Table of Contents
The most dangerous roads in the world
In the Congo with Ben Fogle
Some enterprising editor should tie Rhod Gilbert to a chair, place a laptop in front of him, and force him to write a comic novel.
He has a style of expression that makes him the natural successor to literary geniuses like Tom Sharpe, as he demonstrated between avalanches of swear words in The Most Dangerous Roads in the World (Dave).
Tackling the alpine passes of northern Italy in a Land Rover with her comedian friend Angela Barnes, Rhod declared that the steep track – rocks on one side, steep drop on the other – had “more hairpin turns than an episode of Corrie”. He must have been thinking about Hilda Ogden and her curlers.
As they passed through the Saracen tunnel, half a mile long and completely unlit, he described it as “tighter than a hippo’s socks.” And when they finally reached safety, to Angela’s delight and disbelief, he said she was “buzzing like a wasp on a trombone.”
Rhod Gilbert and Angela Barnes photographed in The World’s Most Dangerous Roads
For most of the trip they chatted about their ailments. Angela suffers from degenerative spinal disc disease. Rhod recovers from head and neck cancer
Those were the printable bits. Both celebrities, facing an extreme automotive challenge for the first time, blurted out four-letter words in combinations so clever they would make a farmhand blush.
In an attempt to ensure that at least some parts of the show were suitable for broadcast before the basin, they set up a bucket as a swear box… and filled it four times.
Their route took them from the Italian Riviera, through the mountains to an incredibly beautiful small town called Molini di Triora, and then towards the French border. Along the way they stopped to investigate a World War II bunker on a cliff, which could only be reached via a rope bridge across a gorge.
For most of the trip they chatted about their ailments. Angela suffers from degenerative spinal disc disease. Rhod is recovering from head and neck cancer, an illness he recounted last November in a Channel 4 documentary.
He still seems quite surprised to be alive, although he almost wasn’t as Angela zigzagged along the old salt road, the wheels of the 4×4 inches from falling over the cliff. He nicknamed the LandRover ‘Vera’ because of its tendency to swerve, but the real problem was not so much with the steering as with the drivers.
Neither of them could ignore the sight and concentrate on the road. They blamed their short attention spans: both have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. [ADHD]a label so popular with celebrities that it appears to have surpassed membership to the Groucho Club, just as fashionable but without the hefty membership fees.
In an attempt to ensure that at least some parts of the show were suitable for broadcast before the basin, they set up a bucket as a swear box… and filled it four times.
Ben Fogle also announced this month that he has ADHD. He was heading to the Congo (Ch.5) to stay with a tribe of hunter-gatherers, the Mbendjele.
The reception he received was extraordinary. Evidently someone tipped off the Mbendjele that Ben was coming, for they met him on the rainforest trail with songs and dances that grew in a deafening crescendo until, upon reaching the village, he was overwhelmed by people in grass skirts who They played drums and fell with laughter.
Ben found the pure joy so moving that he burst into tears. He was less cheerful 12 hours later, when the cacophony was still going on. As another Congo tourist, Simon Reeve, discovered on BBC2 earlier this year, the nomads of the Congo Basin know how to have fun. “It’s almost like an old-fashioned rave,” Ben grumbled.
Just as Simon had done, he watched in alarm as a tribesman climbed 60 feet up a tree to collect wild honey, with only a machete to make footholds in the trunk. “That,” Ben marveled, “is what I would call extreme beekeeping.”