RAV’S BIO

Rav Wilding was born in Canterbury, Kent on 16 October 1977 and is the second of five children. His father is Mauritian and his mother is English. After secondary school he took an apprenticeship in construction before joining the British Army at 17. Due to his stature and physical fitness he was selected to undertake parachute training but a broken leg sustained on a training run cut a career in the Airborne unit short and after 4 years he left after medical staff advised him that it would be highly unlikely that his leg would ever be back to full fitness.

On leaving the army in 1999, Rav started working at Harrods store in Knightsbridge as part of the security team. After approximately 9 months at Harrods, Rav’s application to join the Metropolitan Police Service was accepted and he started training school. He joined the service at the start of 2000 and was posted to Peckham in South London. Whilst based at Peckham, one of the busiest boroughs in the UK he was involved in the high profile police investigation surrounding the death of Damilola Taylor. Rav was part of a specialist unit specifically created in the aftermath of the murder where he would work solely on the tough North Peckham estate where he died.

After two years as a Policeman Rav responded to an advert for people to partake in a jungle adventure, to live for three months in an Australian rain forest for a new television programme on Channel 4 called Eden. After numerous auditions and around 50,000 applicants Wilding was picked for the programme and flew out to New South Wales.
After three months in the jungle, Rav returned to Britain and went back to work in the police but this time in to the CID. Working within the CID, Rav was posted to units focusing on robbery, burglary and major investigations as well as a long spell working on a Sapphire unit dealing with rape and sexual assault allegations. He was quickly selected for Detective training and soon became a Detective Constable for the last 6 years of his service. During this time, Rav worked on many high profile cases and was a regular at the Central Criminal Court (Old Bailey) where the most serious hearings were held.

Rav burst on to our screens in 2004 becoming a regular host of the BBC’s ‘Crimewatch’ and took a sabbatical from the Police in 2008 to concentrate on TV work and is now also a regular on the BBC’s One’s ‘The One Show’. Since April 2008 Rav has appeared in various magazines and publications, including full page pieces in editions of Heat and Now Magazine as well as recent appearances on ‘Ready Steady Cook’, ‘Something for the Weekend’, ‘Saturday Kitchen’, ‘Celebrity Masterchef’ as well as appearing on and winning the celebrity edition of ‘The Weakest Link’.
Most recently Rav has been co-presenting a new programme called ‘Missing Live’ shown every weekday morning on BBC One as well as twenty-episode fly-on-the-wall series following the lives of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, ‘Helicopter Heros’ on BBC One.

On 25 August 2009 it was announced that Rav would be taking part in the award winning show, ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ show every Saturday Evening on BBC One.