Botting was the inspiration behind and writer of the 1972 film The Black Safari,[2] a role-reversal parody of English explorers, with Africans touring England, shown in the BBC 2 documentary series The World About Us.
He went on to study English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford (graduating in 1954),[3] during which time he undertook a pioneering exploration of the little-known island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean.
During Oxford and post-Oxford years, he volunteered and worked in a variety of positions, including as a paramilitary ambulance unit member during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, as a private tutor to the Crown Prince of Nepal, as a worker in a leper colony in Biafra, and as a trainer for ex-head-hunter tribes undergoing re-training in the Venezuelan rainforest.
As a BBC Special Correspondent to the former USSR, he reported news events such as the first cosmonauts' homecoming and Fidel Castro's state visit, and was the first person from west of the Iron Curtain since the Russian Revolution of 1917 to travel voluntarily among the nomadic reindeer tribes of Arctic Siberia and the Gulag.
Among his other occupations was that of writing: Botting wrote a series of Time Life Books on the Second World War, early aviation and maritime vessels.