Skip to main content

Our Everest Challenge review – Ben Fogle, Victoria Pendleton and some vertiginous cliches

Only one of these two makes it past halfway in this gruelling spin on the celebrity challenge show. Plus, the Coco Chanel story is better than fiction

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?

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2NyLOM7
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Knives Out review – Daniel Craig goes Columbo in Cluedo whodunnit

Craig grills an all-star lineup of suspects when a wealthy novelist is found dead in Rian Johnson’s sharp, country-house murder mystery R ian Johnson unsheathes an entertainingly nasty, if insubstantial detective mystery with his new film, Knives Out. Back in 2005, his debut movie Brick (a high-school thriller) paid tribute to the hardboiled noir genre. Now he does the same thing for cosy crime, although there is nothing that cosy about it. Knives Out has a country house full of frowning suspects, deadpan servants and smirking ne’er-do-wells and an amusing performance from Daniel Craig as Benoît Blanc, the brilliant amateur sleuth from Louisiana who annoys the hell out of one and all by smiling enigmatically, occasionally plinking a jarring high note on the piano during the drawing-room interrogation and pronouncing in his southern burr: “Ah suh-spect far-wuhl play!” Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2L0NKO4
Post a Comment
Read more

Tracey Emin decorates Regent's Park and a celebration of Islamic creativity – the week in art

Emin and others survey the state of sculpture, Glenn Brown takes his decadent imagination to Newcastle and artists offer northern exposure – all in your weekly dispatch Frieze Sculpture Park Tracey Emin, Barry Flanagan and John Baldessari are among the artists decorating Regent’s Park with a free survey of the state of sculpture. • Regent’s Park, London , 4 July until 7 October. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2IDCpPV
Post a Comment
Read more

Elena Ferrante: ‘Solaris is not Tarkovsky’s best film, but it made the greatest impression on me’

Solaris is astonishing because the book that inspired it doesn’t seem to contain Tarkovsky’s film A film that I watch at least once a year is Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris . I’ve loved all of Tarkovsky’s works, even the most difficult. Some I’ve seen in the cinema, others on television. I saw Andrei Rublev at the cinema, and on the big screen it was astonishing, its black-and-white extraordinary: I’ll probably never see it again in a cinema, but I hope that young people will have the opportunity. I also saw Solaris on the big screen – not Tarkovsky’s best film, but the one that made the greatest impression on me. I remember that it was advertised as the Soviet answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey – a completely misleading slogan. To see in it a cinematic contest between the US and the USSR was as silly as it was misleading. Kubrick’s marvellous film, with its imaginative force, would certainly win. But it doesn’t have even a hint of the desperation, of the sense of loss, that dominates Sol...
Post a Comment
Read more