Lucy Fleming & Simon Williams’ Travel Secrets | Sailing Across the Atlantic at 50

Recorded live at the HoT Podcast Festival in Henley 🎙️

Tanya Rose is joined by acting couple Lucy Fleming and Simon Williams for a wonderfully entertaining conversation filled with extraordinary travel stories, family history and adventures around the world.

Lucy, daughter of Brief Encounter actress Celia Johnson and writer and explorer Peter Fleming, shares stories from her remarkable family history. Her uncle Ian Fleming created James Bond, and Lucy recalls visiting his Jamaican home, GoldenEye, where she sat at the desk where he wrote the Bond novels. She also reveals how she entered a competition to sail around the world, despite not really wanting to, and ended up spending five and a half weeks at sea from Cape Town to Boston, celebrating her 50th birthday along the way.

Simon, best known for his role as James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs, shares why his first visit to New York completely blew his mind, memories of travelling through China and eating oysters straight from the rocks in Oman, and why meeting the people who live in a destination is one of the greatest pleasures of travel.

Together, Lucy and Simon take Tanya from the tea country and wildlife of Sri Lanka to leopard spotting in Rajasthan and a magical New Year’s Day watching the sun rise over the Himalayas.

Plus, Lucy reveals how her father became known as “Professor Nitpick” when Ian Fleming sent him his James Bond manuscripts to read and make notes on, and the couple share the travel advice they’ve picked up from a lifetime of adventures. 

CHAPTERS

00:00 Peter Fleming: traveller, adventurer & wartime deception

00:23 Welcome to Travel Secrets

LIVE00:52 Introducing Lucy Fleming & Simon Williams

02:06 Posting Letters to the Moon & Lucy’s extraordinary family

04:40 Travel Secret #1: New York