Simon Reeve on his new show Wilderness: ‘In Britain we are living lives that are too samey and safe’
Broadcaster and adventurer Simon Reeve is contemplating the climate crisis. “I think many of us fear that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket,” he says. “And that collectively we have completely managed to destroy the natural world.” But in his latest show he wants to offer some hope.
In Wilderness, Reeve travels to the Congo, the Patagonian ice sheets, the Coral Triangle and the Kalahari Desert, to cover the wildlife and the people who live there. As he puts it when we talk on Zoom, “I needed a bit of a reminder, to be honest, that there is still beauty and wonder out there worth understanding and fighting for.”
Appropriately for a 51-year-old professional adventurer, Reeve has the kind of background that would make a great story in itself. These days, his TV shows – which show him travelling to far-flung countries – are regular hits for the BBC, pulling in millions of viewers. His ongoing live tour, To The Ends of the Earth, has recently added more dates due to popular demand.
These days, he lives a quiet life in Dartmoor, with his wife Anya (a photographer) and son Jake. His own beginnings, however, couldn’t be more different. Born in London, he grew up in Acton Town but had a troubled childhood. He regularly fought with his father (he’s talked about leaving “scars” in the house he grew up in from his temper tantrums), left school with one GCSE and from there spiralled into a black hole of depression.
Reeve has been open about the many troubles he experienced as a teenager – at one point, as he puts it, finding himself “on the edge of a bridge” – and he relates strongly to the epidemic of poor mental health currently happening among young men.
“I was a lost young man. And I can absolutely, very powerfully remember the emotions and those feelings within me still. It’s not something I’ve managed to block or hide away from,” he says.
“I’m connected totally to the person I was, and I’m immensely grateful for the lucky journey that I’ve had since then, but I still know with certainty [that] we as a country are terrible at channelling and supporting lost young men, and I was one of them… I’ve been to those dark places, and I feel that for me then, and perhaps for others, now, that purpose and meaning was missing in life.”
For him, healing comes with “time spent in the natural world”, but of course, there is actually very little ‘wilderness’ left in the UK. “We do live on a very crowded island,” he says. “And I grew up in west London, in a super busy part of the city, in the heart of the greatest metropolis on planet Earth.”
Wilderness, for the young Reeve, was a case of exploring the urban jungle wherever he found it – even if it was a far cry from Patagonia or the Congo. “A wilderness for me when I was growing up was discovering a new park with my little gang on my BMX, it was finding a new part of the Scrubs or Gunnersbury Park that we hadn’t explored before,” he laughs. “I still get that feeling, whether I’m in a city or whether I’m in a jungle.”
Carving out a space in everyday life to make these experiences is something he clearly feels passionately about – while acknowledging that the UK is not exactly a haven for wild spaces these days. “It doesn’t have to be a natural wilderness,” he says. “It can be somewhere wild and untamed. Somewhere you find by turning left, where you’ve always turned right, by exploring an area near you that you’ve never been.”
That said, many people don’t – and that, in turn, takes its toll. “I feel very strongly that collectively, in Britain, we are living lives that are too samey and safe generally,” he says. “We need to have the sort of fresh, exciting new experiences that I think we as a species are wired to learn from and enjoy. And we’re not getting that enough. We’re being too lulled into a beige, boring existence by bloody smartphones, central heating and social media.”
These days, there’s no getting away from it: social media rules our lives, whether it’s a quick browse on TikTok or the endless stream of celebrities parading across our Instagram feed. But relying on the internet for that hit of dopamine, Reeve says, can be dangerous.
“We’re a creature that is very affected by thinking our peers are doing better than us. So I think social media is a catastrophe for our collective mental health,” he says.
“There are definitely some people out there on it who can provide wise advice and suggestions. But I think one problem we’ve got now, I’ve sensed, is that there’s a lot of people saying, ‘Let’s talk about mental health,’ but there’s not enough people who’ve got the time or the skill to actually listen, [so] people are feeling extra frustration that their voice should be listened to and there is no-one out there to do it.”
Influencers aren’t much better. “These bloody influencers posing next to a supercar they don’t own in Dubai are clearly catastrophic in many ways for the mental health of many young men and women. There needs to be much more rigorous policing of the internet. Otherwise, we’re heading into a darker head health future.”
Despite his own mental health struggles, Reeve made it work. After sorting post for the Sunday Times in his teens, he went on to forge a career in journalism. He covered terrorism for the paper, before segueing into becoming a travel broadcaster.
Over the past 20 years, he’s been smuggled into Burma during its military dictatorship, dodged bullets on the front line and found himself in the middle of conflict zones, all in the name of television. To date, he’s visited more than 120 countries.
And he remains relentlessly chirpy: his wide-eyed schoolboy face brims with enthusiasm, whether that’s discussing childhood adventures or the remote locations in which he spends Wilderness.
The documentary doesn’t pull its punches: it shows the destruction of the Congo, with vast numbers of its trees cut down, the Coral Triangle being overfished and the Patagonian ice fields melting at an alarming rate. And though Reeves doesn’t consider himself to be a conservationist (“I don’t think anyone with my carbon footprint probably should”), he’s open about what he’s seen.
“We’re inflicting a disaster on ourselves,” he says. “And we mustn’t think in Britain [that] we’re going to be unaffected or immune from the catastrophe that develops. I don’t think we’re remotely close to recognising the seriousness of the situation even yet. And totally, I think that politically, we’re a country mile from where we need to be in terms of the leadership that is required to take us to a greener, more sustainable future.”
Beyond the politics, Reeve is adamant about raising awareness that “these places are here. They matter. They’re incredible. And holy crap, we really need to protect them.”
The show is not just about destruction and despair over these losses of nature, though: beauty and wonder both abound in the series, in moments where Reeve goes hunting in the Kalahari with the local San people or spots a puma playing with its cubs in Patagonia.
With 20 years of documentaries under his belt, there’s no sign he’s slowing down, either: he reels off Japan, West Africa and “the colder parts of the planet” in one breath as places on his bucket list.
“My gig from the beginning has been to focus more on people than anything else. And as a result, you know, surprise, surprise, there are a billion endless bloody stories out there,” he beams, as our interview draws to a close.
“If it had been about me, and how tough my tricky journeys are, that would have been so boring so rapidly. But the fact that I’m focusing on other people who has been central must be to how I’m still doing this 20 years after I started… because we are the most fascinating species.”
Wilderness with Simon Reeve, Sundays at 9pm from 21 January on BBC One and BBC iPlayer
