Extreme Dreams

Ben Fogle's new series moves into week 3 this evening at 6.3o p.m. on BBC 2. I am finding the dreams and determination of the participants inspiring and Fogle's obvious faith and compassion impressive.


Ben Fogle: Dare to dream
Adventurer Ben Fogle knows all about confronting his deepest fears. But could TV’s Mr Nice Guy be a tough enough guide for insecure rookies facing the jungle, the desert and their inner demons? Cassandra Jardine follows his trail.

Ben Fogle seems unable to resist a challenge, however terrifying or unpleasant. As long as there is a humid, bug-infested jungle to explore, or an ice floe on which to battle against gale force winds, he'll be there.

The day before we meet he had spent a "miserable" day in a laboratory deliberately getting hypothermia in preparation for a trip to the South Pole later this year. "I'm dreading it," he admits. But he wouldn't dream of not going: "I have to keep topping up my confidence."

It's hard to believe that this byword for bounce, a golden-skinned have-it-all, recently married to beautiful party-organiser Marina Hunt and the owner of a smart, dog-filled home in North Kensington, London, lacks confidence.

Ever since he became a national heart-throb in the television series Castaway in 2000, his career has rocketed.

The list of TV programmes he presents includes Countryfile, Animal Park and Wild in Africa, and it is equalled in length only by other achievements he has chalked up along the way.

He has completed the Marathon des Sables, distinguished himself in the Atlantic Rowing Race with James Cracknell and set the world record for sailing from Portsmouth to Cork. Books and films flow out of him and new honours crowd in, including, at the age of 34, being appointed President of the Council of National Parks (CNP).

And yet he claims to know what it's like to feel feeble and useless, unfit and overlooked, which is why he spent most of last year taking groups of unhappy, confidence-lacking people on dangerous journeys in the hope of changing their lives. The idea for BBC2's Extreme Dreams was his, but he wasn't satisfied with the first series, made two years ago. He was absent when the participants and ordeals were chosen; this time he oversaw every step and made it tougher.
All who took part must have wondered at times why they signed up for Fogle's nightmarish trips, which involved squelching through leech-infested bogs in Uganda at the dead of night or climbing endless sand-dunes suffering from dehydration in Libya, but he is quite sure it was worthwhile. "They all had problems," he says, "and every one of them came back a better person."

Some 10,000 people applied for the five places on each of the four treks, plus an extra one up a Venezuelan mountain for the hardiest. With the help of explorers Benedict Allen and Charlotte Uhlenbrook and psychologist Cynthia McVey, he weeded out the fame-seeking wannabes. The would-be explorers were chosen because they had something to prove.

Circumscribed by jobs, relationships, ill health or the kind of dull indoorsy childhoods that equip you for nothing much, their lives were drifting past.

Among those given the chance to show themselves capable of more than anyone, including themselves, thought possible are: a taxi-driver heading towards an early grave because he is so unfit; a girl whose education at what she calls "the worst school in Britain" never gave her a chance to shine; a woman who suffers from lupus (an autoimmune disease that causes extreme tiredness) and wants to show she can lead a "normal" life; a 23-year-old who has spent seven years caring for his nephew and niece and feels he has missed out on being young; and "the world's worst mum", who had to leave her family when her marriage broke down and now wants to show her daughter how much she loves her.

"The idea behind Extreme Dreams is to immerse them in deprivation," says Fogle. "The therapeutic element lies in stripping these people down to the bare minimum." By discovering that they can cope in dire circumstances, overcome fear of heights or of water, or walk for miles when feeling sick, hungry and exhausted, Fogle is convinced that they will become more confident and better able to do something with their lives.

At least, it worked for him. And he still needs regular confidence boosts. Although it's hard to find a critical word about this human equivalent of his waggy-tailed Labrador, Inca, Fogle feels like a victim of our national sport of building up celebrities, only to knock them down: "I get sneered at for being posh and rich. It really upsets me. As we set off for the Libyan Desert, I read something cutting about myself and it was a knife to my heart."

Such sensitivity is strange in a man of action. "Most adventurers seem to have fathers who beat them," says Benedict Allen. He didn't. His drive comes from having nearly killed himself on his first trip to the Amazon. It gave him the urge to do better. Fogle had a happy family life, too. His parents, vet Bruce Fogle and actress Julia Foster, seemed doting when I met them in Antigua, where they were waiting for their son to collapse on the beach after completing his 3,600-mile row from the Canary Islands.

So why is the apparently well-adjusted Fogle driven to prove himself? His parents' wish for him to be bilingual lies at the root of his lack of confidence.

In combination with undiagnosed dyslexia, it was a disaster. "They sent me to the French Lycée and it damaged me," he says. "I was in revolt and my English suffered. I had endless extra classes - at one stage I saw an ear specialist because I wasn't taking anything in - but I still failed Common Entrance. Unlike my clever sisters, I went to five different schools and was hopeless at everything. I wanted to be a vet but would never have got the grades. I was useless at sport - I was always the last to be picked for a team. The only thing I was good at was drama and, twice, I failed to get into drama schools."

He left school shy, reserved, insecure with the opposite sex ("I had friends who were girls rather than girlfriends") and without a clue what to do with himself.

What he did next changed his life in the way that he hopes Extreme Dreams will help others: he took a boat trip up the Amazon, even though he spoke no Portuguese, the language of the area. "Actually, it was quite boring because I couldn't speak to anyone, but it made people think of me as braver than I thought I was."

After Latin American studies at Portsmouth University and four years in South America, he was having a jolly time as a picture editor on Tatler when he decided it was time to challenge himself again.

He took part in Castaway, the series that followed the vicissitudes of people marooned for a year on the remote Hebridean island of Taransay. "It was good to discover I could grow crops and rear animals, but in some ways it stripped off what little confidence I had because I worried about how I would come across."

As it turned out, he became the series' pin-up, and was showered with knickers sent to him in the post. "That gave me a boost, but I still lacked physical confidence. So, when I said I'd do the Marathon des Sables [a 160-mile yomp across the dunes carrying all your own equipment] everyone thought I was completely loony. The gym instructor refused even to train me. I came last, but I did it."

Proudly hobbling around on crutches afterwards, he was now up for anything. Soon after, he agreed to face his childhood terror of boxing. For Sport Relief, he was trained by Frank Bruno. "I thought I'd be fighting the singer Aled Jones, but his mother wouldn't let him do it, so I faced Sid Owen from EastEnders. He had been an amateur boxer and already had a broken nose. At the launch he head-butted me to the floor, but in the match I beat him.

"You can see how my confidence grew after that because next I dared to ask an Olympic rower [Cracknell] at a party if he'd cross the Atlantic with me. Although I nearly died when thrown overboard by a freak wave - luckily another wave threw me back towards the boat - James and I made it, despite having done no training. After that I felt invincible. Last year on Extreme Dreams was my toughest physical year ever."

Several times he didn't think he was going to get through, let alone his less fit companions. "I had my second near-death experience in Tibet. A woman fainted in front of me on a precipice. I caught her, but her weight was pulling me over and we weren't roped. We were saved by another team member."

Twice he had to summon a rescue helicopter because it looked as if someone was about to die. One woman had heart trouble and a man had an alarming fit from sheer exhaustion. At least it must have made good TV. But Fogle was anxious not to let his programme look like a reality freak show. He picked people who took on board his view that being filmed (by a crew who enjoyed relative comfort some distance from the participants' more spartan camp) was a "forfeit" that made it possible to take part in Extreme Dreams.

When they fell apart because they were tired, hungry or frightened, he kept the cameras at bay for the most embarrassing moments. "I take on other people's emotions," he says. "When I was crossing the Atlantic with James I was angry, because that's how he was. On Extreme Dreams I found myself emotional and worried."

That doesn't appear to be flannel. All those who work with him endorse the idea that, despite his he-man activities, he remains a thoroughly good egg, not a television cynic. "Ben is good at leading," says producer Chris Kelly, "but not good at confrontations. He like things to be happy and smooth." Psychologist McVey describes him as "a very sensitive young man who genuinely worried about the people in his teams". Benedict Allen says he was "motherly" towards the rookie adventurers.

The idea was to leave them all feeling better about themselves, with McVey to hand if they needed counselling. But there is no follow-up research on those who took part in the first series, and some people who were in other reality TV shows became clinically depressed after making fools of themselves. Can he be sure that taking part has helped his vulnerable participants? "Here," says Fogle, showing a letter from one of them. "It says: 'You helped save a lost and desperate soul.' I've had half a dozen letters like that."

Doubtless those who completed their adventures felt the better for it, but what about those who failed? Fogle looks agonised: "I felt terrible when I told people that they had to give up. I felt irresponsible for taking them. Giving up is harder than carrying on because you have to overcome humiliation, embarrassment and frustration, but I think they felt better about themselves for trying."

Fogle's personal challenge was, in part, to keep going physically - the trips were so closely packed together that he set off for Papua New Guinea with his feet still bandaged from tramping across the Libyan Desert. But the harder task was mental: he had to show a new side to his personality. "I couldn't be Mr Nice all the time. I'd chosen them all, they'd promised me they'd have a good go at it and I'd seen the despair in the eyes of those who weren't selected, so I let it show when I found someone intolerable."

He became hugely involved with some of them, particularly the woman who was still so devastated by her husband's death in a car crash that she pretended to the rest of of her group that he was still alive. "She was incredibly brave. At one point we came across villagers who danced for us and there were tears streaming down her face. She said it was the first time she had felt joy." Fogle himself was in tears on several occasions, not least when he climbed the final peak in Venezuela and realised it was all over and he could return, safe, to Marina. He has been away for nine of the 16 months they've been married.

"My poor wife," he says, "I got so used to sleeping on a blow-up mattress that when I came back I put it by our bed and slept on the floor. I want to spend more time with her, but I also want to get adventuring out of my system before we have a family." That's not quite yet. After the trip to the South Pole (his next treat will be training sessions at-50 degrees) the real test will come. Has he the confidence to stop taking himself and others on morale-boosting adventures?