The WORST episodes of Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild

#1 - Great Blasket Island

Season 18 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/9/2024

Ben explores the Great Blasket Island off the coast of Ireland, staying with Dan and Emily who are island caretakers on Europe's rugged western frontier. Ben discovers how the couple have adapted to their new lives on the island and what they've achieved while living there. Plus, he experiences fixing a water pump, catching sheep, foraging seaweed and swimming with seals.

#2 - Portugal

Season 18 - Episode 7 - Aired 2/13/2024

#3 - Thailand

Season 18 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/23/2024

Ben travels to Southeast Asia, meeting entrepreneur Niall who now helps the country's street-dogs after trading in his previous career. The pair explore his self-built dog sanctuary on the island of Koh Samui, where Ben is joined by volunteers and other dog-loving locals to help out with daily chores. Niall and Ben prepare food for the pooches in the sanctuary and across the island, before making dog beds from oil drums and a canine splash-pool.

#4 - Isle of Rum

Season 14 - Episode 6 - Aired 3/23/2021

Ben returns to Scotland to revisit the Goddard family, who were living a wild and weather-beaten existence in an off-grid static caravan on the Isle of Rum. Now five years later, Ben discovers them living on the mainland, having swapped their caravan for an actual house. Still remote and surrounded by wilderness, they open up about how they altered their circumstances to make wild living work for them.

#5 - Panama

Season 9 - Episode 3 - Aired 4/30/2019

Ben travels to highlands of Panama to meet a couple who turned their backs on a comfortable lifestyle in the US to try their hand at coffee producing. During the busy harvest season, Ben learns the finer details of how to craft his favourite drink.

#6 - Sri Lanka Revisit

Season 18 - Episode 11 - Aired 4/2/2024

Ben Fogle heads back to the jewel of the Indian Ocean to catch up with British vet Janey, who set up a rescue centre for Sri Lanka's street-dogs. Five years on, Janey's centre looks even more impressive. The vet speaks about her new struggles, such as being left alone during the pandemic, and Ben witnesses the impact her charity is having.

#7 - Paul Ferber Revisited

Season 18 - Episode 9 - Aired 3/5/2024

#8 - Norway

Season 18 - Episode 3 - Aired 1/16/2024

Ben travels to an island on Norway's coastline to meet his host Elena, a former Middle East peacekeeper, and experience the hardships of living in the environment. Ben joins Elena and her partner on a mountain climb, before helping them finish their guest house, cleaning a beach, kayaking on frozen waters and gardening in the harsh landscape.

#9 - 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.

#10 - 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.

#11 - 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.

#12 - Portugal

Season 16 - Episode 1 - Aired 1/4/2022

Adventurer Ben Fogle journeys to the mountains of central Portugal, to live with Alex, a British man who traded in his lucrative retail career for his own mountainside hideaway.

#13 - United States

Season 16 - Episode 8 - Aired 3/1/2022

A disabled retiree turned into a modern-day nomad travels across the United States and uses a renovated military transport vehicle for her journey.

#14 - Khatgal, Outer Mongolia

Season 5 - Episode 6 - Aired 11/29/2016

Documentary series. Adventurer Ben Fogle meets people who have gone back to basics in remote parts of the world. Ben meets Micky and Trina Cofer, who along with their four children, left behind the comforts of America to become missionaries in the freezing tundra of Outer Mongolia. In temperatures of below minus 20, Ben builds his own ger (yurt) to sleep in, uses a freezing outhouse, attempts ice-fishing, joins a wolf-hunt and learns how to wrestle.

#15 - Morocco, Atlas Mountains

Season 5 - Episode 8 - Aired 12/13/2016

Documentary series. Ben Fogle meets people who have given up the rat race for an alternative lifestyle. Dina Zughyar and Mostafa Jabbour turned their back on the American Dream to start from scratch with a handful of rabbits and chickens on a small patch of barren land in the shadow of the Atlas Mountains. In their mud house in Morocco, the couple confess to Ben that it has been much harder than they thought...

#16 - Revisit: Norway

Season 18 - Episode 10 - Aired 3/26/2024

Ben returns to the Arctic circle to revisit old friend, and fellow adventurer, Randi Skaug, who is living on her remote island off Norway's northern coastline. When Ben last met Randi, he embraced life on the island and discovered how his host was the first Norwegian woman to climb Everest. Now, five years later Ben's back to find out how the intermittent years have treated Randi.

#17 - Chile

Season 18 - Episode 8 - Aired 2/27/2024

#18 - Ireland

Season 16 - Episode 2 - Aired 1/11/2022

Ben ventures to the ‘Emerald Isle’ to visit Georg and Bettina, an elderly European couple.

#19 - 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.

#20 - 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

#21 - 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.

#22 - Shetlands

Season 16 - Episode 5 - Aired 2/8/2022

Ben journeys to one of Britain's furthest outposts, the Shetland Islands, to meet Helen and Jason, a couple just a few years into their new life on the edge of the weather-beaten island of Yell. He discovers why they needed to escape the demands of urban life, and witnesses the obstacles they now face as they pursue their wildest dreams on this beautiful, historical and remote island.

#23 - Australia

Season 12 - Episode 3 - Aired 6/9/2020

A life-threatening parachuting accident was the catalyst that persuaded Jim Alston to pursue his "Robinson Crusoe" dream, while his partner Kim Nguyen also had a near-death experience in a horrific car crash. In 2017 Ben Fogle went to visit the pair on the aptly named Wilderness Island off Australia’s north-western cape, where he got a lesson in the art of mud-crabbing and the necessity for fresh water (which the island was without). Ben now returns to find Kim and Jim have now built an eco-resort and gained an extended family. "This island has served as therapy for both of them," he concludes. SUMMARY Ben reunites with a couple living off the west coast of Australia, and discovers the logistical nightmares they have overcome to make a home for themselves on a desert island, as well as enduring the extremes of the Australian climate. While they have recently had cause to celebrate, their lives are becoming increasingly difficult, which may result in them moving on.

#24 - Cornwall

Season 16 - Episode 4 - Aired 1/25/2022

We join Ben on the cliffs of Cornwall, where he is staying with Davina and Todd.

#25 - Sri Lanka

Season 18 - Episode 6 - Aired 2/6/2024