First things first: apologies to Ben Fogle, whose series the Guardian has managed to ignore for its four previous seasons. I can only assume that everyone working here has been so busy swiping left and drooling in a digital stupor to give this simple, sweet rejection of the hyper-connected world the props it deserves.
New Lives follows Fogle as he lives with people who have abandoned modern luxuries for soil and, frequently, solitude. You might consider it part of a wider trend for “digital detox” retreats, in which people hooked on the dopamine hit attained from an accidental Snapchat FaceSwap with a baby/walnut are forced to lie in a bath filled with rice until their brain is reconfigured. None of that faddy crap for the focus of this week’s episode, though. Swedish eco-warrior Lynx Vilden is the real deal. She strictly follows stone-age survival rules while living in a frozen forest in Seattle, promoting a radically self-sustaining existence that mainly involves being really cold and really dirty.
Fogle first meets Vilden deep within the woods, where she makes her entrance on a stout horse while wearing a pointy pixie hat. The sexual tension is electric. “You look amazing,” says Fogle, whose “Ursula Andress wading through the ocean in a white bikini” fantasy appears to be a punk dressed in animal skins and straddling a pony. Her archaic existence also involves drinking boiled pine cones and washing her teeth with twigs. Sunday morning at Glastonbury, essentially.
Throughout the rest of the episode, we see Fogle cook, chat and keep fires alight with Vilden, a former hedonist whose new life has propelled her towards a different kind of extreme. At one point, Fogle is woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of her taking a slash in a bowl. He seems bewitched, and I can see why. Vilden’s unvarnished qualities are aspirational. She’s the person you smirk at for having blonde dreads and wearing a felt Zelda costume at a party, but by the end of the night you’re half-naked up a tree with a tattoo of an acorn on your arse. She made you ceremonially stamp on your iPhone 7 earlier, and you’ve agreed to babysit a bevy of otters for her next weekend. You also might be a bit pregnant. With her twins.
While other shows about the wild – eg. anything Bear Grylls-affiliated – are riddled with chest-thumping machismo, there are ethical, environmentally driven intentions to New Lives In The Wild that make for wholesome, if sobering, TV. But there is personal tragedy in this episode, too: Vilden lives alone. She has a daughter, who was brought up for a while in the wild but now lives in the city. At one point she gives a desperate plea to camera, calling for a caveman to sweep her off her feet. You suspect she might want him to be Fogle.
Much to my dismay, the likelihood of romance on is low. According to our presenter, Lynx has a “unique odour”. In an act of defiance she shows him her bath to prove she does wash. It’s an iron pot heated by a fire, which she calls the Cannibal Tub. “I really thought you were going to eat me!” shouts Fogle – dressed now in a pair of small blue pants – as he joins her to soak in 10 years’ worth of dead skin and pubic hair. “The evening’s not over,” Vilden smiles. For the first time, Fogle looks nervous, like he wishes he wasn’t trapped in a cauldron in Washington state with a woman who wants to rut him into a pulp and use his leftover skin as a waterproof. Or maybe he just misses his iPhone.
Ben Fogle’s New Lives in the Wild begins tonight, 9pm, Channel 5
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