Before he sent a show reel to Channel 4 to be a travel show presenter, Ian Wright did lots of jobs - painting, cycle courier, making jams and jewelry and selling them on his stall in Spitalfields Market, London.

His five-minute video showed him in London's Liverpool Street Station, dropping his bags after slipping on the floor. He hit his head on the camera and shouted: "Here we are in London " Then he tried to change money on the black market and got beaten up. When he was on the toilet, he talked about food and advised visitors to take it easy. Then he got arrested and ended up in jail.

He sent the reel in for a joke but, funnily enough, it got him an interview to present Global Trekker, an adventure tourism TV series.

The job has proven to be longlasting, and he has no plans to quit.

"Never!" he shouts, feigning fury. "It cannot possibly get better than traveling around the world, going to hundreds of different cities in 20 years, meeting the most amazing people you have to fight me for that."

He came to China to shoot season three of his latest show Invite Ian Wright. Produced in conjunction with Discovery, it looks at cities as revealed to him by the locals.

The first stop was Harbin, a chilly Northeastern city that's Heilongjiang's provincial capital. Wright's first day saw him jumping into a river in temperatures as low as -25 C to join local winter swimmers. "Everywhere I go, if someone is going in cold water, I've always got to go in, too," he says.

The 47-year-old is a whirlwind, jumping out of his chair, imitating people and animals he met on the journey. He writes his schedule on the back of his left hand.

"If there is a boxing ring, I will always go for it, and always get beaten up by a woman champion boxer. You know, it makes great TV."

Wright seldom refuses to do mad or dangerous things. He fell off a bull when trying bullfighting in Mexico and survived the lava of a volcano in Vanuatu, but he refused to scare a group of lambs a farmer had just rounded up, because he thought it would be disrespectful.