Daily Mail - Daily Mail Weekend Magazine
WE REALLY GOT INTO THE SPIRIT…
… ESPECIALLY THE LOCAL WHISKY, SAY THE NEW BATCH OF CELEBS WHO BRAVED RAIN AND BLISTERS FOR A SPIRITUAL AWAKENING IN THE LATEST SERIES OF PILGRIMAGE
Back when former The Apprentice star Nick Hewer was a boy, his loathing for Sunday school was so great he asked his brother to hit him over the head with a hammer to get him out of it. ‘Not too hard,’ he smiles. ‘Just a bump.’
It didn’t work, of course, but the Catholicism he was exposed to at his Jesuit boarding school also failed to make a dent. Instead, Nick was left with a lifelong agnosticism.
All that means that he seems an unlikely candidate for a pilgrimage hundreds of miles long that’s usually taken by devout believers.
But then, we’re talking about the telly version of this traditional journey of devotion, in which celebrities of all faiths – or none – come together to walk, talk and unpeel the layers of their beliefs under the watchful eyes of the BBC cameras.
The formula has proved a hit with viewers, and Nick, 78, was joined on this season’s odyssey by self-described ‘non-conforming pagan’ and interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-bowen, 57; former England cricketer, Monty Panesar, 39, a practising Sikh; Jewish actress Louisa Clein, 42; Muslim comedian Shazia Mirza, 46; Paralympian and lapsed Christian Will Bayley, 34; and former Gogglebox star Scarlett Moffatt, 31, a practising Christian.
The seven pilgrims spent 15 days together, following in the footsteps of the sixth-century Irish monk, Saint Columba, a key figure in early British Christianity.
Starting in Donegal, they travelled through Northern Ireland and over the sea by boat to western Scotland. From there, they made their way to the Highlands before arriving at their final destination, the Inner Hebridean island of Iona, the site of Saint Columba’s most revered monastery.
‘Having seen the other series of Pilgrimage, we felt we might need sun protection, but we were lucky with the weather,’ laughs Laurence. ‘It just got wetter and wetter.’
He refused to forsake his usual natty style though and undertook the entire trip in a selection of jaunty scarves. ‘There were moments where I’m not actually wearing a matching bowler hat, so standards did slip a bit,’ he smiles.
Laurence confides he’s never followed any belief system (when he calls himself a pagan, he says he means ‘country dweller’) despite a brief flirtation with Christianity when he was 11. ‘I tried to hide the Bible from my mum under my bedclothes,’ he recalls. Nick liked having conversations with those from different religions, wondering if they could bring something to bear on his own feelings. What he found instead was less a spiritual awakening, more a reinforcement of the beauty of the natural world. ‘I think that nature is next to God,’ he says. ‘And as long as one has got a sense of beauty and humanity, and carries that with them, that’ll do.’
There were plenty of challenges en route, including the sleeping quarters – Laurence was horrified that accommodation with less than a one-star rating exists.
A stay in a bothy – a Scottish barn with no electricity or running water – proved memorable. ‘I had to rescue a drunk Nick off the bothy floor,’ confides Shazia. However, Nick insists, ‘Imagine, you’re in your 70s and standing on an air mattress in the dark, half-p***ed and your foot gets caught in the sleeping bag... let’s just say I slipped on the slopes of Glenfiddich.’
Naturally, there were some grumpy moments, as well as some debates. ‘Because everybody had different ideas, sometimes the debates became passionate, if not heated,’ explains Louisa. ‘But everybody listened to each other.’
The daughter of a Holocaust survivor, she says that talking openly about being Jewish was very liberating. ‘This show made me feel very proud of who I am. Being able to share some of what being Jewish means to me with these people was a huge gift, and the way in which they reacted was just so joyful and incredibly bonding,’ she adds.
‘Growing up as I did, I know a lot about different religions,’ adds Shazia, who was raised in multicultural Birmingham and attended a Roman Catholic school. ‘But I wanted to be with people of different faiths, 24 hours a day, to be more compassionate, and more tolerant,’ she says. ‘I learnt that, ultimately, not everybody needs faith – and that’s OK.’
One of her other revelations was less profound. ‘I think we were the fattest people ever to go on a pilgrimage because we never stopped eating,’ she says. ‘We ended up fatter than when we started.’
‘I slipped on the slopes of Glenfiddich!’ NICK HEWER
Pilgrimage, Friday, 9pm, BBC2.