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Me, a daredevil? I’m utterly terrified!
As Ben Fogle presents his most dangerous adventure show yet, he reveals how one challenge was so risky he had to chicken out...
There are moments in every TV presenter’s life when they desperately wish they didn’t have a camera just inches from their face. For Ben Fogle, it happened 10,000ft above Busselton in Australia with an open aeroplane door in front of him, his stomach in knots and every nerve in his body telling him not to jump.
Ben, 39, shakes his head at the memory. ‘To be honest,’ he says, ‘it makes me feel physically sick just thinking about it. I’d only had six hours of training and this was my first solo skydive. When the plane door opened I could hardly breathe. Without the camera there I would have bottled it, sat back down and lived with the shame. But I forced myself out and yes, those first 40 seconds of free fall – absolutely alone – are terrifying. But when you pull the ripcord and the parachute opens your body is flooded with adrenaline and the buzz is so huge I can see how people become hooked on it. The only problem was I was concentrating so hard on the dive I forgot about the landing. I slammed into the ground and my leg crumbled beneath me. My knee hasn’t been the same since, but hey – that’s the point of adventures.’
Ben pushes himself to the limit of physical endurance for his new series Ben Fogle’s Year Of Adventures, in which he travels the world tackling some of the most daredevil action sports there are. But the real joy of the show is that Ben is anything but macho. In a world of TV hardmen where fear is unheard of and emotion a forgotten word, Ben isn’t scared to admit he’s... well, scared. ‘Everyone thinks I’m some brave lion but it’s all show. Often I’m really quite terrified, and I think it’s good not to hide that weakness. I’d rather make honest television. I think viewers want to see what you’re really feeling – they want the truth, rather than some he-man image for the cameras.’
As if to prove the point he reveals that one adventure on his list, a scuba dive to explore a wreck off the coast of Western Australia, was a risk too far. ‘The day before our dive we discovered a man had been killed by a great white shark at that site. I thought, “Maybe it was a random attack”, but then hours before the dive we heard another diver had been killed there two weeks earlier. Two deaths at the same spot? I just pulled out. I promised my wife Marina when we met that I wouldn’t take unnecessary risks, and although I felt terrible because that was the first challenge I’d ever turned down, I owed it to her to return in one piece.’
The series is based on a Lonely Planet travel guide that had been sitting around in Ben’s house for years. ‘Over the years I’ve highlighted things I’ve wanted to do in the book,’ he says, ‘so when we decided to make it a series I picked a list of things I thought would be great to experience. Then I went back and highlighted the ones that absolutely terrified me, but which I thought would really push me.’
And there’s no shortage of nerve-racking moments. As well as a swim from the island prison of Alcatraz to San Francisco and a 24-hour mountain bike race in the Utah desert that involved scrambling bikes down sheer cliffs, there’s the moment where he dangles from a rope above a glacier in Iceland, loses his footing, and then says with remarkable understatement, ‘I feel very unnerved.’ And another where a green-around-the-gills Ben paraglides 3,000ft above the Dolomite mountains in Italy, shuts his eyes and screams, ‘It’s not good, it’s horrid!’
It’s almost three years since Ben’s former TV partner and close friend James Cracknell suffered a severe brain injury while on a bike ride in America in 2010. Didn’t that experience give him a different perspective on danger? ‘Sitting next to James in hospital had a hugely profound effect on me. But it didn’t make me risk-averse or want to wrap everyone up in cotton wool – it made me realise we only have one life, and how important it is to seize opportunities. There were lots of things we were going to do together but have never been able to and that makes me sad. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t affected our relationship and our friendship, but James has to concentrate on his family and his recovery.’
Ben lives in London’s Notting Hill with Marina, a former party planner, and their children Ludo, three, and Iona, 20 months. Do they worry when he’s off on one of his mad jaunts? ‘It’s the physical separation from the family that’s tough, rather than the worry about what I’m doing,’ he says. ‘I don’t go into huge detail over the phone, because I want to find out what they’ve been doing instead.
‘But I know my mother [the actress Julia Foster] worries. Nine years ago I was filming off Wales for the BBC. A helicopter picked us up from a ship and dropped us at a lighthouse, but on the way back to us the helicopter crashed and sank – although the pilot survived, thank goodness. We were plucked off the lighthouse by the coastguard helicopter, but in that rush of adrenaline and relief I didn’t even think to call my mum. The first thing she knew was when the crash was on the news. She rang me in floods of tears. That was a really sobering moment for me.’
There are still plenty of challenges waiting to be tackled in Ben’s Lonely Planet book, and he’s hoping to have a crack at them in a second series. ‘I’d love to try more, especially a big jungle marathon. Actually, I flew in from Borneo last night where it was more than 100 degrees and went straight out to play in the snow with my children.’
Clearly, that was his favourite – and safest – adventure of the lot.
Amanda Cable Ben Fogle’s Year Of Adventure, Thursday, 9pm, Discovery channel.