‘If only Harry were next in line, said a source close to Harry’ – Omid Scobie’s Endgame, digested by John Crace
It was a warm September day in 2022. Expectation hung heavy in the air and around the green and verdant lawns. I was attending a remedial writing course when the phone rang. It was the call I had long feared. I immediately donned my black polyester suit.
“Is that you, Omid?” said a frail yet familiar voice. One that I recognised immediately.
“It is indeed, your majesty,” I replied, throwing myself prostrate.
“I have some very important news for you,” the queen continued. “I’m afraid I haven’t been feeling at all well recently. Seeing that halfwit Liz Truss on Tuesday was the final straw. The country has gone to the dogs. So, I have decided that I am going to die at three o’clock this afternoon. You are the first person I’ve told and I would like you to keep the news to yourself until I can get hold of Charles. Goodbye and good luck with your terribly important book.”
My head literally reeled, unable to grasp the momentousness of this momentous occasion. The world was rocked on its axis. It was the end of a historic era. Cliche after cliche tumbled into my head. And on to the page.
Later that day, as I sat beside the late queen’s bed in Balmoral, Charles entered the room. The Diana killer himself. I thought of the country I loved so much. We all knew Charles would be a crap king. Merely keeping the throne warm. But for whom?
The monarchy was in great peril, rocked by accusations of bullying, misogyny and racism. But not by me. It’s not my fault the Dutch edition named those with unconscious bias.
***
Two days earlier, among the heathered valleys – how much more of this do you want? – Paul Burns had played a lonely lament on his bagpipes. Now, there was just the bustle of the royal family paying their respects. Tim Laurence. The finest vice-admiral of his generation.
But where was Harry? Left to hire a private jet on his own. No one even thought to book one for him. This, sadly, was indicative of the constant bullying of him and Meghan by the royals. Even at the funeral, they cut lonely figures as the king and I led the country in mourning.
Within days, Charles had launched a countrywide PR campaign. He was a new monarch for a new era. The sun was very bright. The king was all smiles as he did a royal walkabout. “About bloody time,” he told a group of wellwishers. “At last, I am the king.” Yet the mood couldn’t hold. Charles’s legendary petulance was evident when he cursed his pen with a torrent of abuse.
More was to follow. Soon, Buckingham Palace was riven with scandal when a 112-year-old courtier asked a black woman where she came from. Soon, the only question on everyone’s mind was: who were the royals who ruined Harry and Meghan’s lives by asking what their baby might look like? Now, as the Dutch version has been published, I can tell you that it was Charles and that cow Kate. Horrible, horrible attitudes that have no place in a modern society, said sources very close to Harry and Meghan.
It was raining outside and the grounds were very wet, so William tried to stay indoors as he went into crisis mode. The house of Windsor was in more danger than ever. The Caribbean tour, which I had been covering for NBC Useful Idiot Hour, had been a disappointment. Worse still, it was becoming increasingly apparent that I had no insights and could only recycle old rubbish for this book. But needs must. I was what the country expected.
“Do you want to see your grandchildren?” sobbed Harry.
“Not really,” said Charles. “I’m a bit busy this afternoon, opening a fridge.”
Typically unconscious racist behaviour.
***
It had been one of those days when it had been neither sunny nor raining. It was the day of the queen’s platinum jubilee. A day those of us in the royal press corp will never forget, as we were sworn to silence after Kate deliberately tipped a nine-year-old page girl over the balcony, sending her headlong to her death. And just because she was hogging all the cameras. Typical Kate. Luckily, Elton John saved the day with a magnificent rendition of I’m Still Just About Standing. The same Elton John who refused to play for Charles’s coronation.
Inside the palace, no one was aware of what the weather was as I began another dreary chapter repeating every royal story that had ever been printed in the Sun and the Daily Mail. And I can exclusively reveal that all the royals spend every morning on the phone to quarter-witted royal correspondents such as me to brief against their royal rivals. Charles dithers as Michael Fawcett squeezes out an inch of toothpaste on to his brush while he sits on the lavatory, or something.
By the way, I can also exclusively reveal that Pervy Prince Andrew is a real problem for the family. I can distinctly remember the crackle as he walked across the frosty gravel to be stripped of his titles by the queen. Sources haven’t yet been able to confirm whether he is a fully fledged racist or not. But since he has been accused of sexual assault and then paid to silence witnesses, there is no reason to suppose he isn’t.
The weather was quite weathery as Charles lurched in indecision. A man who can’t make up his mind whether he is indecisive or not.
William, meanwhile, was plotting his own ascension. William is actually a complete bastard. Just in it for himself. Hates Harry, who only wants to serve. And I am not usually one for tittle-tattle, but we shouldn’t forget his friendship with the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley. Worse, he couldn’t even bring himself to talk to Meghan when she interrupted him. That is the measure of his bigotry. Plus, he is really lazy. If only Harry were next in line to the throne, said a source close to Harry.
***
The sun rose in the west over the Pacific. Inside the Sussexes’ idyll in Montecito, the Sussexes were leading an idyllic life. Meghan was spending time with the children, reading them nursery rhymes rewritten for the modern generation before going off to do pilates. The rest of the day she spent perfecting her image and complaining to the media that no one was breaking her self-imposed media blackout.
In the meantime, Harry was doing his daily two hours of unconscious bias training. Later, he didn’t say to me, because I can categorically state that he and Meghan didn’t help me in any way with this book: “It’s all so unfair, Omid. I’m only a jobbing millionaire. It’s terrible that, after I left the royals, I’ve had to do things for myself. Charles has even taken away one of my houses. All I want to do is protect my family by invading their privacy. Have you read Spare? I haven’t. It’s a bit long. And it hasn’t got enough pictures.”
But let’s leave our much maligned prince there for a while. Happy loading the dishwasher as he and Meghan try to ignore the bigotry that is all around them. As they try to come to terms with the gross injustice that most people couldn’t really give a toss about them one way or the other.
So, as the California apples ripen on the trees and Meghan and Oprah feed the multicultural chickens, let us turn our attention to Kate. What a cow! Imagine having her as queen. It’s unthinkable. The monarchy will never survive Waity Katey, as sources close to everyone once called her. Let’s get real. Her parents are dead common and her mum, Carole, practically pushed her on William. Sent her to St Andrews to bag the prince.
Well, good luck to her. You did it, gal. But her lack of grace shines through. Not only has she killed countless minor royals who have tried to upstage her, she once stepped out of a car several seconds ahead of Meghan. And then deliberately stood in a puddle to soak her rival. Yet the country lets her get away with it. Thank God for sources not close to Meghan for speaking their truth to me. Yet all the while Meghan says nothing, not wanting to rock the boat, her only desire to do her duty towards a country she once called home.
A moment’s pause as dusk falls and we remember Diana. How well I
remember her not saying to me, as I wasn’t even born: “Oh, Omid, I do wish Charles had loved me as I loved him. All I wanted was for him to rule over an undivided country. And for my two sons not to fall out. Although if they do, it will be William’s fault, as I’ve always suspected he’s a wrong ’un.”
It was a windy spring day as Camilla shagged her way through the home counties during her teens and early 20s. There was no country seat where she didn’t leave a pair of knickers. But she was happy to bide her time and now she is queen. And what a malign influence she is, chain-smoking her way through idle afternoons that are only interrupted by a game of draughts. Her one pleasure is to leak unfavourable stories about Harry and Meghan to her stooge at the Daily Mail.
So, as night falls and the stars twinkle over Buckingham Palace, there we must leave our dysfunctional royal family. A weak king, a plotting Prince of Wales and a saviour on the other side of the Atlantic. Barring a miracle, this is the endgame for the house of Windsor. Harry has even been snubbed by the Duke of Westminster, with no invitation to his wedding forthcoming. Hold the front pages. However will we cope?
Digested read, digested: endless.
• Depraved New World by John Crace (Guardian Faber, £16.99) is out now. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
of research and two spent in production, their team consulted the legal representation on both sides, the investigators, the psychiatrists and a handful of on-site civilians to make sense of a tragedy that still feels senseless to legions of fans. Lennon’s vocal advocacy for peace adds another layer of bitter bafflement to the act of violence that ended his life, an unknowability that Coldstream seized as his starting point.
“The tension in the story was in trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle to figure out what was happening in Chapman’s mind,” Coldstream explains. “We wanted to lay out the facts from the prosecution and the defense, without dramatizing it. It doesn’t need to be mysterious. Everyone knew Chapman killed him. The questions were: what drives a man to do this, and how is the justice system to deal with him?”
In the wake of the fateful shooting in 1980, everyone wanted to gain some deeper understanding along these lines, and they laid out an angry-young-man narrative to serve the same explanatory purpose as a creation myth. Chapman’s oft-cited obsession with The Catcher in the Rye cast him as a self-styled Holden Caulfield, alienated by the hypocrisy of the “phoney” Lennon calling on the people of the world to imagine no possessions while he enjoyed fabulous wealth in his own life. Delusional and disturbed, he was ill-equipped to process the moral disappointments of the adult world, and he could only exorcise his torment by inflicting it on as many others as possible. (That’s certainly how Jared Leto played it in the dramatization Chapter 27, which Coldstream looked into and found “actually quite good”.)
Through cold calls and old-fashioned shoe-leather research, Coldstream was able to locate figures with more intimate insights into Chapman’s psychology, key among them lawyer the David Suggs. He attempted to steer his client toward an insanity defense as the last hope of avoiding jail time, a course of action Chapman seemed ready to pursue before unexpectedly changing course to a confession of full lucidity and acceptance of his sentence.
Suggs speculates on the meaning of culpability and remorse to Chapman, two concepts thrown into sharper relief by one of the character witnesses that Suggs’s team tracked down all those years ago. The most illuminating perspective comes from Chapman’s childhood friend Vance Hunter, who recalled the years of physical and verbal abuse Chapman suffered at the hands of his father. Hunter traces the line connecting the destabilizing effects of this emotional pressure cooker to Chapman’s future dalliances with psychedelics, born-again Christianity and, ultimately, murder.
“I didn’t come to this with any particular preconceptions,” Coldstream says. “I didn’t know much about [Chapman], at first. It was interesting, hearing the firsthand accounts of police, psychiatrists, and getting their reactions. But it wasn’t until we started talking to his childhood friends that he came into three dimensions as a person. We didn’t set out to make a film rehabilitating Mark David Chapman. It’s not like we believe there was a miscarriage of justice or anything. But empathy and understanding are more interesting to me. You start to see the factors involved in triggering his mental health issues.”
Even within the purview of cold hard facts, Coldstream faced some delicate decisions about how to portray a widely reviled villain. To extend sensitivity without exoneration, he presents an accumulation of viewpoints to lay out the hurt that Chapman both harbored and spread. A news clip from the scene at the Dakota catches an inconsolable fan retreating into denial, stammering that Lennon would never leave them with the quavering certainty of those awaiting Christ’s second coming. (The doc also looks into the odder outgrowths of this ardor, such as the conspiracy theories pushing the line that CIA handlers used psychotropic drugs to induce Chapman to kill.) More poignant still is the interview with Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s young son Sean, in which the fatherless child explains that he knew the fallen icon and genius simply as “Dad”.
Coldstream recognizes that “if you’re under 40, this is all ancient history,” his own kids’ knowledge of Beatle lore limited to the broad strokes. But the generation responsible for popularizing the concept of the parasocial relationship should have no trouble appreciating how, as he says, “people from all walks of life had projected their own values onto this person who’d given them something to believe in, someone who inspired them.” The series puts this idea forward as the closest it comes to an answer for its irresolvable inquiry, that Chapman’s imagined connection to Lennon made the perceived betrayal too personal to bear. Concluding with Sean’s soft-spoken grief gives Coldstream’s approach a resonant note of lamentation – neither absolving nor damning Chapman, but conveying sorrow that he had to endure all he did, and couldn’t find any other channel for his pent-up agonies.
“When you hear [Chapman] in prison trying to make sense of it all, of himself, you feel a natural inclination toward some sympathy,” Coldstream says. “At the same time, he’s done a terrible thing, and we had a responsibility to reflect that … But one of Lennon’s fans articulates really nicely how amongst all the furor around his death, his life was about peace. Forgiveness versus retribution, we know which side John would’ve been on.”
John Lennon: Murder Without a Trial is available on Apple TV+ on 6 December
dropped him off at Montevideo airport, along with his mother and younger sister (his older sister, Graciela, stayed home). Due to bad weather, the flight touched down early in Mendoza in Argentina, where the team stayed overnight. The pilots delayed for much of the next day (and were jeered by some of the rugby team for doing so), but the plane had been leased from the Uruguayan air force and the law forbade it from being on Argentinian soil for more than 24 hours. They boarded at 2pm and took off shortly afterwards. It was the worst time of day to fly over the Andes, with the afternoon’s warm air rising to create atmospheric instability.
When Parrado thinks about the flight now, he is struck by his naivety. “Today, I would never go near that aeroplane,” he says. “A Fairchild FH-227D, very underpowered engines, full of people, completely loaded, flying over the highest mountains in South America, in bad weather. I mean, no way.”
The plane took off from Mendoza on Friday 13 October, a fact that wasn’t lost on the rugby team, who joked about the date’s unlucky symbolism. On board were 45 people – the team, friends, family and crew, as well as a stranger who had paid for a seat so she could get to a wedding. Flying direct over the Andes wasn’t possible. The plane’s maximum cruising altitude was 6,858 metres (22,500 feet); Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the range, is 6,960 metres. Instread, they would follow a U-shaped route: 100 miles south, then into the Andes and over Planchon Pass, where the ridges are lower, before heading north to Santiago. The flight should have taken 90 minutes.
An hour or so into the flight, the inexperienced co-pilot misjudged his position – most likely due to cloud cover or miscalculating headwinds. He turned the aircraft north too early and headed deeper into the Andes. Unaware of his error, he began the descent to land.
The Fairchild entered thick fog. The steward told the passengers to fasten their seatbelts. Severe turbulence shook the plane. It hit an air pocket and dropped what felt like hundreds of feet. Panchito elbowed Parrado next to him and pointed outside to the mountain, perilously close to the wing tip. Parrado remembers only flashes: the realisation they shouldn’t be that close, some shouts, the worried faces of his mother and sister. Then the plane began climbing, climbing, climbing, its engine screaming, its fuselage vibrating violently. “I heard this sound, like an implosion,” Parrado says, “like a Formula One car hitting a wall headon.” The sky opened above him. He was thrown forward in his seat. Then: “I died without realising I was dying. I went into a very black piece of, I don’t know what … of the universe?”
Parrado’s peers would later fill him in. The pilots had tried to lift the plane over an oncoming mountain, but the belly smashed into the ridge. The wings broke away. The plane’s left propeller cut through the fuselage. The tail snapped off at roughly the point where Parrado was sitting. The fuselage tobogganed down the mountain at terrifying speed. When it stopped, the cabin seats were flung forward, ripping through their anchors and folding into one another, crushing several passengers.
Those who could immediately worked through the wreckage to help the injured and the trapped. Perez, the team captain, took charge. Gustavo Zerbino and Canessa, both medical students, did what they could; bandaging fractured bones with strips of clothing and cooling them in the snow. They found the pilot, trapped in the crumpled cockpit. Before he died, he told them they had passed Curicó; they were at the western limits of the Andes. Back in the fuselage, a makeshift wall was constructed from suitcases, seats and plane fragments to shelter from the blistering winds. They covered any holes with snow. Of the 45 on board the flight, 33 survived, and 32 huddled together on the first night.
Parrado was originally presumed dead, which turned out to be a blessing. “They left me in the snow. They didn’t give me any water. They didn’t hydrate me.” Neuroscientists would later tell him that the cold and dehydration stopped his head injury swelling and killing him. Eventually, one of his friends saw enough life in Parrado to warrant pulling him closer into the fuselage and the rest of the group.
From the moment he woke up, there wasn’t a single moment Parrado didn’t feel close to death. The group were more than 3,350 metres up in the Andes, where temperatures can hit -35C. Blizzards raged constantly and the air was so thin it was possible to be out of breath just standing still. The sun blinded and blistered, reflecting off an endless white. One wrong step could lead to being hip-deep in snow.They had no coats, no blankets, no specialist mountaineering equipment of any kind.
What surprised Parrado most was the unbearable thirst. “You need water permanently. You dehydrate five times faster at that altitude than at sea level. And there’s no water, so you have to eat snow.” It was so cold it burned their throats and cracked their lips.
The nights were brutal. The makeshift wall never fully protected them from the wind; the cloth coverings they had ripped from the seats offered little comfort from the cold. Their clothes froze. They punched each other’s arms to improve circulation. They shivered and their teeth chattered so much it was impossible to talk. They huddled together and sought warmth in one another’s breath. “Imagine how small you become that you look for that heat,” says Parrado. Sometimes, all he could do was count the seconds until morning. They would wake up with frost in their hair.
Hope dwindled. On the fourth day they saw a plane overhead, but from that height the white fuselage of the wreckage was invisible to the pilot. On the fifth morning, three boys tried to climb the mountain, crafting snowshoes from cushions tied to their feet with seatbelts. The challenge was too great and they returned by the afternoon. Susy died in Parrado’s arms on the eighth day. At the time, he felt very little. “I learned that at those moments my brain didn’t react to anything that was outside survival. I couldn’t cry. I didn’t feel sorrow.” He buried her the following morning.
Starvation became a real possibility. Some had tried eating leather from torn bits of luggage. They had crashed with the bare minimum: some chocolate, nuts, sweets, crackers, fruit, jars of jam, three bottles of wine and some liquor. Meals would consist of one square of chocolate, or the equivalent. Parrado took three days to eat one chocolate covered peanut. After a week, he knew what had to be done. One night, he turned to his friend Carlitos and told him he was prepared to eat meat from the bodies outside.
“I didn’t have any doubts. I had arrived at the conclusion of my thoughts very clearly. No doubt. This is the only way out,” he says. “Not knowing when you’re going to eat again is the worst fear of a human being. The most primal fear.”
When the conversation was opened up to the group, the debate lasted all afternoon. There were a few holdouts, but most agreed with Parrado. A small group left the fuselage with some glass to cut the meat off. Some pledged their bodies to the others if they died. One of the boys, Roy Harley, had managed to get a transistor radio working, and on day 11 they heard a broadcast saying the rescue attempt would be called off. Everyone started eating after that. “Everybody in that situation … you would have arrived at the same thought. And it’s easier than you think.”
Parrado wanted to leave as soon as he knew the rescue team wasn’t coming, but his injuries were too severe, the weather too savage. Over time they learned the rules of survival: how to look for dangerous crevices, how to melt snow in bottles so that it was warm enough to drink. “We started to acclimatise. You start to learn. I started to learn how to walk in the snow. One month into the ordeal we were mountain men and we knew what to do.”
What they didn’t know was that the plane sat near the base of a couloir – a steep gorge in the mountain where snow builds up. Just over two weeks after the crash, an avalanche struck. Everyone asleep on the floor of the fuselage was buried. Roy Harley had stood up after hearing the avalanche thundering down the mountain; had he not, they would probably have all died. He uncovered three others as quickly as possible, then they began searching for more, wiping snow away from faces so they could breathe, before moving on to dig for the next body.
“I couldn’t move. I was under rubble but I could breathe.” Parrado remained like that for 30 minutes. Of the 27 people left in the fuselage that night, eight died. The survivors were now trapped in a fuselage half-filled with snow. It was dark. They couldn’t stand. Outside, a blizzard roared. After a few hours, Parrado punched a hole in the aircraft’s roof with a cargo pole, drawing in fresh air. They stayed like that for four days, next to the bodies of the dead.
“We didn’t know if we had enough air. We didn’t know if we had two metres, four metres or 50 metres of snow on top,” says Parrado. They heard a second avalanche that night, but it rolled over the already buried plane. “Hell could have been a very comfortable place, I can tell you, if you compare it with those four days under the avalanche.” When the blizzard stopped and it was safe to leave, they dug their way out through the cockpit, working in 15-minute shifts. It took hours.
After the avalanche, Parrado knew the only way off the mountain was to walk. The following weeks were spent training, waiting for the weather to improve and making the necessary equipment: a sleeping bag from sewn-together cushions, a sled crafted from a suitcase. When Parrado ran out of holes on his belt, he knew time was up. He says the decision to leave was the most important he has ever made. “I knew that when I gave the first step to leave the fuselage I was not coming back. This is a kamikaze expedition.”
On the 61st day, Parrado, Roberto Canessa and their friend Antonio “Tintin” Vizintín left the fuselage. Based on the pilot’s dying message to them, they believed they just needed to scale the mountain to the west and then head down to Chile. Parrado had layers (three pairs of jeans, three sweaters, four pairs of socks covered in a shopping bag, rugby boots), an aluminium pole for a walking stick, a backpack with three days of meat rations. Before he left, he told those staying behind they could use his family if they ran out of food.
Experts say you shouldn’t climb more than 300 metres a dayin such high mountains; the trio cleared twice that in one morning. Altitude sickness kicked in – Parrado’s heart rate soared, he came close to hyperventilation and dehydration. They thought the climb would take them 14 hours; it took three days. On the first night, the temperature dropped so low that their water bottle shattered.
Parrado was the first to reach the summit. They had started the climb at 3,570 metres; the peak sits at 4,600 metres. Any joy he felt reaching the summit evaporated as he looked around. Parrado realised the pilot’s mistake. No green valleys of Chile, just ridges and peaks far off into the horizon.
“We thought we were five kilometres away; we were 80.” He made his life’s next biggest decision: continue west. “I said: ‘Come on, Roberto, I cannot do it alone. Let’s go. If we go back, what for? I’m going to die looking into your eyes and who dies first?’”
Did he expect to die on the trek? “I mean, if I die, if I crash, if it hurts, if I suffer, nothing matters. You are already dead. So if you are still breathing, that’s a bonus. But you cross the invisible gates of death and nothing matters.” Before heading down, Parrado christened the mountain after his father, writing “Mt Seler” in lipstick on a bag that he tucked under a rock.They took Tintin’s rations for the journey and sent him back to the fuselage (he made it back in one hour, using the sled). Parrado and Roberto began their descent.
Day after day, they struggled downwards. The harsh landscape began to soften. They found a river, which they followed. Signs of human life kept them going: signs of camping, manure, cows. Eventually they found three men on the far side of the river. Against its crashing flow, they communicated with notes tied to a rock. The men threw some bread to them, then rode off to get help from the nearest police station, 10 hours away by mule.
Parrado and Canessa had hiked more than 37 miles in 10 days. Parrado believes they could have lasted one more day. “Roberto was very weak. He gave everything that he had. Everybody gave everything that they had. He was the best associate, the best companion, the best friend I could have had in this expedition,” he says.
Many years later, talking to mountaineering experts, he was told that he achieved what they did because of their ignorance: “They told me: ‘Had you known what you were going to face, you would never have left the aeroplane. You never knew what you were going to face and that’s why you made it.’”
When the helicopters arrived with a rescue squad, Parrado was presented with maps. He traced their path. “They said: ‘No, no, no, no, that’s Argentina.
That’s 60 or 80km away from here.’” He insisted his friends were there; the rescuers needed a guide. Parrado looked at Canessa, lying on the floor being tended to by a nurse. He looked at the helicopter being stripped for weight. The adrenaline kicked in. “They put me behind the pilot, headphones on and seatbelt and I said: ‘What am I doing?!’”
Eventually, Parrado recognised the valley and the mountains, then the fuselage. As the helicopter circled, the boys emerged.
The helicopter landed. Parrado opened the door and “three of my friends jumped over me like dogs, kissing me and shouting. It was a very surreal and emotional scene. It was their first spark of being alive again.” They couldn’t all fit in the helicopter, so some stayed one more night accompanied by members of the rescue team.
About half an hour later, the helicopter landed at a hospital in San Fernando, Chile. Medical staff rushed toward Parrado with a gurney. “The distance from the helicopter to the entrance of the hospital was about 50 metres. And I said: ‘No. Stop. I crossed the whole Andes on foot. I’m not going on a gurney into this hospital.” He finished his journey on foot.
* * *
Parrado never came close to giving up. He accepted death. At points he was almost certain of it. But he never stopped going. “The lighthouse was my father,” he says in a rare moment of sentimentality. “I knew that he thought we were all dead. Only somebody that can lose their family in one second can understand what he was going through.” When Parrado eventually wrote about his experiences in Miracle in the Andes, published in 2006,he did so as a 90th birthday present for his father. “Everything that he taught me at the beginning of my life saved my life,” he says.
After the rescue, Parrado was reunited with his father and older sister, Graciela, at the hospital. Parrado still had enough strength to lift his father up, but he had lost 45kg of his original 100kg. The nurses removed his clothes – the first time he’d taken some of them off in 72 days – and he looked himself in the mirror. “I didn’t recognise myself.” There wasn’t a trace of muscle. “I looked at my legs and there were bones – knees and bones.”
After his discharge, he moved to a hotel in Santiago, along with most of his surviving teammates. For them, it was a carnival atmosphere. “For me, it was different,” says Parrado. “Maybe my ordeal really started when I came back home. My father was sleeping in my bedroom, sometimes on the floor embracing my dog.” On the mantelpiece was a photograph of Parrado with his mother and sister Susy. “All my old friends, they returned to their homes, they were embraced by their family, girlfriends, and the ordeal was finished …”
Their experiences made them celebrities overnight. “For six months afterwards, we were surrounded by journalists everywhere we went.” His gauntness made him instantly recognisable. Paparazzi photographed him; strangers would approach him in the street and shake his hand. Some even said they were envious of his experience.
Officials from the Catholic church said the survivors had committed no sin by eating the dead, but the newspapers couldn’t resist sensationalising it. There were even rumours that the
boys had made up the avalanche. “Ethically, religiously, there are a lot of things you can write about this,” he says. “But it never bothered me. Never.” He speaks proudly of the fact that the survivors’ foundation, Fundación Viven, played a significant role in getting the Uruguayan population signed up to organ donation.
“We donated our bodies,” he says. “You could die, and you could help the other ones to live. That was a fantastic thing that we did together. I try to explain to people what happened, and that they would have done the same thing. I don’t try to justify anything.”
It took Parrado the best part of a year to recover physically. He ate normally, and slowly reintroduced his rugby training; 10 months later he played in the last few games of the season. He’s coy about how long it took him to recover mentally. How could he possibly know? But he says he suffered no trauma, never felt guilt and never saw a psychiatrist.
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What we said: “Flanagan finishes his Netflix contract on a high, gleefully capturing Poe’s magic, eerie romance and sense of dread.” Read more
39 Russell Brand: In Plain Sight
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38 Black Ops
(BBC One/iPlayer) This joke-dense sitcom from Famalam duo Akemnji Ndifornyen and Gbemisola Ikumelo was definitely 2023’s funniest show to shine a light on institutional racism in the police force. It was packed with astonishing comic timing as it followed two definitely “not street” community support officers forced to go undercover in a drug gang due to a lack of Black coppers. Was there a more fantastic farce this year? It’s hard to think of one.
What we said: “It’s the sort of comedy that lives or dies by its delivery, and the two leads are pitch-perfect. Some scenes might sound hackneyed on paper, but the delivery is so fresh it feels like the first time anyone has made the joke.” Read more
37 The Gold
(BBC One/iPlayer) One of the largest robberies in UK history got the period-crime treatment in Neil Forsyth’s consistently entertaining drama about the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion heist. It had phenomenal ensemble cast including Hugh Bonneville as a determined DCI, tons of twisty storytelling – and more 80s shoulder pads than a Dynasty episode.
What we said: “The Gold is an ever-enjoyable ride. There are pleasures aplenty to be found in the production design – the cars! The collars! The carpet swirls! – and an almost overstuffed ensemble cast.” Read more
36 Dave
(Disney+) Stalkers, near-death experiences, creepily realistic sex dolls – the third outing of this rap comedy had it all. Dave Burd’s semi-autobiographical tale of gangly MC Lil Dicky’s rise to fame finally hit the big time, as did the calibre of its guest stars, including brilliant cameos from Rick Ross, Drake and Rachel McAdams. And Brad Pitt’s extended portrayal of himself as a charismatic oddball in the finale has got to be one of the finest performances of the year.
What we said: “Dave’s pursuit of self-examination at any cost makes this one of the most nuanced, not to mention one of the funniest, shows around. At times, it touches perfection.” Read more
35 Dead Ringers
(Prime Video) In this sex-swapped reimagining of David Cronenberg’s 1988 film, Rachel Weisz had a lot of fun playing identical – but very different – gynaecologist twins Elliot (the naughty one) and Beverly (the sensible one) Mantle. As they plan to open a new birthing centre, the show became a dark but witty examination of modern fertility and childbirth.
What we said: “It is intimate and only as horrifying as an ordinarily bad birth might be. Imagine an unexpurgated and more stylishly shot One Born Every Minute. This aspect of Dead Ringers does feel invigoratingly new and, to use that horrible word Beverly loves so much, empowering – at least to me in the UK.” Read more
34 The Long Shadow
(ITV1/ITVX) This sensitive take on the murders of the Yorkshire Ripper was a poignant attempt to tell the tale in a far broader sense than a chronicle of an evil man’s deeds. There were extended insights into the lives of the women who died, and an urgent sense of the deprivation that so gripped 1970s Yorkshire that sex work felt like the only remaining option for these mothers, wives and friends. Peter Sutcliffe himself was a bit part in a drama stuffed with stellar talent, from Toby Jones as a well-meaning workaholic detective to Katherine Kelly as a desperate and astonishingly strong matriarch risking her life for family. A welcome reframing of the narrative around these muchdocumented deaths.
What we said: “More than any rendering of a notorious case that I can remember, the attention is on the women. Specifically, the living women. And, when they are gone, the people they leave behind.” Read more
33 Starstruck
(BBC Three/iPlayer) Rose Matafeo sealed the perfect modern romcom with a third and final series that continued to have a lot of fun with the “will they won’t they” trope. But there were also plenty of awkward, frustrating and tear-jerking moments, too – which, with the characters now in their mid-30s, felt like a more mature, nuanced examination of love. “Even though we love each other so much,” Jessie told Tom, as they discussed what’s next for them in the last scene, “I think we’d be pretty stupid to think it can’t happen with someone else.” The perfect new beginning to end with.
What we said: “Starstruck has become a better – more interesting, more relatable, more affecting – show, one that no longer revolves around its original premise, but instead deals in distinctly un-gimmicky reflections on life’s trajectory.” Read more
(BBC Two/iPlayer) For Shane Meadows’s first period drama, he told the prequel story to Benjamin Myers’ novel about the 18th-century coin clippers of Calderdale. In typical Meadows style, he let the excellent cast (which included regular collaborators Michael Socha and Thomas Turgoose) improvise northern banter as they put together the foundations of a criminal organisation that would line the pockets of their money-strapped community. Funny, bold and original.
What we said: “The roughcast look, feel and performances combine to make this a drama of rare quality in every sense. It is funny, moving, enraging, shocking by turns and always compelling. Not to be missed.” Read more
31 Silo
(Apple TV+) In a year of gritty scifi epics that promised lots and delivered little (hello Bodies), this bestselling novel adaptation was a rare treat. Moody, tense, gripping, this 10part tale of a post-apocalyptic underground community was so watchable it even managed to kill off its lead character in the first couple of episodes and keep you hooked. Of course, it helped that Hollywood star Rebecca Ferguson was waiting in the wings …
What we said: “Silo can be read as a lot of things. It works as a critique of the class system and as a study in who gets to write, and rewrite, history. It’s also about the advantages and disadvantages of truth and of living in denial. But before all of that, it is a fantastically made story. Dig in.” Read more
be more like the soulless mega-corporation created by evil Mr Clean here.’”
UNOS now has new leadership and is piloting GPS tracking, “but these changes have been too long coming”, said Oliver.
That’s not even getting into the issue with state-level Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs), which have their own hurdles for obtaining organs (and consent from families) and have been known to fudge data. “These are lies that actually kill people,” said Oliver. The government estimated that if OPOs increased their performance, an estimated 5,600 more organizations per year could be transplanted, “which is vital because, again, around 6,000 Americans die each year while waiting for organ transplants”, Oliver explained.
But there’s little incentive for OPOs to improve, as none have ever been decertified for poor performance.
In sum, “our system of managing donated organs is nowhere near where it should be”, said Oliver, “but depressingly, it’s actually a paragon of care and thoughtfulness compared to what happens when someone donates their body to science”.
Whole body donation is crucial to medical training but “unfortunately in practice, you might not end up in front of medical students”. Instead, you could end up at unlicensed body shows or pay-per-view autopsies, because bodies donated to science are bought and sold “in a virtually unregulated market” – there’s no federal law nor a government agency to monitor what happens to cadavers pledged for use in medical education.
Oliver ticked through necessary changes on each front. “For organs, we need to raise the standards of how the system operates,” he said, noting good news from, of all places, the Trump administration, which instituted a rule requiring an objective, not self-reported, metric for measuring the performance of OPOs. Starting in 2026, OPOs which do not meet benchmark performance will lose their certification.
This past September, Joe Biden signed a bill that would split up UNOS’s contract and allow others, including for-profit companies, to compete for parts of the services that it now provides. “Will that improve the efficiency of our national system? Let’s hope so, but the jury is currently out,” Oliver said.
And the Consensual Donation and Research Integrity Act, which would ensure bodies are not unknowingly donated to a for-profit industry, is awaiting a vote in Congress.
Despite all the issues, Oliver asserted, he still believed in organ donation, testified to the life-saving importance of such donations, and revealed that he is an organ donor himself. “When I die, and someone is in need of these sub-par organs, they can have at ‘em,” he concluded, “and nothing that we’ve researched or covered tonight, however unpleasant it’s been, has changed my mind about that decision.”