The TV explorer’s career has been quite the journey, going from newspaper post boy to searching for bonobo monkeys in the rainforest
The BBC’s great explorer Simon Reeve doesn’t like the word “adventure”. He pulls me up a couple of times over lunch when I use it to describe his trips up the Congo river, or into the Kalahari desert. “Forgive me, Tim,” he says, “but adventure is a kind of loaded term” – too many intrepid personal heroics, not enough culturally sensitive traveller, I guess. He thinks a “search for experiences” better describes his one-man quest to bring the world’s four corners into British living rooms. “As a species, we have a constant need for encounters and food and smells and sights that tweak our buttons,” he says. “We’re wired for new experiences and without them we sink into mental slumber.”
His expression of this philosophy, in London restaurant terms, is Jacuzzi, on Kensington High Street, three lunchtime floors of extravagant indoor vegetation and Italian high camp, a little like unexpectedly encountering Bruno Tonioli bearing a tray of canapes in a jungle clearing. Reeve has chosen it for our lunch for a few reasons. One because it sounded fun – he’s not been before. Two because it’s a “B-corp certified” restaurant, which means Jacuzzi adheres to the highest social and environmental standards, “super fucking right-on verging on worthy, thank you very much”. And, lastly, because it reminds him a little of a restaurant called The Vine, on Acton High Street, where his family used to go when he was a kid for a once-a-year blow-out. “It was also Mediterranean – Greek – with a very significant amount of foliage on the ceiling. So: I feel at home.”
