10:55am Tuesday 2nd February 2010
Globetrotting biker Charley Boorman is hitting the road again to tell his story on stage in theatres up and down the country. He talks to Steve Pratt about his adventures.
ADVENTURER Charley Boorman has motorcycled from London to New York via Europe and Asia and from John o’Groats in Scotland to Cape Town in South Africa. He’s competed in the Dakar Rally. But his latest expedition is proving one of his most challenging – doing the shopping.
“I’m just in Waitrose paying for my food, can I call you back?” he asks when I ring at the appointed hour.
Five minutes, later he’s back on the phone. I can hear him shouting instructions at Tiggy to go away. “Tiggy is my dog, not one of my children,” he says, in case I get the wrong idea.
In his forthcoming tour, Charley Boorman Live, the easy rider will talk about his worldwide adventures with his trusty steed – his motorbike – and his friend, Ewan McGregor.
Shopping brings all sorts of surprises. “I met some lady. She was staring at me and said, ‘oh my god, Charley Boorman. I’ve watched loads of your shows. What are you doing in Waitrose?
I said even intrepid adventurers need some time off,” he says, once dog and shopping are under control.
He’s in between travels after Long Way Round, Long Way Down, Race To Dakar and By Any Means – journeys chronicled in books and TV series – which means time at home with wife Olivia and daughters Doone and Kinvara.
His travels take him away three or four months at a time. Being away when you have a young family is one of the hardest things, he says. He misses his wife, family and friends.
That’s one of the reasons he and McGregor, whom he met making a movie, became involved in doing work for children’s charity Unicef as they biked around the world because that charity had representatives in all the countries through which the pair were travelling.
Children, he says, are often the ones who suffer when situations are bad.
Later this month, Boorman is back on the road for a very different type of venture with a theatre show that will take him to Middlesbrough, Newcastle and York.
“I’m a little bit nervous, like anyone would be when they’re doing a bit of a road trip,” he says. It all started when I was doing book tours and promotions where you sit and talk to people.
I did the odd festival too. They seemed to go okay and people were interested in listening.”
He tried the show out in Newcastle (although he can’t remember which venue, which doesn’t perhaps give much confidence in his navigation skills on his road trips) and it went well, so a full-scale tour was set up.
As well as talking about how he and McGregor came to embark on their travels and showing unseen footage from their journeys, Dakar Rally veteran Simon Pavey is appearing in a show than ends with the audience grilling Boorman in a Q&A session.
One thing he believes is that anyone can get out and do what he and McGregor have done, or at least a smaller version. “Maybe you can’t take three or four months, but could go off and do a two or three-week trip and have your own experience. People say, ‘isn’t it dangerous?’, and it really isn’t.”
His love of travel can be traced back to his father, film director John Boorman, whose movies include Deliverance, Excalibur, Hell In The Pacific, Emerald Forest and Zardoz.
“As children, we travelled round everywhere with him. because he was away for long periods of time,” he recalls. “I got that sense of travel and adventure from my father. I was dyslexic – still am dyslexic – and as child, I found things very difficult. I think my father realised that in acting and stuff I could express myself.”
As a teenager, he had a starring role as a young boy who goes native in the South American rainforest in the movie Emerald Forest.
“That was full-on and amazing and I loved that,” he says. He admits that the films he chose after that were more about location than anything else.
Before that, when he was only four, he had his first taste of travel and bikes. He was with his father in the US making Deliverance with Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. “I had a very small part in the film – my father said if I sat on the sofa by Jon Voight he’d give me something, a bright red bicycle,” he says.
Could that, I wonder, have been the source of his obsession with motorcycles, something he shares with his pal McGregor and which led to the idea of an adventure on two wheels for the pair of them.
How important is his motorbike to him?
“Just important. Full stop,” he says.
“I suppose it began when I was about seven.
All kids love bikes and cars. But there was a guy in my local village, Tony, who gave me a go on a bike. My first proper motorbike was when I was about 12, but I’d ridden on his and he was the one who really got me into bikes.”
He admits that having an international movie star like McGregor as his travelling companion was a bonus because it helped them get a TV deal for a documentary series following their adventures. “I couldn’t really afford to do it, but with Ewan involved, we got a book deal and that was okay. That meant I could afford to go.
“We both thought what a wonderful opportunity to do this adventure and then, on top of that, we would get to record all of what we are doing. We just thought, ‘how brilliant’. Then the show started to become popular. We were lucky it came out at the right time.”
He resists picking out any favourite places he has visited, saying there are moments in all of them, although does mention travelling through Papua New Guinea and up into highlands only discovered in the Thirties. “We had the most wonderful time, but it’s different in each place you visit and you end up having really magical moments.”
There are places left to visit, including the US, the Middle East and India but, for the present, he’s happy to be doing mundane domestic chores, like the shopping. “It’s very nice to be home for a bit,” says Boorman, before adding the proviso: “Travel is the spice of life.”
■ Charley Boorman Live: Feb 25, Middlesbrough Town Hall (tickets 01642-729652), Feb 26, Newcastle Journal Tyne Theatre (0191-243-1171) and March 8, York Grand Opera House (01904-678703)
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