When Ranulph Fiennes appeared on Radio 4s’s In the Psychiatrist’s Chair, host Dr Anthony Clare was left so frustrated by Fiennes’s lack of self-reflection that he described the experience as “stirring a void with a teaspoon”. Well, maybe it’s age, but we see a few cracks in the granite of the “the world’s greatest living explorer”, now 78, in this documentary. Driving about in his battered silver Ford – 280,000 miles on the clock – Fiennes is at times on the verge of introspection as he talks to director Matthew Dyas.
So it turns out that Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd baronet – the title is inherited, he prefers plain old “Ran” – grew up in a house of women, raised by his mother. He took up boxing at Eton after bullies picked on him for being “pretty”. Like his father (killed in the second world war four months before Fiennes was born) he joined the Royal Scots Greys. He was booted out of the SAS after a youthful prank involving a film set and explosives (the details are a bit sketchily drawn).
