Simon, welcome to Waterstones.
Thank you very much. Not a bad view!
Hey, it's not a bad view, you can see pretty much the whole of London from our
little penthouse up here, you've seen far more than London of course in your time.
I have but it's quite rare to get up high in London and it's a
lovely part of... yeah well thanks, I'm just saying thanks for inviting us up.
It's a pleasure to have you here. I feel slightly weird having you sort of here
in a chair being so used to seeing you out in the world exploring...
What, we should have gone for walk?
Maybe we should have, we'll do that next time for the next interview.
Reading your memoir, people will have seen you on TV,
they've seen you adventuring and you have been in a fair few scrapes
in your time. But I was very intrigued to see that you got into scrapes very, very
early in your life and in fact as a very young child your first brush with death
came with meningitis, that was followed by tonsillitis, that was
followed by pneumonia and you're a bit like a cat that has several lives but
you seem to use up quite a few quite early on.
Yeah I haven't counted but possibly, yes.
No, I had a few tricky moments definitely in early life just
from illnesses that can hit anybody perhaps. I was a little bit more unlucky
than most and yes I suppose there have been one or
two moments in adult life as well when a few lives of ticked down but I'm
pretty sure I've got at least a couple left. – I think you've got a few left, certainly.
I think so. I did tally it up at one point and think... *'Ooh, bit close' noise*
Now, I think it's alright.
There's a great, not a 'great' moment
obviously because you were suffering from malaria at the time...
That's a really wonderful time in my life that was!
But in your feverish state you thought you
were sort of talking to Mr. T, who was your childhood hero and I wanted, if we
could, to just just tap into that. Why was Mr. T your hero, I wonder what it was
about him that you were particularly in awe of.
How... was Mr. T not your childhood hero?
Of the A-Team..? I'm trying to think whether he was
How can Mr. T not have been your childhood hero? I mean what a what a crazy fool character.
He was just great. I loved the A-Team. I think
it was the only, it was a program I was allowed to watch and
it was just a an important time and obviously each episode, for people who
haven't seen it, basically the same thing happened. This gang of wrongly accused,
former military folk came into a small town in America and rescued people
suffering at the hands of the wicked cattle baron nearby. And this invariably
involved them getting locked in a barn with a table and a chair in and they
would convert those into a tank, somehow. That was basically it if you
remember. But Mr T was brilliant at welding and he was enormous
and he was reassuring and he has some fantastic one-liners. And my parents made
me read his autobiography when I was a kid, when I was going a bit off the rails.
Which was a massive mistake because his autobiography was just littered with
extreme gang stories and the most extreme swearing almost every other
paragraph. I would completely recommend it to any other 11 year old and yeah he was my hero.
You mentioned your teenage years and you're very frank about the
difficulties you had at that time. And also quite humble about the fact where
you talk about the fact that you were quite lucky actually with the scrape
that you had but you were dealing with depression you were dealing with
drinking and drug taking, things that a lot of teenagers do, but you did
find yourself considering taking your own life. And it was just, you were very
lucky that that didn't happen. But it's clearly a very important sort of switch
point in your life. Do you mind telling us a bit about how you, I suppose how you
came back from that and how that ended up actually helping you to do what you ended up doing?
Yeah I think luck has been a massive part of my life and I
think many of us imagine that we are where we are, just through our hard work
and our incredible natural raw talent. But I think we underplay the role
luck has as well. And luck can nudge us along different
paths in life and it can give us little opportunities. And I was nudged a few
times and when I was very low and I think in some ways when you say...
the darkness that I lived in was for quite a long period actually
and it wasn't a brief flirtation with ending it all, it was a more protracted
period of awfulness in my life. And what was quite weird actually was that
I've never really looked back to that time. Since things started to go right
for me I've never really looked back to that time of darkness and
owned it, if you like. It was almost just there within me, the fragility.
And it was quite special actually to start writing my book, my little life
story and go back over that time and cry about it and talk to my family about it.
I'd never told my wife or my brother stories that I've put into
the book, they had no idea and I had to say look – they're OK about it –
but this is how bad things got for me. And yeah I got very, very low. I was
pretty hopeless as a student at school and for some of the reasons you
mentioned, for being a bit naughty and bit unfocused and I managed to leave
school without any real qualifications. And my heart really breaks actually for
other kids who are like me, who don't have much hope, they don't have a clear
path in life from school to college or school to university and look around now
with the kids and all of us we're being bombarded with images of perfection all
the time and the Instagram generation has so much to cope with. And I felt that
I wanted to own up if you like to the fact that my beginning was pretty humble
and sometimes awful and sometimes very tricky. But I made a bit of a go
of it and the advice that carried me along was the title of the book; do
things step by step. And that was advice given to me in
the Social Security office when I was signing on for the dole for goodness sake.
And it became a bit of a mantra for me and so that was the
advice I took, just to take things slowly don't imagine you gonna aim for the
stars – kids are told that all the time now – so I thought it might have a little
bit of relevance to people I know, people I meet today who are saying I don't know
what to do in my life, I'm a bit lost. It's okay, that's my message. I was there,
don't think you're gonna change your life overnight but
taking it slowly can be a bit of an answer.
People will have seen you on TV
traveling around the world and assume that you have always had that kind of
vista and range but actually that idea of taking things step by step had a very
localised focus when you took a trip to Glencoe in Scotland and that was a
hugely important turning point for you wasn't it?
Yes, thank you, yeah it was.
I was very lost and I realised I needed to challenge myself a bit. I was going
nowhere, very literally, in life. I was struggling to get out of bed and go and
get a newspaper from the shops to go through looking at the
job ads. And I had this mad idea one morning that I was gonna go on a journey
and I was gonna go to Scotland. And you know I don't think I'd ever been out of
London before on my own. I don't come from wealthy traveling family, I don't
come from a connected elite part of London at all, so it wasn't that abnormal
but I did say I have to go to Scotland. And it wasn't for any really profound
reasons to be honest it was just because my friend had a video of the movie
Highlander that we'd watched over and over again and I decided to go to
Scotland. I decided to go very much using the advice that I'd been given by the
lady in the social office which is the title of the book; just take it all very step
by step. So I thought okay I'll go to the train station and get a ticket and if I
can't face it I'll just turn around and go home.
But everything became possible and I thought okay, now get on the train, I can do this and
the bizarre and the slightly extraordinary became possible for me as
a pretty lost lad. And I went to Scotland
and yes I had a little experience there which helped to change my life.
There's something in that experience as well which I think is one of two
key character traits which I think a part of your success and one of them is
this almost naivety where you just kind of go 'I'll just climb up this
mountain and that'll be fine' even though dusk was falling, everyone else who's coming
down the mountain was saying what are you doing? But whether it's that or going
to MI6 and saying you'd quite like to work for them...
Oh don't, it's so embarrassing now!
But I think that any trip idea
that you've come up with has come from that same I guess openness to kind
of go why couldn't we go there? And even though other people would be saying no
it's not that simple you just can't turn up in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
you just go 'No it'll be absolutely fine, there'll be a way.'
Well maybe the younger
experiences have made me more open to possibilities as an adult. Because, yes, I
did do something that was very challenging for me as a lad.
It wasn't climbing Everest but in a way it was for me, it was pretty... it might as
well have been for goodness sake! And I didn't realise that was what I was
almost being... I don't really want to say, but almost being called to do. I
don't know if it was Fate, I don't know if it was a secret little voice in my head
that knew I had to do something really challenging. But yeah I went up a bit of
a mountain in every possible sense and I made it and it was slightly against the
odds and it was tricky and challenging and it did open me up to other
possibilities in life and I think that is fundamentally, that is the
power of a journey, of a bit of a quest, of challenging yourself. And I'm
hugely keen now to get out of my own and keep getting out of my own comfort zone
and keep pushing myself a bit. And I'm always trying to nudge, sometimes give a
bit of a shove to people around me to say that we need, in life, we need to keep
reminding ourselves that risk is good and risk is interesting and risk is fun;
and it's challenging and rewarding as well. So definitely, we're all shaped by
our life events absolutely and I certainly have been and I still
have the fear and fragility in some areas of being a lost little teenager
and I have the confidence that's come from doing some pretty bizarre and
extraordinary things as an adult as well.
The other quality which I think is really key...
- You're defining me here! - Well, I am a bit
- Go for it, go for it! - You define yourself in the book
But one of these things is empathy.
Because I think that one of the things that's so engaging about your programs is that
they don't feel plotted or scripted, that there is an improvised element to them.
But also you seem genuinely interested in the people that you meet and in their
lives. Which is not the case for every program that you watch on TV.
You could say that, I couldn't possibly comment! It's a lovely thing for you to say thank you.
But I wonder where that empathy comes from because you think
in the book is it just a genetic thing or is it perhaps shaped by some of those
things that happened to you when you were a teenager or perhaps even younger. So
that illness we were talking about right at the beginning. If you've been fragile and
you've been cared for by other people, does that help to teach you that crucial
quality of empathy, being interested in other people's lives?
I think it's nature and nurture if you like. I think my family are pretty
good on empathy so I've got some good DNA with it there and then I think it's
something I've learned and I've loved as well. I like hearing people's stories and
you're right we don't have a script on the travelogues I do and we don't have
a recce where somebody goes out ahead. We basically have to turn up places and
make it up as we go along and that's quite unusual in TV and it's much more
exciting as a result. But the most wonderful, memorable experiences for me
as a traveller as it were are encounters with other people. That's absolutely,
that's why I do it really and why I keep doing it and want to keep doing it because
they're so meaningful and memorable and yeah I like people's stories I'm
interested in us. It means that everywhere I go is fascinating because
there's wonderful human beings with tales to tell
anywhere. And I'm sure that the experiences I've had and the fragility I
felt as a teenager makes me more receptive to other people's problems. But
I think also growing up in London helped. I grew up in a very ethnically diverse,
culturally rich part of the capital at a time and in a place where I was hearing
lots of stories from around the world, even though I didn't get on a plane until
I started working. So I was aware of the world and I heard tales from people and
I've never looked to other people and seen them as an 'other', they've always
been for me our brothers and sisters on this planet and I've been open to their
stories. So yeah, I had a very tricky start in life and it's
been painful and freeing and cathartic to go back over it just this
year while writing the book but I don't regret any of it. It's who I
am, it shaped me and it's gifted me a lot as well. And perhaps, all right,
yeah maybe empathy is part of that. I'm gonna go and say yeah, I'm empathetic,
and I'm happy and proud of that!
Just to finish off, you have met a lot of
people in completely diverse countries as you say, but you just mentioned there
that despite the differences, despite the different cultures that you see them all
as being sort of brothers and sisters that we share the planet with.
You mention near the beginning of the book that one of your inspirations was
Michael Palin and his travelogues and he said something very similar which is
that despite travelling around the world and meeting people from completely different places
when you actually sit down and talk to them, or not even talk because you might
not even share a language, you find that actually you share the same things, that
you care about friends, family, love, food, drink. Would you say that
through all the travels, that's one of the biggest lessons that you've learned?
That actually there is far more that unites us than separates us?
I think one of the benefits of my background actually was I almost knew
that before I started travelling extensively. So I was a bit
pre-educated on that almost. So from the start I think I knew that
we are all pretty much the same and whether I was talking to a young a camel
herder in the middle of Kazakhstan or a princess in Madagascar, fundamentally
of course, human beings when you strip it down
generally we pretty much want the same things from our existence. And we
need pretty much the same things. So I had that with me and that really helped but
I think yeah Michael Palin was a complete breath of fresh air on the
telly when he first started because before him
telly travellers doing his sort of job, my sort of job, tended to,
could be a little bit patronizing towards the funny foreign people.
And often they would be physically looking down on them and observing them
with a slightly raised eyebrow. And Michael you know he stripped that away
for a lot of people and for me as well watching as a viewer. And recognised them
as us and humanised them and was very respectful in every way. And I
suppose if anything I've tried to learn a little bit from the great Mr, the
Great Lord Palin and carry that as advice and a tactic and technique
if you like on my journeys. Just be open to people! It's such a good
bit of advice for people traveling now I think because so often people are told
or you know the world is a scary place, stay away from the locals, stay in the
resort or the town where you are. Don't go out. But actually the
world is a very safe and welcoming place and getting out into it is an extraordinary gift
Actually in the book you say that for anybody who doesn't
travel much one thing you can do is to take a map of where you live and pop a
glass on it and draw a circle and make sure you explore everything within that
circle first and then you can start to widen out.
Yeah definitely it's a bit of a state of mind really isn't it. I mean you can take what
you want from exploring and from traveling. Some people will do it so they
can say I'm the first person to summit these twelve mountains backwards or
something you know with something that's quite personal to
them, fair enough. I like traveling because I like the experiences and meeting people.
But yeah, it doesn't have to be round the planet. I think we all need to stay
interested in our world and ourselves and us collectively. And yeah it doesn't
have to be to somewhere that's a long-haul flight away. It can be local
and there's a beauty in that as well. And igniting that passion and
particularly in the young, in kids, can be a way of leading them really into
into much more and a more adventurous life. So definitely it's a recommendation, yeah.
Explore your own area, take a delight in knowing what's around the corner, that's
how I started with my Gran's magical mystery tours in the back of her adapted
car. It's another story but she helped to light a little bit of a
fire in me even though we weren't travelling abroad.
You will have to read the book to find out what that is.
But Simon it was great to read your book, great to hear a bit more about the sort
of the background to your travels and it's very inspiring as well so thank you.
Thank you very much, what an honour this is, appreciate it, thank you!