Jo Brand meets Storm Jonas on the Pennine trail
‘A
58-year-old woman… incredibly unfit… morbidly obese. This has the potential to be an absolute car crash.” Greg Whyte, the Harley Street physiologist consulting on Jo Brand’s Hell of a Walk for Sport
Relief (BBC One), pulled no punches when summing up the challenge being taken on by the “rebel comedian” (as the voice-over ponderously described her). And this was the initial appeal of the documentary: Brand, a manifestly unsuitable candidate for any physical endurance test, was to walk 135 miles of the Trans Pennine Trail in a week.
As if hauling her “non-functional weight” on aching limbs and creaking joints wasn’t bad enough, she also had to suffer the company of a succession of celebrities whom she received with varying degrees of warmth (with Bill Bailey at the Saharan end and Gabby Logan at the Arctic). And then Storm Jonas hit as she negotiated the Peak District and literally knocked her flat. While you didn’t fear for her life, you might have for her sanity, were she not so sensible about the whole business.
Whenever I began to muse about the weirdly narcissistic-masochistic tinge that these charity selfflagellations can sometimes take on, there was Brand to pre-empt the issue. “Do these torture scenes go down well with the general public?” she mused while receiving a gruelling massage. “The more someone cries, the more people donate,” she speculated while lost in a bog in the middle of the night. (She didn’t cry, although a surprise appearance from Billy Bragg, who serenaded her with her favourite song, brought her close.) This was a different sort of celebrity suffering, free from vanity and all the more engaging for it.
In fact, Brand’s honesty and selfawareness won her as much public support as her redoubtable fortitude. “I love Jo, because she don’t give a toss about what she looks like or what she says,” said one veteran of the Trail. It would have been nice to get more of a feel for the areas she passed through beyond them being a homogenous mass of struggling former industrial towns bound together by a sense of community, but there were compensations in Brand’s occasional soul-baring about her father’s struggles with depression or her own attitudes to adversity.
And although the primary motivation was of course to raise money (which she did with spectacular success), her secondary goal – to demonstrate as a middle-aged woman that you can make yourself visible and relevant even when society might habitually deem otherwise – was no less handsomely achieved.
Iam no one’s idea of a Formula One fan. Perhaps this made me the wrong person to review Speed
with Guy Martin: F1 Special, but then Channel 4 has long had the knack of drawing the casual viewer in to all sorts of sports, from American football to sumo wrestling and kabaddi (an ancient Indian form of tag).
TT motorcycle racer Martin brought his BMW S 1000 RR superbike to Silverstone to test its capabilities against a Red Bull V8 car driven by David Coulthard – the former F1 driver happens to be fronting C4’s coverage of the forthcoming season. It barrelled along merrily, like Top Gear without the stonewashed jeans. Coulthard won the drag racing and braking challenges, while Martin took the slalom, before the drivers went headto-head in circuits around the track (Coulthard emerged the winner); the tone was perfectly pitched for the target audience, with technical stats presented as Top Trumps and a bit of pit-lane hand-slapping topping up the laddish banter quotient.
I can’t deny that my attention wandered at times, but Coulthard and Martin were a study in contrasts that constantly intrigued: Coulthard the slick, media-trained Monaco-dwelling pro; Martin the shaggy, excitable fanboy apparently entirely without ego. Both Coulthard and Martin were in the frame for the new series of Top
Gear. Certainly, one looks at the latter and then at the effect of Chris Evans’s rampaging ego – already – on the BBC’s motoring cash cow, and wonders what might have been.
Would Martin have outraged war veterans, forced producers to quit or have fellow celebs taking to Twitter muttering darkly about him being a “timebomb”? Unlikely.
And while I’ll still be finding something else to do with my Sundays, petrolheads will doubtless have had their appetites fully whetted for the F1 season, and for the fresh perspective that Channel 4 can bring to it. Jo Brand’s Hell of a Walk for Sport Relief Speed with Guy Martin: F1 Special