‘He’s got to break a limb one day…’
TV adventurer Simon Reeve tells Rosa Silverman why he hopes his son won’t be as intrepid as him
When faced with mortgaging your own grandmother to pay for university, the alternative (not going) can seem devilishly tempting. If anyone would make a good poster boy for this life choice it is Simon Reeve, the no-hoper turned BBC travel presenter and bestselling author.
Although for him, admittedly, it was not so much a choice as an inevitability. The mophaired, cheeky chap from an unfashionable corner of west London was, in his words, “very uninspired and uninspiring as a lad”. He drank too much, flunked everything and left his comprehensive school with “basically no qualifications”. So how has he ended up with more than 60 BBC programmes under his belt and more than 120 countries ticked off his bucket list? The gods have been kind to him and, at 43 years old, he still can’t believe his good fortune.
“I didn’t get on a plane until I started working; didn’t really go abroad until I was an adult,” he says, with a touch of incredulity, when we meet at an upmarket hotel in the West End. He is supposed to be dressed smartly today but, endearingly, he’s sporting a scruffy person’s idea of smart clothing: a casual shirt, chinos and scuffed brown shoes. Bless.
It is impossible not to like Reeve. Two minutes in and we are squabbling like siblings over whose pen is whose (answer: we both “borrowed” one off the hotel, but the one we were fighting over was, for the record, definitely mine). Once this matter is cleared up, we move on to his latest project, a twopart BBC Two show called
Ireland With Simon Reeve. In it, he journeys around the Republic and Northern Ireland, exploring their cultures, histories and changing societies. To watch it is to realise how much you didn’t know about a place you thought you knew pretty well.
“Lots of us think we know Ireland, and what’s great fun to do on a journey like this is to play on that stereotype and try to overturn it – though inevitably we reinforce it a bit,” says Reeve. “They do like a drink. Fiddles do come out now and again. It is very green. But we’re showing a different side.”
It’s not his most hairraising adventure to date, but he is none the less enthused by it. And this is a man who has circumnavigated the globe three times (for the BBC series Equator, Tropic of Capricorn and Tropic of Cancer), hunted with the Kalahari Bushmen, picked his way through minefields, and seen trench warfare in the Caucasus. Oh, and there was that time he contracted malaria in Gabon – but was relieved it wasn’t Ebola.
“Though it’s terrible to have,” he says. “I was hallucinating, rambling incoherently, and had a temperature a fraction off brain impairment.” He was treated with a potion derived from Vietnamese sweet wormwood – “and it bloody worked!”
Yet even this doesn’t rank as his scariest moment. Travelling in Mogadishu in 2004, protected by 12 heavily armed, stoned local mercenaries, with a gang of kidnappers on his trail, was “probably” number one.
His story begins some years earlier, when the 19year-old Reeve was staring gloomily at the prospect of a life on income support. Sacked by a jeweller after his first day, he had then been rejected as a van driver – despite being the only applicant. “I was really hopeless,” he says. “It was so soul-destroying, you can’t imagine. I had no idea what I was going to do in life.”
Then his father, a maths teacher, spotted a job advert for a post boy on a national newspaper. “The nutters there hired me, and thank God they did, because I don’t know where I’d be now,” he says. Taken under the wing of an older reporter, he started helping out on investigations and “the world opened up to me instantly”. He began specialising in investigating terrorism (“as you do”), and when a car bomb was detonated beneath the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, he got on the case immediately.
“Madly, arrogantly, I decided there was a book in it,” he says. “It became the first book in the world on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, but nobody took any interest when it came out in 1998. Then 9/11 happened and suddenly I’m the only person in the world with a book about this. My phone started ringing before the second tower had been hit and didn’t stop for a year and a half.” The book, The New
Jackals, soared up the bestseller charts and was, he says, “what made me”. Television jobs followed and soon he was travelling to some of the most dangerous spots on earth to shoot documentaries.
Which is all well and good, but how does his wife Anya, a half-Scandinavian former camerawoman, with whom he has a four-year-old son, cope with his absences? It must be hard. “It is, but it’s probably a relief in some ways, because I’m a right pain around the house. It certainly provides less interference in terms of parenting,” he says.
But when he speaks of his “lad”, Jake, Reeve grows misty-eyed. “Having a child turns you into a right weepy sod,” he laughs. “It completely changes you.”
Fatherhood means he tries to limit the time spent away from their converted barn in rural Devon. “I’m a city boy, but the wife had it written into some sort of marital agreement that we would do the middleaged, middle-class thing and move to the country,” he says. The frenetic pace to which he’s accustomed means a slower pace of life doesn’t come naturally: “I don’t really relax. I’m not great at that. I like doing stuff: chopping wood, playing with my son.”
I assume a man with his cavalier approach to risk adheres to the Bear Grylls school of thought on the need for childhood adventuring? “I couldn’t be more protective of Jake,” he says. “I would massacre worlds to protect that child, there is nothing I would not do. But I still say to him, ‘I bet you couldn’t jump off that table, it’s really dangerous’, to try to get him to do it. Because he’s got to break a limb at some point – that’s how you discover your boundaries.”
“We’re not getting our kids outdoors enough, getting muddy, taking risks. You’ve got to get out of your comfort zone.”
Does he want Jake to follow in his globetrotting footsteps? “No chance! I’m going to come up with devious plans that mean he is denied a passport,” he jokes. “I’ve only got one lad. I’m keeping him on a short leash.”
So not like father, like son. Somehow I doubt we’ll be seeing Jake’s dad on a short leash himself, any time soon.
‘Having a child is enough to turn you into a weepy sod’