Adventurer Ed Stafford interview: “To be a good dad now, you have to swim against the tide”
There are any number of -reasons why Ed Stafford, the former soldier-turned-TV adven-turer, could be running late for our meeting. The intrepid explorer, who lives deep in the Costa Rican jungle, may be stuck up a mountain, say, or have got lost on one of his marathon walks.
The reality is far more prosaic: he got stuck in traffic because of the roadblocks put in place during the State Opening of Parliament. When he finally arrives at Channel 4’s -central London headquarters, about 20 minutes later than billed, Stafford is apologetic and explains that he is not used to such issues in Central America. “We don’t get many state openings or diversions,” he says. “Or anything, really.”
The jungle may be quiet, but Stafford and his family – his wife, fellow explorer Laura Bingham, and their four children – love it there so much that he reckons the feckless dads of Britain should try wild living, because it would make them better parents.
By Stafford’s telling, fatherhood is in crisis and modern technology is to blame. “In this world of video games, social media and personal devices, it’s difficult to be a good dad,” he says. The amount of time parents and children alike spend indoors and on screens, combined with more widespread prosperity, has both blunted their animal instincts and stopped them having mature emotional relationships.
“Life is easy. I mean, there’s a cost of living crisis, but we’re still going through something very minor compared with wartime scenarios, or times in the past where people really didn’t have any money, and there was actual starvation,” -Stafford says. “You can go to the fridge and get food or turn on the tap to get water. You don’t have to work very hard to physically survive.”
In an attempt to prove that another way is possible, Stafford is fronting a new Channel 4 survival series, Into the Jungle, in which six fathers are plunged into the Belizean jungle with one of their children. All of the pairs have relationships that are strained in one way or another – some dads are overprotective, while others are distant – and the expedition hopes to bring them closer together, by forcing them to forage for food, trek to waterfalls and build safe overnight camps without help.
“I don’t want this programme to be about blaming people for being bad parents,” Stafford insists. “[In everyday life] you don’t have these big, intense challenges. When do father and child have to work together to overcome something? Virtually never, quite frankly. Maybe playing video games, [but] that is literally all it would be. I felt as a dad – and it was part of the reason we moved to Costa Rica, as well – you really have to swim against the tide to be a good parent now.”
The issues besetting each father-and-child pairing quickly become obvious. Phones are used to excess by both dads and kids, with one 12-year-old boy, Dexter, saying that the fact his father, Jethro, does not have any devices in the jungle means that he will “finally get to talk to my dad properly”.
Stafford upped sticks last year because, like many in midlife (he’s 48), he and his wife felt consumed by ennui. “My wife walked into the kitchen about two years ago and said, ‘Am I really cleaning this f---ing room for the next 40 years?’ We had fallen into the same trap that everyone else does, that domestic routine,” he says. So, they decided to “go on a bit of a family adventure” and, with three children under the age of five, moved to a country they had never previously visited.
The Staffords “just winged it”, living in a house about 10 minutes away from a town, but so secluded that they cannot see any other homes from theirs. “Monkeys come down to the balcony and eat off the breakfast table,” he enthuses. “It’s like a Disney jungle.” They have since had a fourth child.
It is mid-July when we meet and Stafford has been back in the UK for about a month. He has been watching England’s run to the Euro 2024 final and feels a bit worse for wear. “Britain’s just such a big drinking culture that I feel utterly unhealthy after the past four weeks,” he sighs. Ever the adventurer, he is wearing a pair of old jeans, zip-up black sweatshirt and battered shoes.
“Sorry I’m wearing scruffy shoes, but I wear these to go to the bank,” Stafford says. “That’s how posh Costa Rica is: the rest of the time I’m barefoot. It’s incredibly informal, incredibly relaxed and all about family.”
Stafford was adopted as a baby by Barbara and Jeremy, who were both solicitors, and grew up in Leicestershire. He was sent to Uppingham, the prestigious independent school, but by his own admission was a troublesome pupil. Following an attempt to decapitate a statue of Edward Thring, the school’s 19th-century headmaster, defecating on the Astroturf and cutting electricity cables to the geography block, Stafford was eventually expelled, aged 17, for chopping down a tree planted by the late Queen.
His experience of school convinced him that they are too focused on teaching children to be good at exams, rather than life. “I was lucky enough to go to a good school, but I do think the thing it omitted was nourishing the child,” he says. “That’s why when things did go wrong, I just went straight to bad.” It is still a problem: in the six months before filming the series, Dexter was suspended twice from school and spent “as much time in isolation as in the classroom”, but he was one of the keenest learners when he was shown how to forage. “He has been taught the wrong way. His style of learning is very different from sitting in a chair in a class of 30, having someone at the front with a monotone voice,” says Stafford. “If I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have known that he was a ‘problem child’ at all.”
Though his parents were well-to-do, Stafford spent much of his time unsupervised outdoors with his friends from the age of about five. “It was feral, in a way, so I wouldn’t say my parents massively encouraged it, but the backdrop was just there,” he says. “I guess it was so much more healthy than just being stuck in front of the tele-vision all day.”
After reading geography at Newcastle University, in 1998 he joined the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and later served a tour of duty in Northern Ireland. Having risen to the rank of captain, he left the army in 2002. A career as an adventurer beckoned, and he rose to prominence in 2010 when he became the first person to walk the entire length of the Amazon (Channel 5 aired a film about it). Another show followed his exploits as he was dropped on the unin-habited Pacific island of Olo-rua for 60 days with no food or equipment.
The latter experience, in 2012, left him severely depressed and needing to seek help. “I opted not to go down the pharmaceutical route and started with cognitive behavioural therapy, then got introduced to meditation. That helped hugely, and it’s just opened my world to understanding that we’ve all had something in our lives,” Stafford says. “There are very few people who have not had some sort of trauma that’s affected the way they behave in modern-day life.”
Despite his own experience, he remains sceptical about the value of psychiatry for the bulk of the population. “I’m not saying that sitting on a couch talking about your problems for years on end doesn’t work. It does, and it’s very appropriate for some people. And there are others that have to resort to pharmaceuticals and prescription medicines,” he says. “Again, that has a time and a place in extreme circumstances. But it’s not like we’re talking straitjacket levels of mental health. Everyone struggles a bit.”
Now that he has been in the public eye for more than a decade as a daredevil adventurer, does he compare himself with the likes of Bear Grylls, Ben Fogle and Ray Mears? After all, he named his eldest child, Ran, after Sir Ranulph Fiennes.
“They’ve all been very kind, and in different ways,” he says. “You’d think there would be a real competitiveness… It doesn’t seem to be a very bitchy industry.” Fogle invited Stafford for dinner after meeting him at the Royal Geographical Society, while he has worked with Grylls in the Scouts. “There’s a lot of envy involved when people talk about other people, isn’t there? And I’ve heard a lot of negative stories about Bear, but he’s always been genuine with us,” he adds.
What does Stafford make of Grylls, the outgoing chief Scout, helping to bap-tise Russell Brand – who faces historical allegations sexual assault, which he denies – in the Thames in May? For the first time in our conversation, there is a pause. “I don’t think my views are publishable. It is bizarre,” he says, unsurely. “Let’s just stick with something nice and neutral like ‘bizarre’.”
Heading to the jungle is not the most practical solution for parents trying to build stronger relationships with their children. What can the average mum or dad do? “We’ve got to pay more attention to each other. We’ve got to spend more time doing stuff together. I do think it starts at family meals – no phones allowed in here,” he says. “And I hope it sparks a desire to spend time outdoors. Every-one feels reinvigorated standing on top of a hill when you’ve got the wind blasting in your face.”
Into the Jungle with Ed Stafford begins on Channel 4 on September 24