Simon Marton spent years as a steward, flying thousands of miles. We find out what life was really like 30,000 miles in the air.

When did you start working for the airline?

I joined the airline industry nearly twenty-five years ago – which instantly makes me feel old. In late 1995, having worked a summer season on the Greek island of Santorini, I had gained a new inner confidence and decided it was time to attempt something new, which combined my childhood love of aircraft and travel with my natural people skills. I felt it was time for reinvention. The thought of working on and around airliners created the magic for me, rather than anything else, and being up in the skies appealed to my sense of adventure. I didn’t dress particularly smartly as a rule, nor did I wear make-up, but I really wanted a change for the better, to improve myself in some way and to go for a job which I thought might fit me, regardless of the intense competition.

And you were successful…

Within five...

Mr. Motivator, aka Derrick Evans, is best known for getting the nation’s hearts racing in the 90s, with his fat-burning fitness routines. Now, at 67, the superhero of breakfast television is back. We meet the man behind the Lycra…

How did you become Mr. Motivator?

For ten years I tried to get onto television, and I kept getting turned down. I’d go to the TV-am studios trying to persuade them, and they’d say it had to be a woman, and she probably had to be blonde. I’d worked in marketing and I knew that marketing is critical with everything, so I looked at the people on television. There was Mad Lizzie who you wouldn’t remember, because all she ever wore were cardigans – they weren’t significant enough for you to remember her. And there was the Green Goddess, who stuck with me because of her green outfit. So I created Mr. Motivator, with the colours and the music, as a way of engaging and empowering people and making them feel good. If I’d worn a black t-shirt and a white pair of ...

I’m lying on my back on a freezing cold concrete garage floor, my breath cursing the cold as I twist my body to get at the bolts that need releasing, skimming my knuckles in the process. I’m underneath the back of my old Harley, sorting out some awkward routine maintenance and on a tight deadline to get the job done. It’s late in the evening, and I’ve got to be on the road first thing in the morning to conduct a funeral several hours away.

These days, I try not to ride sub-zero unless I really have to. The knees and back can’t take it any more. I guess riding somewhere in the region of approaching 500,000 miles, in all weathers, has caught up. The bike is carrying a few scars as well. It’s been a solid workhorse and never really let me down, apart from the time the stator packed up on my way back from Poland which became a bit of an adventure. It’s survived a few scrapes and there’s definitely more corrosion than chrome these days. But I look at this old bike and it’s like a favouri...

A horrific fall of over 800 feet could have ended very differently for mountaineer Richard Tiplady.

Like many of us, and despite having played sport at school, visited gyms as a young man, coached junior football and so on, Richard Tiplady had allowed himself to get ‘lardy.’ Fifteen years of a few too many glasses of wine, coffee and cakes, had seen him slowly get bigger. ‘I tried everything I could to lose weight, apart from eating less, drinking less or doing more exercise’ he says.

Guilt and uneasiness didn’t work as motivating factors, but what finally drove him to do something about his weight was a prolonged period of workplace stress, that in turn caused a chronic pain condition. Having been put on painkillers, he was coping, but he knew that, long term, they were also addictive, and would not provide the solution. But then he discovered that brisk walking was recommended, and that half an hour or an hour’s walk around his local nature reserve meant a pain free night. ‘The...

Dan Walker’s week is full. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, he is presenting Breakfast on BBC1. As well as the early morning shift, that can involve filming something for the show later in the day. Thursday is in principle a quieter day but then again can involve the filming of other programmes. By Friday, he’ll have changed his focus – to preparation for Football Focus, in the studio and then presenting the football programme on Saturday. The week might also include some corporate work, filming for another channel or writing an article. Alongside that there are three kids to look after and a dog to walk, as well as trying to find time to play golf – ‘still chasing the scratch handicap’. 

How, I wondered, would he describe his profession: presenter, journalist, sports journalist? ‘That’s a good question’, he replied. ‘I think I see myself as a broadcaster and a very fortunate one because of the way I am able to straddle the different worlds of news and sport. People sometimes ask...

On the 31 July 2019, Reza Pakravan, an explorer and film maker, became the first person in modern history to have travelled the full length of the Sahel. A belt of land stretching across the southern boundary of the Sahara desert, the Sahel spans the width of Africa, from Senegal to Somalia, and is home to some of the harshest conditions on the planet, where the effects of climate change are most felt and rebel uprisings are common. In this issue, we trace his journey from Mali to Lake Chad: in our next issue, he completes his trek to the Red Sea and discovers the Great Green Wall.

Like many explorers, I have been fascinated by Africa since I was a boy, but felt there were still vast areas of the continent I knew little about.
I wanted to document these forgotten frontiers and tell the story of those who live there, whilst setting myself a new challenge.

Having made a host of incredible journeys in the past, including cycling the Sahara (for which I hold a Guinness World Record)...

A spectacular cinematic rise, followed by an equally dramatic fall from grace: Ben Affleck’s career has had more than its fair share of highs and lows. But with newfound self-acceptance and a rediscovered sense of faith, this once bright young thing has turned his many flaws into future strength.

It’s not been an easy time of late for Ben Affleck. In 2017, the two-time Academy Award-winner hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons after a high-profile relapse into alcoholism. Never one to be far from the prying lenses of the world’s paparazzi, images of Affleck, shabby and sombre-faced, were splashed across the world’s biggest entertainment news outlets.

This proved to be the final straw in his on-again, off-again marriage to fellow Hollywood star and mother of his children Jennifer Garner, with the pair finalising their divorce a year later. And all this occurred against a backdrop of professional instability – from the poor reception of his high-profile turns as Batman/Bruce ...

Shay Cullen is a fighter. He is also a Catholic priest. And he is currently helping a woman, sexually abused by Gary Glitter while she was still a child, to sue the former pop star for compensation.

As the president of the Preda Foundation, Shay Cullen has spent 46 years tracking down sex offenders, getting children away from them, and campaigning to change the law. In the UK, he works with Jubilee Campaign, but he is based in the Philippines, a country which has provided a paradise for paedophiles for many, many years. Having been involved in a successful case to sue another convicted paedophile, Douglas Slade, for his abuse of Filipino victims, Shay has now got involved in the case against Glitter, who abused children in Vietnam. But what makes a man take on a lifetime battle?

How did you get involved in this work in the first place?

When I graduated from secondary school in Ireland, I wanted to see and understand the world beyond Ireland. I was inspired by the virtuous life...