Boorman talk on the National Geographic Traveller Stage on Friday and Saturday at the Active Travel Show
What have you been up to recently? I’ve been filming the next series of my Extreme Frontiers programme for Channel 5, this time in Africa. The idea with it is that we get to experience the country, rather than just travelling through it as we did with Long Way Round and Long Way Down. So for this programme we’ve travelled by motorbike the length of the South African border – 6,200 miles including its coast – and have cage-dived with great white
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sharks and detonated dynamite deep underground in a gold mine.
And what’s next for you? It all depends how the next series of Extreme Frontiers goes, but if viewing figures are good and Channel 5 want more, I’d really like to travel across South America or Mexico.
What inspires you to undertake such epic adventures?
As an actor I’ve got an inquisitive
streak in me, then when I met Ewan [McGregor] and we became good friends everything led on from there.
Who inspired you as a youngster? My father. He’s a film director [Deliverance, Excalibur] and would often be filming in odd locations around the globe. As children we would follow him around, and my wanderlust came from that.
Are your young daughters sharing
your love of adventure? They certainly love to travel – maybe one day I’ll do a TV show with them!
You seem to be a very energetic person – what’s your secret? I don’t see myself as particularly active but I guess because I’ve always been into motorcycles I quite like adrenalin stuff, and so a lot of the TV stuff focuses on that. For instance, on the TV show I’ve just finished, we went up the Sani pass, which is a