A peak performance from our favourite adventurer
Not long into Our Everest Challenge with Ben Fogle and Victoria Pendleton (ITV1), Fogle was talking to his two young children, Ludo and Iona, about his looming attempt to climb Everest, back in 2016. “What do your friends say?” he asked. “He’s going to die,” came Iona’s chirpy response.
Even for this most intrepid of fellows, this felt like a sobering moment, and it also drove home what was really quite unusual about this hour-long, ravishingly shot helping of reality TV. True, many viewers will have known that the ever-engaging adventurer did in fact make it to the top of the world’s tallest mountain and return intact. But not all, I suspect; besides which, any ascent of Everest’s 8,848 metres brings with it quite appalling danger, and there was still room for plenty to go very wrong.
As, in fact, it did. To help him fulfil this lifelong dream of his – sponsored, though this was never mentioned – Fogle had chosen as his climbing partner another chum, the retired British cyclist Victoria Pendleton. If anyone could make it, surely it would be this Olympic gold medallist.
But it was not to be. As Dr Sundheep Dhillon – the “altitude expert and mountaineer” who popped up throughout the programme like a well-informed clanging tocsin – revealed, “your sea-level performance is not predictive of how well you’re going to fare on the mountain”. Ominously, he added that longdistance athletes generally manage better than “sprinters”.
And so it proved. Twice Pendleton showed signs of plummeting oxygen levels in her bloodstream and altitude sickness. Having previously heard this likeable, iron-willed woman declare “I’ve been underestimated my whole life”, one felt for her now as, sobbing, she lamented “I think it’s the first time in my life when I feel my body is failing me” before being whisked off the mountain by helicopter.
In the blubbing stakes, however, she was no match for Fogle. His post-pendleton climb boasted some scary vignettes – the sight of him perched, with only his plucky cameraman, on a 45 degree slope, 26,000 feet up, as they awaited reinforcements; the repeated failure of their oxygen regulators. Stir in the thinness of the air, the biting cold and the soul-splintering exhaustion of it all, and this old softie found it hard not to be moved by Fogle’s doing a George from Peppa Pig as he rang his wife, and told the camera, “This is for all those people who were told they couldn’t, they wouldn’t, they shouldn’t”.
Most reasonable of all, though, was his subsequent confession: “I can’t wait to get back. I think I’m done with mountains now.”
Meanwhile, in part two of his new series Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage (Channel 4), the former Turner Prize-winning potter was scrutinising mountains of a different kind: marriage, and divorce. He set the tone by witnessing the preparations for, and actual day of, a real, seraphically beautiful Shinto wedding in Japan, concluding that its fusion of formality and warmth was a lesson for all of us on how to mark “the things that need marking in our lives”.
Rather glossing over the fact that western Christian weddings are not exactly short on regulations either, Perry then returned to Britain to join one couple who were about to get married, and another on the threshold of divorce. How, Perry wondered, could he introduce some meaningful ritual to Ben and Surika’s civil ceremony, the day after their (twohour-long) Hare Krishna one? And how, more ambitiously still, could he do the same for Dillie and Mark’s split?
If this made for uneven television – with what felt like a lot of marriage-guidance-style sharing from the separating couple – Perry’s solutions were nothing if not thoughtprovoking. Dillie (very sympathetic) and Mark (a real jerk, on this evidence) summoned friends to the field where he proposed: they cut in half a Perry-designed flag that depicted them both, whereupon Perry asked the guests to pin it back together.
As for Ben and Surika, Perry made them a sculpture of the happy couple, complete with a built-in, ballot-paperstyle box. Into this, each guest slotted a card on which they had completed the sentence: “The secret of a happy marriage is…” The box was to be broken into at a later date should emergency nuptial counsel be needed. Completely ridiculous – and yet, somehow, also not ridiculous at all.
Our Everest Challenge with Ben Fogle and Victoria Pendleton ★★★★ Grayson Perry: Rites of Passage ★★★