The penguin that followed a teacher home

Lives Less Ordinary

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While visiting friends in Uruguay, British teacher Tom Michell saw a penguin covered in oil and tar on a beach. Tom cleaned the bird as best he could and then tried to release it. The penguin refused to return to the wild, it just followed Tom around. So he took it home, smuggling the animal across the border into Argentina where he lived and worked at a boarding school. The penguin became a part of his life, and the school's life - with a remarkable influence on everyone who came into contact with it.

Later Tom entertained his children, friends and family with tales of the penguin. He put those stories into a bestselling book, The Penguin Lessons, now the subject of a film starring British comedian Steve Coogan.

Lives Less Ordinary is a podcast from the BBC World Service that brings you the most incredible true stories from around the world. Step into someone else’s life and expect the unexpected. Each episode a guest shares their most dramatic, moving, personal story. Listen for unbelievable twists, mysteries uncovered, and inspiring journeys - spanning the entire human experience. These are stories that stay with you. Our guests come from every corner of the globe: from Burundi to Beverly Hills, New Zealand to North Korea, Rajasthan to Rio. And their stories can be about anything: tales of survival, humour or resilience. From the mind-blowing account of the Japanese man trapped in his own reality TV show, to the Swedish women rescued from lions by a tin of spam. It’s life’s wild side, in stereo.

Lives Less Ordinary is brought to you by the team behind Outlook, the home of true life storytelling on BBC World Service radio for nearly 60 years. Got a story to tell? Send an email to [email protected] or message us via WhatsApp: 0044 330 678 2784

Presenter: Asya Fouks Producer: Hetal Bapodra

You can read our privacy notice here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5YD3hBqmw26B8WMHt6GkQxG/lives-less-ordinary-privacy-notice

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, podcast fan. Consider this your invite to the UK's biggest podcasting party. We're heading to Sheffield from the 4th to the 6th of July for the BBC Sounds Fringe at the Crosswires Festival. We'll be joined by some of the biggest names in podcasting, including Sarah Cox, Charlie Hedges, Russell Kane, and some bloke called Greg James doing his Radio 4 show called Rewinder.
0:23.0	You can watch live shows of your favorite podcasts, and the best part is free.
0:28.0	To book your free tickets, go to crossedwires.org-slash fringe.
0:32.9	I've got a question for you that I bet you'd never thought about before.
0:36.8	How would you smuggle a penguin on your way home from holiday?
0:43.1	I was just going to walk straight through customs and say, nothing to declare.
0:46.6	What I hadn't anticipated was the penguin was going to squawk just as I was going through.
0:51.6	So I was marched off into a little room and told that I couldn't take the penguin through
0:56.0	because, you know, it would be illegal
0:57.5	to import exotic livestock and so on.
1:03.4	Hi, I'm Osie Fuchs, and from the BBC World Service,
1:07.0	this is Lives Less Ordinary,
1:08.8	home of unexpected human stories.
1:16.5	Fifty years ago, Tom Michelle crossed paths with a penguin, setting off a chain of events that would reverberate through the decades.
1:24.2	While working abroad in his early 20s, Tom saved the penguin from a miserable death,
1:29.0	covered in oil and tar on a Uruguayan beach, and his life has been bound to him ever since.
1:35.4	Picking up a penguin and finding that I'm sitting here 50 years later puts me in mind of chaos theory.
1:42.2	There's a story that says something like, you know, if a butterfly
1:45.0	flaps its wings in Tokyo, this leak can lead directly to a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico.
1:53.0	And in the same kind of way, I feel that the picking up of the penguin, that the ripples that
1:58.4	set out for that have led to a tsunami in my life now,
2:02.9	where every time I pick up an email or something, something more is happening about this penguin.
	...

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