Simon Reeve

Simon Reeve left school with a single GCSE and joined the Sunday Times post room at eighteen, working his way into the cuttings library, where he dug out material for reporters covering arms dealing, nuclear smuggling and terrorism. That grounding produced The New Jackals in 1998, an early study of Ramzi Yousef and Osama bin Laden that reached print three years ahead of the September 11 attacks, and then One Day in September, on the attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Television arrived in November 2003 with Meet the Stans, four films across Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for BBC Two, and he has gone on to make series tracing the Equator, the tropics and, in 2024, Wilderness. The Royal Geographical Society gave him its Ness Award in 2012. Step By Step, his 2018 memoir, returns to a violent household in Acton, the counselling he needed from fourteen, the jobless stretch after school, and the post room job that set him on a new road.