A helicopter to Skye, Bear? Did no one tell you there’s a bridge?
Running Wild With
Bear Grylls: The Challenge National Geographic, Sunday HHHHH Fisk
Netflix HHHHH
The new series of Running Wild With Bear Grylls: The Challenge, in which he plops a celebrity in some harsh part of the world for 48 hours and helps them emerge unscathed, kicked off with Benedict Cumberbatch on the Isle of Skye. I call this genre ‘survivalist entertainment’, which takes you, the viewer, on a thrilling adventure where you have to survive multiple thoughts along the lines of: I wonder how many folk there are in the safety crew just off camera?
Grylls arrives on the island hanging off the side of a helicopter. This would have to be necessary as there is no other way of accessing Skye. Apart from the bridge that connects it to the mainland. You’d have to come by helicopter unless you were to take the bridge, I should have said. Or ferry. In short: unless you took the bridge, or ferry, how the hell are you meant to get there? If not by hanging off the side of a helicopter? Get real.
Grylls is a pumped-up fella who has rolled out various moustaches down the years and has now entered his swashbuckling Errol Flynn phase. He says: ‘This is going to test Cumberbatch like no part he’s played.’ Cumberbatch did actually learn to ride a horse, lasso, play a banjo and castrate a bull for The Power Of The Dog, but this puts all that in perspective. Skye, insists Grylls, is ‘a harsh landscape shaped by big seas and cold weather’. It’s not like you’d ever holiday there, except I have – twice. Luckily the bridge was open and operational both times. I must be blessed.
They are not here randomly. Cumberbatch has a ‘connection’ with Skye because his grandfather, a Second World War submariner, trained there. Cumberbatch thinks he is attracted to ‘risk’ because of his grandfather. I know what he means. My grandfather was a shoe wholesaler and I can’t look at a shoe without wanting to wholesale it. I don’t have a ‘shoes off’ policy in my house because I know that if a pair are left by the door I’ll have wholesaled them by the time the guest leaves*. These things, they’re just ‘in the blood’.
The pair have a ‘transreceiver’ to locate ‘caches’ containing critical supplies and gear for their journey. I think, bar Cumberbatch, everyone knows where these caches are, so it’s quite like an Easter egg hunt with the kids when you act as surprised as they are when one is discovered.
Their first ‘cache’ contains ‘talons’ for ‘rappelling’ down a sheer cliff. These talons, simply dug into the earth up top, act as an anchor and are the only thing saving them from plummeting. To secure himself, Cumberbatch learns how to attach them to his rope with a particular kind of knot, an Italian hitch, which looks pretty simple, with its two loops but who am I to say it’s not harder than castrating a bull?
The second cache is a lobster pot, but there is no lobster in it. So, instead, it’s limpets and seaweed for tea as they gather around a fire where Bear (Eton) and Cumberbatch (Harrow) discuss how it feels to be an ‘outsider’. They are in a desolate field but have luckily come across a tarp and sheepskins for the night, as well as waterproof matches and old fence posts for firewood. The old fence posts contain bent bolts that, says Grylls, can be fashioned into talons for next day’s sheer cliff adventure. They have the luck of the devil, this pair.
The following day Cumberbatch has to go it ‘alone’ while we pretend a film crew aren’t all over it. His transreceiver loses signal for nearly a minute, so that was scary. He rappels down a cliff face and reunites with Bear, who has a surprise for him. It’s the Royal Navy, accompanied by a nuclear submarine of the kind his grandfather would have commanded. Cumberbatch cries and, like I said, I do understand this connection.
My other grandfather owned and ran a cutlery factory in Sheffield. I only have to look at a fork to want to manufacture it.
Why hadn’t I heard of Fisk? Why would I still not have heard of Fisk if a friend, who knows I loved Colin From Accounts, and knows I can’t wait for the return of Starstruck (this week!) hadn’t said: ‘You’ve watched Fisk, presumably?’ If you loved Colin From Accounts, and Starstruck, you do need to hear about Fisk. It’s not a romcom, but it is similar as it has characters you will root for and the kind of wit that’s deployed cleverly but gently.
It is a six-parter written by and starring Kitty Flanagan, an Australian stand-up. She plays Helen Tudor-Fisk, a high-end, middleaged solicitor who is forced to take a job at a shabby probate firm, Gruber & Gruber. She gets the job because, as the main Gruber tells her: ‘I can’t be arsed to interview anyone else.’ Helen is socially inept, caustic, says what she thinks but is also vulnerable and lovable.
It is mostly character-driven but there are still jokes happening all over the place. When she contemptuously declines one of those ‘live, laugh, love’ sayings for her office wall she’s told that one can be made especially for her listing anything she considers ‘nice’. Next time we visit the office there it is: ‘Soup. Tea. Butterscotch.’
There are six episodes, covering her work and home life and it’s beautifully performed, very funny, truly lovely. It was made in 2021 but arrived on Netflix earlier this month, and now it’s here, Flanagan has said: ‘You can Fisk yourself stupid.’ I would recommend you do just that.
*I always warn visitors: ‘Keep your shoes on or I’ll be boxing them and sending them straight to my warehouse for distribution.’