Unmissable show?
In this house, it’s Octonauts. It’s one of the mainstays of the CBeebies channel, which seems to be the only channel our television can receive these days. Our lad is four and he loves it. It’s a bunch of strange creatures, one of whom looks like a turnip, and they have adventures under the sea. It’s deeply educational and he’s learned a lot about the natural world from it. We went to the Natural History Museum and his very proud parents clapped like seals because he was able to identify a deep-sea anglerfish before he was three. Wonderful BBC.
Bring back?
The A-Team gave me immense pleasure when I was growing up. I loved how they’d chuck everything together and it had a bit of American glamour for someone growing up in the grey streets of west London. When I was very ill with malaria in Gabon a few years ago, I was hallucinating about The A-Team being on the telly, and the room I was in didn’t have a telly! I’m laughing about it now but I’d been vomiting blood and I had a temperature which was only just short of causing brain impairment. Maybe I thought only The A-Team could get me out of where I was.
Mastermind specialist subject?
I used to write books on terrorism and I wrote the first book about Al Qaeda, before 9/11 happened. My phone started ringing before the second tower fell and didn’t stop for a year and a half. That’s how I came to be working for the Beeb. I started getting the chance to go to parts of the world that don’t get a lot of airtime.
Turn off?
I hate Towie and those kinds of things. It’s end-of-days programming. I know some people have a secret love of it but they need to purge themselves. It’s not just turn-off TV. It’s pull-the-plug-out-and-throw-the-TV-out-the-window-and-abandon-civilisation-and-go-and-live-on-an-island TV.
Ireland With Simon Reeve is next on Sunday 29 November, 8pm, BBC2
