Ben Fogle: Call of the wild
Ben Fogle has many strings to his bow: TV presenter, writer, adventurer, documentary maker. Considering he was a shy youngster who didn’t excel at school either academically or on the sports field, he handles the spotlight remarkably well.
Now 51, Ben grew up in London with his actress mother, Julia Foster, and Canadian father, vet Bruce Fogle, and two sisters. His mother starred in 1960s films like Alfie, alongside Michael Caine, and Half a Sixpence, with Tommy Steele. He’s said: ‘Each day she’d turn up at the school gates in a different wig, depending on the character she was playing. I’d sit in her dressing room doing my homework, while she did her performance.’
Ben puts his eclectic career down to a ‘mix of luck, opportunity and determination’. His love of nature was fostered by annual summer trips to stay with his father’s parents in Canada. ‘Canada was my introduction to the great outdoors. I’d spend eight weeks canoeing and swimming and fishing, living the polar-opposite life to my urban existence in London,’ he has said, as the family home in London did not have a back garden.
In 1999 he spotted an advert in The Guardian. He became one of 36 volunteers out of 10,000 applicants chosen to take part in the BBC’s reality show Castaway. Marooned on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides, their challenge was to form a self-sufficient community.
‘I was in my mid-20s and it sounded like an amazing adventure,’ Ben recalled. ‘I learned a lot about myself and about our relationship with the landscape. It’s when I became a passionate environmentalist – with a small ‘e’.’
Since then, his involvement in the environment has deepened. He is UN Patron of the Wilderness, a role in which he highlights the pressures on the landscape. He is President of the Campaign for National Parks and the charity, Tusk, and a supporter of the Duke of Edinburgh scheme and Hearing Dogs for Deaf People.
He loves to challenge himself – using his celebrity as a way to highlight issues as well as raising money for charity. He completed the Atlantic Rowing Race with Olympic oarsman, James Cracknell, has run the notoriously difficult Marathon des Sables, and took part in the inaugural Amundsen Omega 3 South Pole Race, again with Cracknell, and has climbed Mount Everest.
It was after Ben completed rowing 3,000 miles across the Atlantic with Cracknell – an adventure Ben refers to as his scariest experience – that he proposed to girlfriend, Marina Hunt. Marina’s engagement ring was made from a small piece of rope – ‘I didn’t have time to buy a ring, so I made one from some rope on the rowing boat.’ They had met by chance when walking their dogs in Hyde Park. They married in 2006 and have two children, son Ludovic and daughter Iona. Sadly, their son Willem was stillborn in 2014.
Marina set up The Bump Class in Barnes, alongside her sister, Dr Chiara Hunt, helping women to prepare for labour, particularly when pregnancy has not been easy.
The sisters now also host a podcast, The Parent Hood.
Ben’s activism also led him to help clean up the Thames bankside in Barnes as part of a campaign to preserve English water banks and coastlines.
In April, Ben completed a 24-date nationwide tour, Wild, a follow-on from his successful Tales from the Wilderness shows, when he appeared at Richmond Theatre. The most recent tour embraced everything he’s been doing in the last 15 years, with emphasis on his popular and long-running Channel 5 series, New Lives in the Wild, which sees him travel around the world visiting people who have given up the rat race.
What’s next for the man who can’t seem to stay in one place for too long? ‘I want the next few decades to be about giving back: sharing things I’ve learned. I hope I can inspire people not necessarily to change their lives or move to the wilderness, but perhaps to step out of their comfort zone.’
Find more family articles here.
Image: Courtesy of Channel 5