You may have heard of Ben Southall. He recently beat 35,000 applicants and landed what has been labelled as the Best Job in the World – caretaker of Hamilton Island, on the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia.
He’ll be there for six months, in what from the photos looks like an amazing location and get over £70,000 for the privilege. Pretty clear why it’s been called the Best Job in the World.
How come VB got to meet him?
We got a buzz from a lovely lady who works for the BBC called Jane. She’d been researching the Isle of Wight by reading VentnorBlog and gave us a buzz to see if we could help out.
She’d had an idea for a TV programme, getting hold of Ben and giving him some training for his role … on the Isle of Wight.
(We threw some suggestions towards Jane as to the interesting things around the Island).
All of that lead us to popping down to Steephill Cove at then end of last week to give Ben some tips as to how he can blog and use social media tools like Twitter to keep people around the world in touch with his time on Hamilton Island – part of his role while he’s away.
It’s all being made into a programme that will be shown on the BBC in September.
Our interview
At the end of the filming, we got a chance to find out a little more about Ben and how he got this amazing role.
As you’d expect he’s got a pretty busy life now which started with a media world record carrying out 86 interviews broadcast live within a 24 hours period.
Our chat started in a very flattering way for the Island, with him commenting on Steephill Cove, “The Weather, the environment and the blue ocean almost eclipses what I’m going to in Australia.”
Have a listen to him explaining how he put his application in “as a bit of a joke,” only to find himself in the final 16 and the testing that went on … [audio:http://otw-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/Ben-Southall-Best-Job-in-the-World.mp3]
