you agree?
Other catch-up shows can be a bit of a con – essentially just a repeat of the original episode, topped and tailed with a cursory half-hearted update. Sometimes it’s a wonder the presenter even bothers getting dressed.
What’s more, Ben returns this week to somewhere he found genuinely unappealing the first time around, to revisit a guy who he described at the time as “bonkers” (don’t worry, it was 2013, when calling people bonkers was still allowed).
The location is the swamplands of southern Georgia – which Ben previously called “oppressive, musty, damp, humid and not particularly friendly” but which the chap he’s come back to see has called home for the past 30 years.
Colbert used to be a financial planner, with a fancy house and a fat salary. Nowadays he lives alone in a remote shack, with no power, no running water, no sanitation, nothing. He doesn’t even have Netflix.
For food, he gets by on plants and animals and “anything I can catch – anything that doesn’t eat me first, I’ll eat it…” (although this apparently hasn’t included Ben Fogle).
Of all the people Ben has met over the years, Colbert is the man he says he’s probably asked about the most.
But since they last met, a terrible event has posed a serious threat to this likeable eccentric’s way of life.
Elsewhere, in episode two of
A HOUSE THROUGH TIME
(BBC2, 9pm), historian David Olusoga delves further into the fascinating history of this former sea captain’s house, situated near the docks in Bristol.
It includes the story of Ann, the original owner’s daughter, who was humiliated in her father’s will, referred to as having “misbehaved and disobliged” him.
“What had she done,” David wonders, “to deserve this sort of treatment, this reprimand from beyond the grave…?”
Do the murky circumstances surrounding her marriage, nine years later – on the quiet, in a rush, to a former clergyman with a dodgy past who was decades older – offer us some kind of clue? You bet they do.