BASE CAMP EDEN: BEN FOGLE'S CAMPFIRE STORIES

Ben Fogle, our Base Camp Eden leader, told us all about the adventures he has had over the last 10 years. Here, he takes us back to where it all began...Castaway.

"When they told me [I had been selected to go to an island for a year] I had images of white sandy beaches and girls in bikinis, but I later found out they were talking about an island in the outer Hebrides, a windswept island, totally treeless, in one of the windiest parts of the British Isles. But it didn’t put me off and I unwittingly became one of the very first volunteers of reality TV in the UK.

I personally wouldn’t call it reality TV though. The idea of the project, Castaway 2000, was to take 36 volunteers like myself all from the City, (I grew up in London) to this remote island and have to create a whole lifestyle from scratch. So we’d grow our own crops, we had our own animals, we milked cattle each morning, we had sheep there for our meat and we had children. We therefore had to build a little school and we took turns educating them. We did absolutely everything. The idea was that by the end of the year, we would be entirely self sufficient.

For me, it was probably the happiest year I’ve ever had. I absolutely loved every minute of it. We were an eclectic bunch- some of you who may have seen the series will have seen a lot of arguing but actually, the reality was there was a lot more happiness and laughter than there was arguing. The show wasn’t a contest and there was no winner; I’m sometimes referred to as ‘the winner’ but I wasn’t. There was no prize money, there was no voting off, it was purely a social experiment and it was a success. By the end of the year, we grew 25 different crops, we reared all our animals successfully, the children had jumped ahead a year in terms of their education and for me, leaving that island was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.

Going from this incredible island which I loved, into city life, was such a shock to the system. I felt I was suffocating, there was no air. All the food was too rich back in London because we’d had all of our organic food for a whole year and all the noises were too noisy, the smells were too smelly, I couldn’t bear crowds of people, and all I wanted to do was get away again...."

See what Ben did next in tomorrow's blog.....