The BEST episodes of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild
Every episode of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild ever, ranked from best to worst by thousands of votes from fans of the show. The best episodes of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild!
Ben Fogle travels round the world to visit people who have given up the rat race.
#1 - Alaska
Season 1 - Episode 2 - Aired 4/29/2013
Ben Fogle joins a family in a mountainside yurt in Alaska.
#2 - Australia
Season 1 - Episode 1 - Aired 4/22/2013
Ben travels to a remote island to live with a former Sydney businessman.
#3 - Himalayan Foothills, India
Season 2 - Episode 2 - Aired 2/7/2014
Ben journeys to the foothills of the Indian Himalayas to live with former fighter pilot, 69- year-old Steve Lall. Steve turned his back on high society, instead opting for a simple farmer’s life in the mountains. He has fought for decades to protect his tiny private wilderness. Ben joins this mountain-dwelling renegade and his family in their remote, isolated home, a steep 2km climb from the nearest road. He gets hands-on with their harsh subsistence lifestyle, from ploughing with buffalo, chasing monkeys and human intruders, to the more surreal grave digging and naked meditation. Ben discovers that the hardships of this remote location are also the key to its beauty.
#4 - Panama (island)
Season 2 - Episode 4 - Aired 2/22/2014
Ben journeys to Central America to live with Ian Usher, a 49-year-old British former dump-truck driver who sold 'his life' on eBay and bought a tiny island off the coast of Panama for £30,000.
#5 - Namibia
Season 3 - Episode 1 - Aired 11/21/2014
For the first time on New Lives in the Wild, Ben heads to Africa and the deep desert sand dunes of Namibia. He lives with 50-year-old Gideon David and his young family in the largest conservation area on the continent. Gideon is a master bushman who quit a city career in life insurance for the dry and dusty desert. Ben embraces the harsh and relentless work of farm life in temperatures pushing 40 degrees. He tends over 150 animals, repairs baboon damage to water pipes and even learns how to castrate sheep with his teeth! Ben also witnesses the reality of life when one has to think about raising children in these conditions, from hand-washing nappies to learning vital desert survival skills and hunting and eating oryx.
#6 - Utah
Season 3 - Episode 3 - Aired 12/5/2014
Bill and Bob Stone are twin brothers aged 72 who fled their adrenaline-junkie pasts for a tough subsistence lifestyle hidden away in Americaʼs Wild West. In this unforgiving landscape, even with one of them recovering from a stroke, they carve out an existence and fight the challenges associated with growing old. Ben joins these canyon-dwelling renegades in their remote, isolated home, deep inside some of the worldʼs most striking and wild terrain. There he joins the boys cattle-wrangling, rock climbing and sleeping in a cave. One of the twins even persuades Ben to do a skydive. Ben also discovers more about the Stone brothers and why they decided to cut themselves off from civilisation. Once parachute instructors, police informants and bounty hunters, they are now organic farmers and doomsday preppers.
#7 - Leyte, Philippines
Season 2 - Episode 3 - Aired 2/15/2014
Documentary series in which adventurer Ben Fogle meets people who have given up the rat race to start a new life in the wilderness. Ben journeys to one of the 7,000 remote tropical islands in the Philippines to live with 'Jungle Neil' Hoag, a 45-year-old former cabbie from Florida who struggled to make a living before finding the love of his life on the other side of the world and becoming a coconut farmer.
#8 - Texas
Season 1 - Episode 4 - Aired 5/13/2013
Ben heads to a remote part of Texas to visit an ex-city slicker.
#9 - New Zealand
Season 1 - Episode 3 - Aired 5/6/2013
Ben travels to New Zealand, to meet the family of Robert and Catherine Long, hunter-gathering in Gorge River.
#10 - Morocco
Season 16 - Episode 10 - Aired 3/22/2022
In this episode, Ben heads back to the stunning Saharan landscape of Morocco.
#11 - Bulgaria Revisit
Season 17 - Episode 12 - Aired 4/4/2023
Join Ben as he revisits global nomads Miriam and Peter in the vast forests of the Rhodope Mountains in Bulgaria. In 2016, the couple walked the length of New Zealand and Ben then found them on an intrepid journey across South-Eastern Europe. He joined them as they left one camp to hike to another, their entire world in their backpacks, foraging and hunting as they went, sometimes travelling up to 25km a day. Now, four years later, he finds them back in Bulgaria, but living in an off-grid cottage. He discovers that disaster struck while they were walking Australia and the couple had to radically change their life.
#12 - Pembrokeshire
Season 16 - Episode 11 - Aired 3/29/2022
The Watkinsons gave up their careers as vets to live greener on the Pembrokeshire coast.
#13 - Sierra Nevada
Season 17 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/3/2023
Ben travels to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the USA to meet Mike Basich, a snowboarder who left the world of professional sport behind to reconnect with nature and pursue a quieter life. Ben joins him in his extraordinary hand-built log cabin and follows him as he embarks on a life changing project.
#14 - Australia
Season 17 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/10/2023
Ben heads Down Under to meet Bette, an elderly woman living alone in a ramshackle house in the wilds of northern Queensland. She is a no-nonsense personality and refuses to cook Ben any dinner. But as the week progresses she warms to her guest and explains what drew her to the harsh Australian wilderness 30 years ago. She also talks about her complex relationship with men, and reveals how she has been seriously threatened when defending the natural world around her from development.
#15 - California
Season 17 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/17/2023
Ben heads to Slab City in California to meet an extraordinary homeless artist called DNA, who Ben had previously met whilst in the area making another documentary. Ben joins DNA in his 'Mad Max' camp on a desert hill, an extreme place to seek refuge, but like most residents in Slab City, he discovers DNA had few choices. Ben learns the harsh reality of what it's like to be homeless in the US, and the downward cycle that people can find themselves in.
#16 - Uruguay
Season 17 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/24/2023
Watch as Ben Fogle journeys to South America to visit Rhona, a British born actress who left the bright lights of Hollywood to live alone in a remote valley in Uruguay. Ben is instantly intrigued by the juxtaposition in lifestyle and learns that ill health, a difficult childhood and disillusionment with Tinseltown culture have all led to his host's new life. He discovers that Rhona is now committed to rehabilitating horses and the pair attend an animal auction looking to rescue any mistreated animals. There Rhona reveals that she has had to adapt to the machismo culture of rural Uruguay… or rather it to her. Rhona has also nearly been seriously injured while venturing out onto her land. Ben realises that if something does go wrong, Rhona's isolation means she has no one to call on. That night he experiences nature's fury for himself when a violent storm hits while he shelters in a fragile biodome. But despite the difficulties, his fellow Brit insists that this is the best role she's ev
#17 - Tuscany
Season 17 - Episode 5 - Aired 1/31/2023
Ben heads to Tuscany to visit British couple George and Sophie who breathed new life into a Tuscan farmhouse. Ben discovers how George's adolescent desire to live a self-sufficient existence seeded an ambitious plan to create a lifelong project and how a chance encounter enabled Sophie to find what seemed improbable. Ben travels into the heart of the stunning Casentinesi Forest National Park to join his hosts and their young children in their progressive off-grid home, a three km walk to the top of a mountain. Their continuing renovations of the ancient, ramshackle buildings sees Ben put to work in return for his stay as he embraces honey collecting, tends their extensive vegetable garden, makes homemade pizza and gruelling repairs on the track up to their house so they can get a vehicle to it, and deals with their wayward cow who destroys all their crops.
#18 - Oregon River
Season 17 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/7/2023
Ben meets Pirate Rob who lives for half the year in a sandbag house on a river.
#19 - Zambia
Season 17 - Episode 7 - Aired 2/14/2023
Ben journeys into the heart of Zambia to live with a British family who have built a safari lodge on the edge of a national park. Ben uncovers what prompted this intrepid couple to start a new business and a family in the unforgiving bush, and learns how they have had to overcome fire and flooding to keep their African dream alive.
#20 - The Azores
Season 17 - Episode 8 - Aired 3/7/2023
The presenter travels to the Azores islands, a remote archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, to meet Magnus, Lucy and one-year-old Frey. The family live in an off-grid cottage on a steep sloped mountain which Magnus's nomadic father bought in the 1980s, and they have spent the past 15 years taking on the gargantuan task of restoring the property and land.
#21 - Dorset
Season 17 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/14/2023
Ben joins Chris, a former paratrooper, in the beautiful county of Dorset on the south coast of England. Ben spends a week with Chris who, despite losing nearly everything, has spent the last five years walking the UK's coastline. Ben discovers what has motivated Chris and how he has turned his life around, found love and raised thousands for charity. Ben join Chris and his faithful dog companion, Jet, 27,000 miles into their walk where they've now hit the Jurassic Coast. And they're no longer alone – Chris met his partner, fellow hiker Kate and now they are parents to baby Magnus. Ben learns what Chris calls "the art" of living wild on the road, once as a solo experience, but now with a young family. He learns how to desalinate sea water and forage the nature around him, embraces river washing and charming local fisherman for food, while beginning to understand what it's like to "wild parent" and where this intrepid family are heading next.
#22 - Australia Revisit
Season 17 - Episode 10 - Aired 3/21/2023
Ben returns to rural Western Australia to catch up with charismatic widow Barbara. Since he last saw her, she has faced a serious cancer scare and a devastating bush fire that nearly destroyed everything.
#23 - Sweden Revisit
Season 17 - Episode 11 - Aired 3/28/2023
Ben heads back to Sweden to revisit Annalisa, a single mother who was developing a forest hideaway on the fringes of society for her and her young son. Now three years later, Annalisa has a new partner and an enviable homestead, and Ben learns of the extraordinary journey the trio took during the pandemic and how they sustain their thrifty life with such passion and ambition.
#24 - Exmoor
Season 14 - Episode 5 - Aired 3/16/2021
Ben revisits Simon and Debbie in Exmoor National Park.
#25 - Norway Revisit
Season 16 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/15/2022
Ben finds former 'Stone Age' host, Lynx, living on a different continent than last time.