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).
The film rattles through Fiennes’s many achievements: first crossing of the Earth pole to pole; world record Antarctica crossing, seven marathons on seven continents in seven days (three months after bypass surgery); Mount Everest. There’s plenty of white-knuckle footage from the archive, as well as reflections of old muckers. Fiennes says that in his darkest, diciest moments in peril he imagined his heroes – the father and grandfather he never met – watching over him. “I cannot give in,” Fiennes would tell himself.
Still, he says, the only subject that gets him emotional is his wife Ginny. They met when he was 12; she was nine. In an old recording we hear Ginny describe herself as a “housewife”. Nonsense; in fact she was the brains of the operation, dreaming up the expeditions and accompanying Fiennes on many of them. The great sadness of their marriage was not being able to have children. Though as a friend perceptively points out, he would not have had the same career with a family. Dying of cancer, Ginny told him to meet someone else and have a baby – which he did, just over a year after she died in 2004. I wonder how Fiennes’s second wife Louise feels about their life together being squeezed into the last few minutes of the film. Though maybe there’s always an element of being a footnote when you’re married to the “greatest” somebody.
As for Fiennes, he’s still happiest in Boy’s Own adventure mode, talking about his adventures. Like the time he got frostbite and sawed off the tops of four of his fingers in the shed with a Black & Decker. “No point crying over spilt milk.” Did I mention he once made it to the final six in auditions for James Bond?
• Explorer is released on 14 July in cinemas.
