SNOW wonder
Te Radar reveals to Weekend his five favourite things about Antarctica that didn’t make it into his show
Te Radar is mourning the death of Captain Oates — the event itself, and the necessity of cutting it out of his live show, Te Radar’s Antarcticana. “His feet were so destroyed he couldn’t get his boots on. He crawled out in his socks. It was his birthday.”
Known best to most of us as a single quote: “I am just going outside and may be some time,” Lawrence Oates’ sacrifice during Robert Falcon Scott’s fatal expedition to the South Pole came too late to save his teammates, but it’s the little details that fascinate Te Radar. “Oates smuggled five extra tonnes of hay on to the Discovery to feed the Siberian ponies,” he says. “How do you even do that? Really big suitcases?”
Antarcticana is all about the things we don’t know about Antarctica, but in a one-hour Comedy Festival show, even some favourite stories have to be allowed to wander off in their socks. Here are Te Radar’s 5 favourite things that didn’t make the cut:
SNOWBALLS TO AUSTRALIA
“One of the greatest things about Antarctica, says Te Radar, “is the way it inspires people to do things. Inventor Arthur Pedrick was inspired to harvest its abundant frozen fresh water by patenting a system of pipes. Snowballs would be dropped into these pipes from the top of a mountain, reach incredible speeds and be propelled into the heart of Australia’s desert, thereby greening it into arable land that would feed the world. Pedrick also patented a device for allowing only ginger cats into his house. He was an ideas man. A good ideas man? That’s debatable.”
INEXPRESSIBLE ISLAND
“This is an amazing story and one I would have loved to include. Scott’s Northern Party, a group of six men assigned to collect geological samples, were unexpectedly cut off from their rescue ship by early winter. They were forced to carve an ice cave from a snowdrift and winter over. Less than 3m x 4m, rank, dirty and squalid but it beats my house because it had two bathrooms. Yes, they dug two latrines: one for the officers and one for the enlisted men, because Rule Britannia.” The tales of chipping meat off frozen seal carcasses in total darkness, then retrieving the bits from wherever they pinged off to so that they could be cooked, are grim, he says, but hilarious. “The first they’d know of their dinner was being hit in the eye with frozen seal shrapnel. Don’t try that on My Kitchen Rules.”
REVERSE MERMAIDS
Anywhere mysterious and inaccessible is going to bring out the cryptozoologists and the conspiracy theorists. Spend any time online and you’ll read that Antarctica is actually just a rim of ice mountains encircling a flat earth. Or it harbours aliens, dinosaurs or reverse mermaids.
“Early Japanese whalers reported sightings of a white creature with human legs but the head and torso of a large fish. They called the Ningen, which I can only presume is Japanese for ‘hilariously bad at swimming’ or ‘worst mermaid ever’.”