Ed Stafford joins a family, including a toddler, on a deserted island without food or water

Ed Stafford, a survival specialist on television, will face one of his most extreme survival challenges when he "leaves his family," including his 21-month-old son, on a deserted island without food, without water or knife.

Instead of spending 60 days sleeping in the streets of the United Kingdom, Stafford will have to use all his survival skills learned from previous experiences to keep his family safe.

Ed and his fellow explorer, Laura Bingham, will have to return "to the basics" when they will be left on the Indonesian island with their toddler son, Ran, with just the clothes that they will wear. next month.

Speaking exclusively to the Mirror about the Discovery TV show, Ed said: "This is not without risks, but I think it will be a very positive thing.

"Surviving alone is one thing, but in real life you would have dependents. So the concept we proposed to Discovery was to do a show with Laura and Ran.

"When you have a baby, you are told that you need so much – this type of stroller, this type of pacifier for your model, this type of toy.

"But if you lived in an indigenous tribe, you would have none of these attributes of the western world.

"So the concept of what we are about to do as a family is to settle on an island and see if we can live without everything, literally from scratch, so no water, no knife, no food, literally goes in the clothes we are standing in.

"I am convinced that I have enough survival skills to look after a small baby, and Laura is more than capable of taking care of herself.

"And it will be an incredible opportunity for all of us, as families, to live the kind of survival.

"I do not think it's realistic that only one man is on TV fighting in the chest saying," Look how hard I am. "In a real survival situation, you have people who depend on you. "

Laura, 26, is no stranger to survival in extreme conditions after leading the very first expedition to cover the Essequibo River (620 miles) from Guyana, from sea to sea, only eight months after gave birth to Ran.

On the new family challenge, she added, "This will be an extreme test for us and our strength, an extreme test of our individual skills and it will really bring us back to the basics.

"I hope to be able to get by and do the hand drill (light a fire with sticks) and become an independent woman.It will be interesting to see how this evolution unfolds, which badumes more the role of guardian. children or if we are very equal with all that.

"It will be like the Swiss Robinson family," she says with a smile.

I met Laura at her family a few weeks before the last televised challenge of Ed – 60 Nights on the Streets – broadcast on Channel 4.

Smiling, she opens the heavy studded door of her house while two plush dogs the size of a pony push her against her legs.

It's her birthday, but the intrepid explorer, the world recorder, the author of aspiring children's books and her mother have agreed anyway an interview today – one session pencil in pencil between lighting and fitness clbades.

And learning to light fires with salvage sticks can be a very important skill to master for Laura and Ed's new TV show.

But if anyone can succeed in taking up such a challenge, he can.

In February, Laura led the first-ever sailing expedition to Essequibo, a 20-km-long river in Guyana, just eight months after giving birth to Ran.

And despite the physical pain of her absence (compared to slicing and intestinal discharge), she completed her mission with fellow explorers Ness Knight and Pip Stewart.

Her husband Ed, 43, made it famous as soon as he became the first person to cross the Amazon, filming the exhausting journey in which he had to deal with an inhospitable environment and sometimes hostile inhabitants who kept it standing with rifles, bows and arrows.

He has since shot several television series with Discovery Channel, including Naked and Marooned and First Man Out.

The couple already has an experience of raising a baby in the wild.

When Ran was 10 months old, he had already been to 14 countries, including in the remote jungles of Guyana, when Ed brought him to visit on his expedition to Laura.

And although they believe that nature can be a statistically safer place to raise a child than to drive it on British roads, even some contact with nature is too close for the family to be at home. easy.

Ed pales a little while he remembers walking a jaguar into his encampment in Guyana – directly on the area where Ran would have slept in a bed on the forest floor if they did I had not left a few hours earlier.

Ed had decided to move away from the expedition to wait for the next stop in a nearby colony providing better shelter and shade when the fat cat would join the camp.]

"Our baby was almost eaten by a jaguar, we can laugh now but it was scary," he said.

While Laura offers drinks in their charming country kitchen, plants cascading from the ceiling and plant cuttings jostle to the light of deep stone window sills, a tall man with bright blue eyes opens the door behind.

With a shy smile, he wishes Laura a happy birthday and hands him a box of chocolates.

"It's 'Mike'," she says. Ed met him filming in London and invited him back to help paint his house.

Ed has just returned from filming 60, 4 days on the street, Channel 4, where he lived for 60 days without food, water or shelter in Manchester, Glasgow and London.

The three-part C4 documentary examines the current homelessness epidemic in Britain.

Laura said, "Ed is a very good character judge, so when he texted saying," Do not you mind if I bring back someone? " I was like, "yes, yes you can."

"He met 'Mike & # 39; on the first or second day they started a conversation and Lee took him under his wing. He was essentially his "in", his tour guide on the streets.

"So when they finished filming, Ed asked him to come here to help us with the painting of the house.

"Mike is amazing, he is really, very respectful, really non-imposing, he rides and does the painting job for us – he's a really nice guy, without strength."

Ed added, "I told him that the house was like a retirement home and that there would be a lot of space."

But after only 60 days on the streets, eating fast and sleeping on the street, Ed, who was previously healthy, had heart, thyroid and bowel problems.

Laura said, "Ed is an extremely incredible man. He is like an emotional sponge, he feels a lot of pain and I do not know if he has absorbed a lot of pain in the street.

"He has a runny bowel after eating pure junk food for two months, so from a health point of view, he needs to recover and he is on a health mission."

Ed works with a vegetable protein company called Nuzest to repair his runny gut.

"All his levels were off, he was 100% on the road to cardiovascular disease, his thyroid was not working and all his blood tests showed everything you did not want in your body.

"And he has it all by eating junk food for two months.

"We talked to you (Mike) after getting the results and you said," I do not want those blood tests if that's what happens in two months. "

Mike, who did not want to be identified by his real name, said, "Yeah, mine would be through the roof!"

Then, as he was at the right time, a courier calls out the door to pick up a machete for a photo shoot to accompany a magazine article on Ed's favorite article, which is of course a very large functional blade that would cost about 19 dollars in Brazil.

"It's very rusty," he says, checking that tape is covering the blade to avoid slicing the future less experienced knife handlers.

More and more guests then call the door full of flowers, craft gin and a small silver bee key ring.

"I love bees," said Laura smiling, before the gardener and beekeeper retrieves her precious seed box to share her plan to plant more bee-friendly flowers in their garden. this year.

"I'm calling Ed my bee," Laura said with a smile.

The couple met while Laura was planning to travel South America without money.

"I emailed him for advice, he searched me in Google and said: 'I'll find you.'"

Ed smiles: "You mentioned on the front line of your email that you were an old model, that's why I searched you on Google."

"My biggest campaign has been bad psoriasis, just in case you're wondering," said Laura, smiling broadly.

"They said that they wanted to reserve me because I had" excellent facial expressions ". They only told me what it was after I arrived, so it was too late.

"I mostly worked in real life.

"I was told that if I wanted to book appropriate things, I had to lose a lot of weight to make up for the fact that I was not pretty enough.

"I had size eight but I was told to lose three inches from everywhere. Bicker and drugs are the only way to do it, so I chose to quit and be healthy.

"Now, I punish myself more during expeditions," she joked.

The couple lived in London before selling their Battersea carpet and settled in an old large country house in the pretty village of Hallaton, in Leicestershire, near Ed's parents.

Ed wanted to move and Laura "had never been a crusher of dreams" so she nodded.

Born in Stoke Charity, a small village outside Winchester, life in the country was not too difficult for her and she spent all her valuable time raising chickens and bees and cultivating her garden.

"I'm much happier with plants and chickens and growing vegetables," she said.

"If the apocalypse happens, everyone can come here. I'll grow vegetables and Ed can teach survival skills. "

The couple bought their country after falling in love with its rowdy rooms and its giant garden that extends to a lake and a forest.

The former owners of the house have lived happily for 60 years. They died at the age of 93 and 94, a few months apart.

The story of the house seemed therefore auspicious for a new couple.

A few months later, Laura gave birth to Ran in their bedroom, after the two lower floors were reinforced with steel joists to make sure her delivery basin did not drip through. floors during work.

"Ran is now the only person with Hallaton on her pbadport," she said.

"And he's the dictator of the house," laughs Ed.

But despite the joyous and dynamic activity of their home, the last few months have not been quite easy.

Laura had a miscarriage last year while she was pregnant with twins of three and a half months.

She said: "It was a molar pregnancy in which two sperm fertilized an egg, so there was an extra set of chromosomes and I had eclampsia in early September.

"My body did not recognize that babies were dead and the placenta was developing like a tumor.

"If I did not have medical badistance, like many women I met on my travels, it would have been fatal. One in seven women die worldwide during pregnancy and childbirth. This makes you extremely grateful to have western medicine.

"I felt very bad with this pregnancy. I could barely get up from the couch, I started bleeding at 8 weeks and I was completely vulgar towards Ed.

"I think that he was relieved to go filming. He said, "Good bye, I'll be homeless for two months instead of being here," Laura jokingly said.

"I'm almost in a good position now again after that.

"I'm not a patient and I hate having to wait until I get pregnant, but we have to wait until my hormone levels are normal again.

"So we will continue our adventure in a month or two, then we will try again.

Laura is friendly but focused, sliding from time to time in a charming stupidity or making self-disparaging jokes.

She is beautiful and does not make up a face that nature has created so perfectly that it no longer needs to be improved.

Her husband is exceptionally open to a television personality, with a light shadow and unchecked emotion and a thought that illuminates and darkens her face like a climate change. This openness and this ability to connect with people is one of the things that make it so nice on the screen.

Laura has been working on her first children's book series on "real adventures", which is expected to be published by Award in June.

"I hate the idea that kids grow up thinking that their self-esteem comes from the size of your cleavage, the size of your skirt or the number of guys watching you every day.

"I want books to teach little girls and boys that self-confidence comes from within, from what you can achieve in life and from the kindness you can give to others."