Our Everest Challenge review – Ben Fogle, Victoria Pendleton and some vertiginous cliches
Ben Fogle has achieved something noble and profound: he has made those series where semi-famous people sweat over contrived ordeals, such as pretending to be an Edwardian serf or going on quite a long walk, look even more trivial. In Our Everest Challenge With Ben Fogle & Victoria Pendleton (ITV), the adventurer and his Olympian pal literally try to climb Mount Everest. It’s very much the Everest of celebrity-challenge documentaries.
Not that the majestic enormity of the task means we’re immune to the tropes of the form. Early on, Fogle ticks off the obligatory shot of him discussing the project with his family, to give us a sense of both the sacrifice involved and the desirability of his house: on the latter point, he has got a kitchen-diner the size of a squash court. In Kathmandu, “Vic” masters the art of banal scene-setting by reacting to a blessing they receive from a local lama: “For me, it’s pretty unique.” Fogle adds a sprinkle of sea salt to the reality-TV cheese by talking about Everest as if it were a human woman, like a smooth, randy yachtsman. “I’ve dreamed of climbing her, ever since I was just a boy.” Crikey. Can he pull it off?
After a glimpse of the two-year training regimen that led Fogle and Pendleton here, we put aside concerns that climbing Everest might have warranted more than an hour of telly (the original airing, on CNN, was across three half-hour episodes) and get acclimatised to the cold beauty of the terrain and to some unexpected facts on the ground. Did you know that the tight two-month window of accessibility in the spring turns the base camp into a functioning multinational village, teeming with mountaineers? Or that the hardest part of the ascent is the first phase, the nightmarishly jagged Khumbu icefall?
Once that has been bested, Everest reveals herself to be – as you wouldn’t be surprised to hear Fogle say, although to his credit, he doesn’t – a harsh mistress. Halfway up, Pendleton’s altitude sickness becomes unmanageable. (Did you know that however fit they are, some people just can’t cope with reduced oxygen?) Suddenly, Fogle is the last personality standing. But there is only a quarter of an hour left. Now it dawns on us why, perhaps, this incredible journey has been stuffed into a single episode: if there is one thing harder than climbing Everest, it is getting usable footage of it – everyone is too busy not dying. What fragments there are, though, turn those last 15 minutes into stunning TV, from the unsettling sight of Fogle reduced to gibbering mania by another almost fatally exhausting day, to the bewildering serenity of him alone near the top, separated from his cameraman by a scary oxygen-mask mishap, filming the unimaginable landscape himself.
At the summit – yes, Ben Fogle has just conquered Everest, on a Thursday night on ITV – our man has one shot at the biggest piece-to-camera of his presenting life. He looms tearfully into the lens, drunk on relief and thin air: “I want you all, please, to promise me one thing: go and climb your Everest!” Like much of the programme, it’s mawkish and awkward. Forgivably so: fickle Mount Everest isn’t willing to accommodate the perfect documentary, but she’ll give you moments most TV journeymen couldn’t dream of.
The No 5 War (BBC4, ★★★★), a French documentary bought by the BBC, is a fine hour of twists and intrigue. This is the story of how, in 1921, Coco Chanel casually invented the world’s favourite scent, but then struck a distribution deal that the nerviest Dragons’ Den applicant would reject as too weak. Coco kept just 10% of the business, leaving the donkey work to two proper entrepreneurs, the Wertheimer brothers. As they cleaned up, Chanel fumed. What initially seems like a wicked tale about a difficult genius becomes a jaw-dropper when the Nazis arrive in Paris. European history is peppered with dreamy creatives who soiled their legacies by collaborating, with what in hindsight are varying degrees of culpability, but the film leaves no room to doubt Chanel’s perfidy, explaining how she used “Aryanisation” laws to try to ruin the Wertheimers – who were Jewish. And how the exiled brothers fought back – including sending an emissary to occupied France with a suitcase full of gold and a mission to secure a lifetime supply of the finest jasmine – is an unbelievable thriller plot that The No 5 War tells with light wit. Right up to the conclusion of the struggle, which leaves the question of who really won hanging elegantly in the air.
- The caption to the picture on this article was amended on 31 August 2018 to reflect the fact the celebrities are surveying Ama Dablam on their way to Mount Everest base camp, not surveying Everest itself.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/aug/30/our-everest-challenge-ben-fogle-victoria-pendleton
