Ben Fogle interview: 'If I didn't have a family I'd be living in a wood'

Ben Fogle has climbed Mount Everest, rowed the Atlantic, trekked the Antarctic and run across the Sahara Desert. And yet when I mention to people that I am interviewing him for his latest TV show, Ben Fogle: Inside Chernobyl, I am greeted with sniggers of derision. “Can’t wait to see Gemma Collins on the Fukushima disaster next year,” one friend texted, while Twitter was ablaze with mickey-taking.

One journalist compared it to Alan Partridge’s famous Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank, while another user went viral after suggesting it was only commissioned because it rhymed, leading to thousands of others pitching their own shows (“Tiananmen Square with Lionel Blair”).

Not that Fogle knows – he abandoned Twitter last year after being publicly mocked for his suggestion that the nation join in a singalong for the Queen’s birthday. His Twitter account is now mainly used to highlight various charities and good causes. Besides, it’s hard to imagine someone like Fogle – adventurer, hearty outdoors type, Boy Scout in long trousers – giving a fig about social media. When I contact him at his home in Oxfordshire, his hands are still soily from digging the veg patch that afternoon. But he does give a fig about social media, I discover. And about the sniggers: “It’s amazing how your day can be ruined just by reading a couple of comments.”

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Fogle, 47, relocated to Henley-on-Thames last year, with his wife, Marina, an antenatal guru, and their two children, Ludo, 11, and Iona, 10, after a lifetime in London, so that the family could be closer to nature. It’s hard to think of Fogle as a Londoner, but he is, born and bred, growing up above his father’s veterinary clinic, “a stone’s throw from Marble Arch”, eventually making his way into the London media scene via a job at Tatler magazine, before finding fame as one of the first reality TV stars via Castaway 2000.

Pre-pandemic, Fogle estimates he spent eight months of each year away from home, travelling the globe for various shows. He says he has relished the opportunity presented by lockdown to spend more time with his family.

But he did get to decamp to the Chernobyl exclusion zone for a week for his Channel 5 documentary, gaining rare access to sites including the control room of Reactor No 4 – which, thanks to the hit Sky Atlantic drama, Chernobyl, we all know is where the fatal errors were made – and the inside of the protective dome that now sits over the reactor, although he and his crew were only allowed to spend five minutes there, such were the levels of radiation.

But, although the presenter was, like everyone who visits Chernobyl, struck by the enormity of the disaster (it is estimated that the clean-up will take another 100 years, and the area will not be safe for habitation for 20,000 years), he was also thrilled by some of the changes he witnessed.

“Wildlife is thriving, it has come back at an unprecedented level,” he says. “We didn’t catch it on camera, but I saw a pack of wolves. I’ve never seen wolves in Europe in my whole life.”

Fogle, remarkably, came away from the Ukraine full of hope, not just for the ability of Mother Nature to bounce back, but for the potential of human ingenuity. “A lot of people feel hopeless when it comes to the impact of humans on the planet,” he says, “but what I saw in Chernobyl was actually the power of man to right the wrongs we have done."

The re-wilding in Chernobyl put him in mind of the changes that have taken place back in Britain during the pandemic.

“We’ve all been forced to slow down, and by slowing down we’ve naturally decreased our impact on the planet. Less air travel, less car travel, fewer trips to the shops, less consumerism. I hope that, as we do start to pick up the pieces, we will embrace this slightly slower pace of life.”

Fogle admits that he often feels envious of his subjects on his other Channel 5 show, the long-running New Lives in the Wild, which focuses on people who have given up the rat race to pursue often extreme lives in the middle of nowhere.

“If I didn’t have a family, I think I would be off,” he says passionately, “having grown a massive beard, living an eccentric life in a little cabin in some faraway woods, probably up in Sweden or Norway. Without doubt I get a pang of jealousy when I see how people can live without the complications we create in our own lives, living the Western, materialistic lives that we do."

What Fogle is good at is getting to the heart of the matter, rooting out the answer to the question on the viewers’ lips: why does this person live in a hut/cave/hole in Wales/Iceland/Kyrgyzstan? I once called Fogle “Louis Theroux in a sensible cagoule” for this ability to stealthily, unassumingly winkle out difficult, traumatic truths from his subjects. Is he able to find the darkness in these people because of the darkness in himself?

“I think it’s one of the reasons I do connect with those people,” he says. “I’ve been very honest about the trials and tribulations in my life.” In 2014, the Fogles’ third child, Willem, was stillborn at eight-and-a-half months, with Marina almost dying after suffering an acute placental abruption. He has also talked in the past about his difficult schooldays.

“The people I spend time with on New Lives are slightly damaged, but I think we all have damage. I think when you’ve had a profound experience, it does drive you on. So Everest was driven by that very painful loss [of Willem]. And I do find myself driven by this notion that people are still laughing at me and sneering at me. I can’t really help it.

“I wish it wasn’t the case. But I still feel I have a point to make to those examiners who failed me in all my exams and to those trolls who say vile things.”

Those trolls again. Why does Fogle think he is so often the subject of ridicule? “I think because of my heritage starting out on a reality show, having a posh accent, having gone to public school.” Fogle says he appreciated the Louis Theroux quote – it’s on his Twitter bio – because: “I always think that people are sneering at me, because there can’t be much to my shows, because I’m just a reality show t—.”

I put it to Fogle that the thing that brings out the sneering and jibes on social media, more than the accent or jolly public schoolboy image, is his sincerity. It is something he shares with Jamie Oliver and Joe Wicks, men who undoubtedly do goodly works, but whose blazing sincerity and, perhaps, lack of self-awareness, makes them a ripe target for some good old fashioned British teasing. We are not a nation naturally disposed to the very sincere, to those who seek to be “good”.

“I’m very much my father’s son,” says Fogle, “and my father is a good man. And I think in this country we have suspicions of that. We’re a nation that celebrates heroic failures: we celebrate the Scotts, who die, rather than the Amundsens, who got to the South Pole first. I think people like failure, they like to see people brought down to Earth.”

Given the slings and arrows he has endured, it’s understandable that Fogle so often seeks to be on top of a mountain or lost in a jungle, but his future ambitions mark him out as braver than I thought. “I always seek to be out of my comfort zone. It doesn’t need to be climbing K2 or walking to the North Pole. A live morning studio show would take me out of my comfort zone. Strictly Come Dancing would take me out of my comfort zone.”

Strictly Come Dancing? “I’ve been very close to doing it, but my family are horrified by the idea. I think I’d thrive on the challenge.” Fogle in sequins – now that would get Twitter talking.

Ben Fogle: Inside Chernobyl is on Wednesday on Channel 5 at 9pm

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