The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
Here’s one we strayed to earlier…
Richard Webber talks to former Blue Peter presenter Peter Duncan about his life in travel and why the best adventures are never planned
Throughout his life, actor Peter Duncan – best-known for a fiveyear stint on Blue Peter – has enjoyed his fair share of adventures. From his love of tree-climbing as a boy to cleaning the face of St Stephen’s Tower without a safety harness in the name of TV, he has never been one to shirk a challenge.
So when the opportunity to help launch the Natural Adventure Company (thenaturaladventure.com) arrived in 2009, Peter, now 66, saw it not only as a decent business proposition but as a means of satisfying his insatiable wanderlust. “My parents were actors involved in summer seasons and pantomimes which meant travelling around the country. Perhaps the need to travel was in my genes from day one.”
After becoming an actor at 15, he could soon afford foreign holidays to the likes of Malta and France. But it wasn’t until joining the Blue Peter team in 1980, aged 26, that his sense for true adventure came to the fore (thanks, largely, to becoming the new John Noakes as the programme’s resident action man).
“The show’s regular expeditions were eye-boggling and a great education because we were immersed in different cultures and religions. Among the earliest trips was to Indonesia in association with Oxfam, helping supply water to outlying villages in Java.
“I’ll never forget spending time in the company of a village elder and sharing a pipe he was smoking as a way of welcoming us to the community. Goodness knows what was in it because I spent the afternoon incapable of talking or even functioning!”
After Blue Peter, trips around the world followed, including appearing
I shared a welcome pipe with the village elder. Goodness knows what was in it!
in Central TV’s The Big Race, a car race from London to New York via a frozen Siberia. “It was the early days of reality TV and threw up plenty of challenges, including being stuck in a snowstorm in the middle of the Siberian Tundra.”
But the catalyst for becoming a true adventurer was, according to Peter, the sudden death of his mother. “My wife, Annie, and I decided to celebrate her life by backpacking around the world for six months – with four kids in tow. I filmed our adventures which we later turned into a TV series, the first of several travelogues.”
With their youngest, Arthur, just seven, and eldest, Lucy, then 13, it was a life-changing experience for the family and remains a source of much conversation even now, over 20 years later. “We intentionally didn’t plan in great detail and didn’t always have somewhere to stay. It was about the adventure of seeing what happened.
“This led to the occasional mishap – like spending three days at Mumbai Airport because we forgot to get a visa – but the old adage that travel broadens the mind is certainly true as far as we’re concerned, and it’s what probably led to me becoming Chief Scout, a position I held for five years.”
Launching the Natural Adventure Company, which specialises in selfguided holidays, was born out of Peter’s passion for travel. “Alex, my Bulgarian business partner, invited Annie and me to visit southeast Europe – in particular, Bulgaria. It was a region I’d never been to before and I was intrigued by its history.
“It took years for our company to get going because, initially, we were seen as a small provider of a particular area of the world – the Balkans. We first developed a couple of self-guided walking itineraries in Bulgaria, gradually adding more countries in the region, and eventually expanding to cover the rest of the world. But the Balkans remain special: to some degree, there are still areas which haven’t been explored, beautiful places still waiting to be discovered – once we return to some semblance of normality.”