Twenty Twenty for Channel 4

Exec Producers: Ruth Kelly, David Sutton, Julia Hunt

Editor: Rob Trela

Episode one is on tonight at 9pm on Channel 4

Rob Trela worked across this brand-new six-part documentary series from Twenty Twenty productions. World-renowned explorer and former British Army captain Ed Stafford sets up an extreme survival school that will put struggling modern dads and their children through some of the toughest outdoor challenges on the planet.

Ed Stafford believes modern dads in the UK are too soft and risk averse. He believes his job as a father is to challenge and test his family to try and strengthen them. He has decided to take his wife Laura and their three children to live in the jungle in Costa Rica, while there he will establish an extreme wilderness adventure school.  

The series follows several struggling, out-of-their-comfort-zone British dads, each bringing one of their kids with them while they live in the heart of the jungle. They sleep in home-made shelters, catch and cook their own food, dig toilets, build fires and dodge spiders, snakes and scorpions. All while dealing with boiling heat and high humidity. On top of that, they tackle a wilderness challenge specially designed by Ed to test both their individual characters and their relationships with one another.

In the series press release, Ed Stafford said: “Increasingly the odds are stacked against you as a parent. You find yourself having to swim against the tide to simply do what’s best for your kids. For me connection is everything; this isn’t about parenting techniques – that stuff is instinctive – rather this is an extreme fast-track to a deeper connection between dads and their children in a modern world where that is more tenuous and harder to achieve than ever.”