The first thing you notice about Ian Wright is that the man just can’t keep still. He’s constantly in motion; even when he’s standing, his eyes might be rolling toward the ceiling while his tongue might be hanging downward. He’s forever clowning – perhaps a throwback to his days teaching drama to children, which is what his adult audiences quickly turn into. His hands will dart about like uncaged birds, pecking at a point here and fluttering around another there. He can’t be taller than a couple of inches above five feet but he can fill the stage with the kind of presence politicians would kill for.
The Philippine STAR sent me to Singapore last month to interview the famous "Globe Trekker" through the auspices of the Discovery Travel & Living channel, which is running a new six-part series titled VIP Weekends with Ian Wright. As the title suggests, it’s a good many steps up the social ladder for this street-smart Cockney, who had to trade in his sweaty T-shirt and cargo pants for a tidy tux.
"From beer to champagne!" is how Ian himself exuberantly describes his momentary transformation from the poster boy and patron saint of backpackers to the houseguest of an English lord and an Indian princess, among others. (The complete list includes Hong Kong celebrity Karen Mok; the Earl and Countess of Carnarvon; Princess Bhargavi and the Mewar royal family of India; the Alvaro Domecq family of Spain; the UK’s Simon Woodroffe; and France’s Florence and Daniel Cathiard.)
Over lunch, dinner, and a 20-minute personal interview in between, I managed to learn a bit more about the man than even his travelogues have revealed.
To begin with, he’s 40. And sorry, ladies, but he’s married, with two stepchildren aged 17 and 19. (He gets along just fine with them, but doesn’t spoil them, and they’ve apparently gotten over their dad’s global celebrity.) Ian comes from Ipswich, about an hour by train from London, and is a diehard Ipswich football fan. (When I told him that I lived for a while in Norwich, a few stops down the railroad tracks, he snickered, relishing the memory of a great football rivalry.)
As you can imagine, he’s been through a lot – even before he began globetrotting on everyone else’s behalf. He went to art school, was a cycle courier for a while, then ran a market stall at Spitalfields in London. "I used to make paints, jewelry, weld things up, make candlesticks, clay artwork, jams, chutney, and mint sauce and sell them there," he recalled in a previous interview; then he taught art and drama to children.
When the call for a TV "presenter" (as the Brits call their hosts) for a travel show came, a bulb lit up in his head. He had already done a bit of traveling – to India, Nepal, Egypt, Guyana, and all of Europe – and having done some video work as well, it seemed a natural thing for him to join the search, even for a lark. He sent in a typically funny take on arriving in Liverpool Street Station and falling all over the place – and the rest, as they say, is globe-trekking history. Twelve years of it, in fact.
When he strides into the China Club for his first meeting with the press, he’s in a crisp black tux and bow tie. "I’m Ian Wright," he says, "and I am the luckiest bastard in the world. You’ve got to remember it’s not my fault, yeah? If someone comes to you and says, this is the job, we’re going to send you around the world, we’re going to give you a chance to meet the most incredible people, see the most phenomenal sights, and we’re going to pay for your food and your accommodations, give you some spending money, and if that’s not enough, here’s a fat wad of cash as well, what would you do, eh, what would you do?"
He goes away about seven, eight times a year. We all think we’d love to do that, but it’s a punishing lifestyle. "The only problem with having the best job in the world is that you’ve got no friends," he says smiling, but you know there’s some truth to that.
As if to banish the backpacker blues, he starts talking about food – we’re meeting, after all, against the backdrop of the World Gourmet Summit, which Singapore hosts yearly to claim its spot on the global gastronomical map. Ian prefers to go vegetarian – except when he’s on the road, which happens to be most of the time. "The country to me with the worst food in the world is America. It’s rubbish there, rubbish. Obviously if you go to New York or Chicago, they’re countries on their own, and the food there is heaven. But beyond that…. Our driver in the US asked me once, ‘Are you hungry? If you want, we can get some snacks from the supermarket, but if you want a proper meal, we can go to McDonald’s!’"
Still, a Big Mac can’t be half as bad as the other things we’ve squirmed to watch him having to devour in the name of global goodwill – a sheep’s eyeball and a Cambodian cockroach, among others. "The worst thing I’ve ever put in my mouth was in Iceland, which was rancid shark," he says. "You get your shark, stick it in a hole, then leave it there for eight months until it gets all moldy and rancid, then you pick it up and dry it for another four months… It is the worst taste!"
But there is, he reminds us "the hospitality thing: you can’t really say no." The sheep’s eye, for example, the Mongolians give to the visitor as a sign of respect. "The taste isn’t too bad, it’s the texture. It’s like that white glue stuff, crusty on the outside and gooey on the inside, that’s what an eyeball is."
The switch from all that to champagne and caviar may have required a corresponding shift in mind-set, but being what he is, Ian remained his true irrepressible self in this new series. "What I like about this series is that every single one is different," he would tell his dinner audience. "You never know what you’re going to get next, because the crux of the program is me getting on with them, and I’ve never met them. You meet them on a Monday, and if you don’t get on it’s going to be a very short series. You never know until you’re there, and that’s the exciting part of it."
Authenticity and spontaneity are mantras to Ian, who acknowledges that "It’s harder for them (his upper-class hosts) to come down to my level, because they’re not used to that."
He can’t work very well with scripts, beyond a general outline of what the episode will cover and contain: "You put them into your own words. I can’t read from a script, or read very well. If I see a word, fine, if I don’t, well, then just tell me. My favorite ones are when I’m doing and saying something at the same time. It just makes it more spontaneous. I never know what I’m going to say or going to do or how I’m going to react to whoever, and I don’t want to, you know what I mean?"
He’s proud of his working-class roots and connections: "My wife is staunch working-class like you would never.... When I think of my kids now and what they’ve got, they would think that my era was medieval.... My wife was brought up in absurd working class conditions where she had nothing, with six sharing a bed.... On my mum’s side, my great granddad’s Welsh, and they’re from an old coal-mining family."
During our sit-down interview, a fellow journalist remarks how kind and honest the English were, in her personal experience. "You do judge places like that," Ian responds, scratching his chin, "even though they might have been one-offs. The fellow sitting next to you might have been through something completely opposite. When I got mugged in Morocco, I wrote the whole country off because of one stupid bad experience. The funny thing was even when I was getting mugged they kept haggling the price down. We got to my hotel, and the guy kicking me said I’ll kick you anyway when you come out, so why not give me a hundred and I’ll go away? I offered sixty, he asked for eighty, and we settled on seventy-five."
He loves Southeast Asia, but has never been to the Philippines. Did he have any pre-formed impressions of it, I ask?
"The women look really nice!... But nothing, really, I don’t know anything about the Philippines at all. But I would love to go to the Philippines. I don’t want to know that much about it, that’s why you go there."
"What’s a real personal vacation for you?" I follow up.
"A bed and breakfast in England. I love an English seaside. That’s because as a kid that’s what I grew up on, and you can’t get that away from you. I loved it even in winter when it was cold and breezy and you could hear the sign outside the pub go ngeeek-eeek-eeek! You looked outside and it was cold but there was something comforting about a nice, warm pub."
Has he ever gotten into any seriously life-threatening situation?
"I remember we were in Vanuatu, which is an island in the Pacific between Fiji and the Solomon Islands, and it had the most active volcano – well, the most acceptable active volcano. It was almost like a park-and-ride, you know... You walk up and then you see the smoke, but it’s not like an old film where it’s all lava, there’s little vents that come up every now and then, and they’re just flying up in the air pitching lava, and the sound is unbelievable. And just like kids you wait for the last big blowout, and with the crew, we go right up to the top of the volcano. As it gets dark, the lava cools down and becomes more ferocious. We didn’t realize that the wind had changed and suddenly an explosion sent lava literally five meters from us. At the next explosion we started to run down the path. It was mad!"
The longest Ian’s been away from home is seven months. But he can’t think of living anywhere else. "I love England, to be honest. Being away for so long, you just get fonder and fonder of where you live. And I can’t live anywhere without four seasons."
But he’s a firm believer in the salutary effects of travel – even if our version of it doesn’t quite match up to his shark-swallowing standards. "Every bloke should leave home and live on his own for at least three years, that would be my policy." After 12 years on the road, you’d think he’s been everywhere and seen everything, but there are, believe it or not, places he has yet to visit and would love to: "Antarctica, Central America, Vietnam."
And the Philippines? "Yes, of course! Take these people’s phone numbers down!" he instructs his staff in jest, but who knows – one of these days, that guy buzzing your doorbell just might be Mr. Wright.
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VIP Weekends with Ian Wright is showing Sundays, 10 p.m. on the Discovery Travel & Living channel.