I’m pleased to say I’ve been confirmed as a speaker at Armchair Adventure Festival 2026.
This is not just another event booking for me. It is a chance to share what survival really looks like when pressure, discomfort, uncertainty and decision-making all collide.
Armchair Adventure Festival 2026 is being held at Mount Edgcumbe Country Park from 23–26 July 2026, and the festival describes itself as the UK’s celebration of adventure travel, with speaker announcements already live for AAF26.
For me, that makes it the right place to talk honestly about what survival teaches beyond the edit, beyond the hype, and beyond the version people see on television.
What I like about Armchair Adventure Festival is that it brings together people who actually care about adventure, challenge, resilience and real stories.
It is not just about polished travel content or staged outdoor branding. It is about people who have done hard things, learned from them, and have something useful to say afterwards.
That matters to me because my background sits across three worlds that do not always get explained properly together:
That is the angle I’ll be bringing to this festival.
I served for 23 years in the British Army, including with 29 Commando Regiment Royal Artillery. My own About page reflects that background and the wider survival, training and media work I now do through my personal brand and through South West Survival.
That military background shaped how I think about:
But television survival creates a different kind of test.
On shows like Naked and Afraid, Naked and Afraid: Apocalypse, Naked, Alone and Racing to Get Home, and Bear Grylls: Wild Reckoning, the challenge is stripped back. My own public pages connect me to those credits, but what matters more than the titles is what those environments actually do to you.
No comfort.
No kit-heavy safety net.
No easy way to hide weakness.
No normal recovery.
That is where survival becomes more than a skills test.
It becomes a test of judgement, attitude, energy management, teamwork and whether you can keep functioning when your body and head both want comfort.
I break a lot of that down in more detail on my own site here:
At Armchair Adventure Festival 2026, I’ll be speaking about the reality behind survival television, the mindset required to operate under pressure, and what actually transfers from military service and extreme environments into everyday life.
That includes:
That is the part I care about most.
Because survival is not just about fire, shelter, water and food.
It is also about:
There is a reason Naked and Afraid became such a big survival format.
It forces people into a brutal question:
What are you actually capable of when the normal world is removed?
I have been through that process myself, so when I talk about it, I am not doing it from the outside. I am not just reviewing television. I am talking about what it feels like when hunger, weather, terrain, poor sleep, discomfort and partner dynamics all start stacking up at the same time.
That is one reason pages like my podcast hub matter. The Survival Debrief Podcast lets me go deeper than television ever can and pull useful lessons out of real experience. My podcast page positions the show around survival, mindset, and experience-led conversations with people who have genuinely been tested.
You can listen here:
Away from television, I run South West Survival.
That is where the lessons become practical.
What I do there is built around taking real-world survival principles and making them useful for:
The goal is not to make everyone into some dramatic TV survival character.
The goal is to help people build:
That same thread runs through this festival appearance.
Survival is not about looking hard for a camera.
It is about staying calm, doing the basics well, understanding your environment, and managing risk when things become uncomfortable.
You can read more here:
Being confirmed as a speaker at Armchair Adventure Festival 2026 matters because it brings the key parts of my work together in one place.
For me, this appearance connects:
That is why I see this as a strong brand asset, not just a diary update.
It helps explain the wider story.
Not just that I’ve been on television.
Not just that I teach survival.
But that the two now support each other in a way that is useful for people who want to learn, book training, hear the deeper stories, or understand what survival really teaches.
The official festival pages currently list AAF26 at Mount Edgcumbe Country Park from 23–26 July 2026, and the festival’s own posts say I’ve been added to the line-up.
Festival links:
To follow more of my work:
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