Now on bbc news hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk. Im stephen sackur. My guest today is an extremist of a very special kind. Nothing to do with his political views, but recognition of a lifetime spent embracing physical challenges at the extreme limit of human endurance. Sir Ranulph Fiennes has taken on and conquered the polar ice, the worlds highest peaks and the most gruelling deserts. Hes been described as one of the worlds greatest living explorers. So, what is the motivation for this life of extreme adventure . Sir Ranulph Fiennes, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you very much. Seems to me, your entire life, you have spent testing yourself, challenging yourself. Why this preoccupation with tests . It doesnt come about in that particular way, it comes about because of being brought up in south africa, arriving in the uk, not getting a levels thats what it comes from, because thats not what i wanted to do, its what my dad had done, commanding the royal scots greatest tank regiment when he was killed in the second world war, and i wanted to command that same wonderful scottish regiment, but in his day, it didnt require a levels to get sandhurst. In my time, you did, and i couldnt, and therefore i had a second grade of cadet school and would never become colonel of the regiment, so ijoined the regiment but had only eight years of army service before you were thrown out. And so i didnt do what i wanted to do, and i did as long as i could in the army, then i found myself with no income, i married my wife, jenny, who had virtually no income, and so we thought wed do what i had tried to do in the army, which was to do expeditions with soldiers, but that was paid for by the taxpayer. Doing it with just my wife, the new word was sponsorship. Get everything for nothing. Youve already developed several themes there, and one thing that is important to your life and i think thats, in a way theres a sense of disappointment that you were not, despite the fact that you tried very hard to emulate your father. And it should be said that your father was killed in action in the second world war, so you never knew him. You were born after he died, but you clearly wanted to emulate his brilliant military career, but you were not able to. Was that always, and is it now, a disappointment to you . It is the biggest disappointment. I wanted for 2h years to do that, and then found that i had failed and couldnt do it, so i had to turn to something else. Youve just written a book about elite special forces throughout the course of Human History and you actually write about your dads own regiment, the royal scots greys, a cavalry regiment which has been involved in some of the most famous battles that the uk military has seen. You did, for a while, serve in that force yourself. Have you always found it difficult to live up to your fathers reputation . Yeah, i mean, i wanted to actually get, its an awful thing to say, but to fight. In his days it was nazis, in my day it was marxists, and they Harold Wilson had chucked the brits out of aden yemen, as it now is. And they were coming in, having trained the muslims in odessa in the soviet union, to become marxists instead of muslims. And we were there, thanks to Harold Wilson sending us, to protect the muslims from the marxists, and so i was able to actuallyjoin an elite force, having been trained by the sas without fighting, i now had a command over an elite force, like what the books all about, 60 of them, and could change their operations procedure by what i learned in the sas, mainly to move only by night, do nothing by day, and by shouting in the dark when we were under attack from machine guns, retreat, retreat but advance. You were a tough guy in that sense and you led men in very difficult circumstances, but youve also written very honestly about the way in which you didnt always find it easy to be that tough guy. Youve written about school, how you hated being bullied, how you felt you had to keep your mouth shut when you were being beaten at eton, one of the leading Public Schools in the uk, because you, again, didnt want to let your father down. We have had other guests in this studio talk about their upbringings as males, in very male societies, and they have talked and one in particular, a novelist from australia, talked about a toxic sense of masculinity, and i just wonder whether you, reflecting on your life, can relate to that . Yeah, youre talking about an all male background. I was brought up in south africa with a mother, a grandmother, lots of aunties, lots of sisters, no male whatsoever, so it was totally i was spoiled rotten. And then thrown into a pretty brutal boys boarding school. Yeah, i hate to call eton brutal. But in your day. Yeah, and if i had a son, id probably send him there. But in my day, it was very different. You were beaten and all this sort of stuff like you were at every other school, pretty much at the time. And yes, i do remember not wanting to shout when being beaten, and that is a sort of indication, and i do remember people saying i looked pretty and i scowled to try to stop looking pretty. So i thought id take up boxing in order to become aggressive appearing, and it sort of worked quite well. So here we are, let us be blunt, you were thrown out of the sas, britains special forces, because of a complicated incident in which you and a friend acquired some explosive and went a bit freelance. No, i acquired the explosives, but you were being taught to blow up as much as possible by the sas with as little as possible, and at the end of every day i was quite good at it so i had a lot left over. I thought, pity to give it back to the queen, you know. Put it in the boot. So two months later, the boot of my car was full up with explosives. So when this guy came up with an offer to protect castle combe in wiltshire, the prettiest village, voted as such, being ruined by 20th century fox. So we planned to blow up the dam, which they had made this lovely river into a big lake forfilming, and yes, i was thrown out of the sas for misuse. Yes, lets be honest, you went a bit rogue. You undertook a freelance operation, and they took a very dim view of it. But the point of the story, in a way, is that there you were, pretty much penniless, newly married, now without a military career. You thought the way through this, to continue to travel, to have the adventures, but to not do it with the military, was to launch a series of expeditions. Yes. Luckily, my wife late wife of 38 years, she was into the same sort of thing. Shed been a mountain guide up in the north of scotland. And she was a very determined person, and she decided that we would have to be polar because of the british media at the time were only interested in polar stuff, and if you dont get media coverage, you dont get sponsorship which we depend upon. And therefore, we would do the only polar expedition which had never been done by mankind, not even Scott Shackleton and co, which was to do the first ever journey around earth vertically, and she decided thats what we would do. Which of course was a journey without any air flight, you were on foot across the poles. Yeah. No flying one inch of the 52,000 miles. And noticing as we speak that the hand is evidence of some of the suffering that you have had in yourjourneys across the most frozen parts of our planet. Yes. Well, when we are selecting people for a small team, weve had 8,000 applicants in the london area, we only want two people. So choice is important. One of the things i would never take is someone with previous frostbite because they become a liability on the expedition, so i wouldnt choose myself anymore after getting this sort of thing. Just explain to me, because that, i think, is important to talk about, not because of the detail of how it happened, but how you responded to it. You basically had to amputate your own or you chose to amputate your own fingers and most of a thumb, didnt you . Yeah, i mean, when it happened, i sent a telegram back to the uk because by then my wife was into cattle, and all i got back from her was, typical ran, getting your fingers and all that, we are already short handed on the farm, so i didnt get much sympathy. Got back to the uk, the surgeon wouldnt operate for five months, so i was Walking Around with mummified half fingers on the end, and any time you touched something, its agony, so she said i was getting irritable, and cant wait five months to have a proper amputation. So we bought a black and decker fret saw, and she brought me cups of tea, and the physiotherapist in bristol said i had done a very good job. The surgeon was sort ofjealous, i think. Which raises the question, as you undertook more and more extreme adventures, crossing the poles on foot, deciding, much later in life, you were going to try to climb all seven highest peaks on the seven continents of this planet. You clearly were prepared to endure enormous amounts of physical suffering. Yeah, i had a massive heart attack on everest within five hours of the summit ridge. And therefore i had to retreat, and three days later i got back down to the base camp through a very good sherpa and tried again five years later, but by which time i was becoming an 0ap and failed a second time because of passing too many bodies. 0n the third attempt, with a wonderful sherpa, passed the bit which has recently been in the news, where you get queues of people all you do is, you do it at night when theres no people. So my sherpa took me up at night, got to the top, no bother, became the first 0ap to get to the top. How old were you when you got to the top of everest . 65. But because of being an 0ap it made more money for multiple sclerosis. And these expeditions, one of the offshoots is we have made £19 million for uk charities, and the more difficult they are, the more the public will give money to the charity. Interesting you say the more difficult they are, the more money we can raise, the more we can do. Isnt that, in the end, a rather dangerous philosophy . Because it is tempting you to undertake adventures, and i dont know whether we call them adventures or explorations which actually. We call them expeditions. Expeditions. But they are at the very boundary of what the human body can sustain, and i wonder whether at times you have actually been irresponsible . No, its a commercial problem. We need sponsorship, we never pay money to anybody or anything, so we need sponsorship. The sponsors will only give you sponsorship if youre breaking World Records, and they are only World Records because the easier ones have been done. So your point about them being very hard, is what comes about. We dont attack at. We look at the previous people, normally norwegian, who have succeeded. Where theyve failed on the expeditions that havent yet been done by humans, where theyve failed, we discover what they did wrong, and normally they took risks. So we try and actually avoid the risks, not confront them. Isnt it the truth that explorers and expedition leaders such as you are running out of new places to go . Running out of records to break . It depends which field youre in. If youre in polar, there are only two poles so you are quite right. If you happen to be one of the people who go for first ascents of difficult mountains, there are still many horrible north faces still to be climbed, so theyve got plenty to do. Its interesting you mention that, because i was reading a back copy of the New York Times from 2008 which was all about the mission that some of the worlds leading climbers undertook to k2 using a very difficult route, and i believe ii of them were killed in one of the Worst International mountaineering incidents ever. And ijust wonder, with your experience, whether you fear that Decision Making is being compromised by this desire to push to ever more extreme limits. Yes, it must be. Because if you are wanting that is yourjob to go onto the next record, and because of what ive just said, the records become harder and harder as your predecessors manage the last one. But in a sense, its not a job, is it . And thats what im driving at. Perhaps there is a selfishness of going too far in some explorers minds, because of course if they get into trouble, they are going to have to be rescued or at least rescue attempts will be made, enormous resources will be spent, and i think perhaps some people in the public are saying, whats the point . The Foreign Office stopped that happening. You cannot get permission to go down to antarctica in the winter when theres no rescue service. The rescue Services Want money by rescuing people so they like it. So, youre not ending up with threatening somebody as you have in the old days when that wasnt the case. The polar desk, if theyre not going to sue me for libel, in whitehall, are there to stop you going there in the wintertime when theres no rescue service on the entire continent. Every time i go in there with a new expedition, they say, christ, its him again. Just one more thought on the way in which youve promoted and sold the expeditions. Because, of course, as you very honestly say, i need the cash to make them happen. Is there a tendency to exaggerate at times . Im just thinking now about one of your most remarkable expeditions, which was nothing to do the ice, it was the desert, and it was your mission to find the lost city of ubar, a sort of mythical city mentioned in the arabian nights. You were convinced it was somewhere in the Empty Quarter between saudi arabia and 0man. Yeah, my wife was convinced. Well, your wife well, she led many of your missions in terms of being the logistics commander. True. And you claimed youd found it in 1991. Now, many archaeologists and experts that ive read since say, well, ranulph found something very interesting, but it sure as anything wasnt the lost city of ubar. The sultan of oman will tell you that it was the lost city of ubar, the queen of sheba had somewhere in order to put the frankincense on the camels to send them to the market up injerusalem and thats a huge journey, and we knew, therefore, exactly where she would have to start loading the camels with frankincense, which cost three times the cost of gold. So, it was well worth doing. It mustve been where water came from the coasts towards the great desert of arabia, which they had to cross. So, we were looking at the very tip of where that water reached, and we reached a place called shisr, and that must have been and all the 0mani authorities agree, and the professor who found them, juris zarins, the best middle east archaeologist in the world, agreed that it must be ubar. So, what youre saying, quoting other jealous archaeologists, talking a load of rubbish. No, it is ubar. Well, obviously youre not an archaeologist. But youre right, the 0manis, but they could have other reasons, including tourism to want to believe you were right. But in the end, it was an extraordinary expedition, whether its ubar or not. Yeah, it wasnt me deciding it was ubar, it was the best archaeologist in the world, juris zarins. But you sit before me as a man in maturity, in your 70s. And you have not stopped and your Health Problems have gotten worse. And ijust wonder whether you are struggling to put it bluntly with the realities of ageing, when your determination to keep going, keep the expeditions alive is as strong as ever. Yeah, it is, in my head, as strong as ever. But i acknowledge the fact that people, when they get to sort of 73, it starts being alarming. Things drop off and you have to start going for fast walks instead of runs on your daily yeah, that is unfortunately true. So, what we are doing is i am handing over the planning of what we do do to my colleagues, like doctor michael strahd, whos a top expedition doctor. He is taking over, right now, up in the arctic with the russian polar experts, looking to see how the ice is behaving, allowing new expeditions where there was ice and theres now water. But i just wonder whether youre. Again, its a question of responsibility. You have a teenage daughter. After your first wife died, you remarried. Youre a father. And yet, even in, i believe, your 70s, you undertook one of the Worlds Toughest sporting challenges the marathon des sables in the saharan desert. And that, for a human in Good Condition in their 20s or 30s, is almost unbearable. How on earth could you do that . Well, you have to have a guide who pushes you really hard, more than your own mental process is pushing you. Therefore, i went to this guy, rory coleman in cardiff, who took me on, looked to see what i was capable of if driven and did it successfully. So, we made the 2. 3 million figure that we were after from that particular thing youre talking about. And when you go off on these extraordinary challenges now, in the last few years, what does your wife, what does your daughter say to you . Well, they are a wonderful couple, wonderful wife, wonderful daughter. Do they ever suggest to you, you are mad . Are they fed up with it . I better, for the first time, not answer that question. 0h, no. I think you have to. Although youve got to remember, that back when i got born, i didnt have a father, i was brought up with just a mother. And my lovely wife is a fantastically good mum, so, you know, i wouldnt feel all that guilty. And you get to a certain age, youre going to die off anyway whether you do it out in the cold or run over by a taxi. A theme through our conversation has been motivation and tracing things back to your early life. It intrigued me that you said this just a few years ago in an interview with the financial times, you said, if i didnt do what i do, i do think i would get depressed. I think i would suffer depression, which i dont, thankfully. But i think i could. Its a sort of a background shadow, a sort of fear at the thought of not having a challenge. I think that is correct. And thats still something i would fear, yes. Have you ever, at any point in your life, where either physically or for reasons of money, youve not been able to do what you wanted to do . Have you suffered depression . Reasons of money, no. Because we always know that if we are doing something really difficult, we will get the sponsorship. So, no to that one. In terms of this health thing you bring up, it is very unfortunate, and the only decent thing about it is it happens to everybody. And a thought, before we end, about the planet you, more than any other guest ive ever had on hardtalk, have seen some of the most remote, wildest, most extreme parts of this planet of ours, i wonder whether you, in your travels today, really do feel that our planet is under pressure, is being compromised as never before . Utterly. And im totally behind the youth, including my daughter who has been in trafalgar square, talking about that sort of thing. You mean, shes been part of Extinction Rebellion . The effect on animals, as well as humans and it is dreadful and its very much there. And we in the arctic, its more easy to see the difference in the arctic than the antarctic. Weve seen huge difference. In the 1970s, i was designing man hauled sledges, which were somewhat waterproof in case there was a canal. Now, we are designing canoes, which can be hauled every now and again. So the amount of water in 20 years up there in this huge area of ice, which is shrinking, is enabling people to canoe to the pole instead of travelling to the pole. Are you a supporter of Extinction Rebellion . Whose core message is that its no good in mouthing the rhetoric of caring for the planet. The urgency of this means that we have to change how we live right now. Im totally in support of the rebellion as long as it doesnt put people off by doing violent things or becoming too like the gilets jaunes. As long as they complain and get the political people to have a real drive, which is difficult because of their business side, you know, very difficult indeed. But thats why it requires Something Like Extinction Rebellion, of old and young, really trying to push the movement to get sensible carbon behaviour, which is against business. And a final thought are you done . You had to abandon your effort to climb all seven highest peaks on the seven continents because you just werent well enough to do it, your back gave way. Is this the end now for you . Of that particular one, weve done all the difficult ones, we got beaten by all the easy ones because of the old age factor. I mean, even hillary, a few years after he climbed everest, could no longer get about 18,000 feet. Its just. But my point is, no more expeditions . Oh, no. You said no more expeditions of a particular type. Youve given yourself a get out clause. So, dont exaggerate. No. In terms of that particular one, weve done the difficult ones over 29,000 feet. The easy ones at 16, 17, you just, at a certain age, i dont know what goes wrong with you, but you can no longer take altitude above a certain height. So, if its not altitude anymore, what challenges can you undertake . Well, you go back to horizontal, not vertical. Have you got one in mind . Well, all the polar stuff is horizontal, not vertical. What is it . I wont tell you, because our enemy, the norwegians, may get there first. Laughs sir Ranulph Fiennes, we will have to wait to find out then. But for now, thank you so much for coming on hardtalk. No, thank you. Thank you very much. Hello there. We saw a big cooldown in the weather over the easter period. Sunday, the hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures up to 25 degrees celsius. Well, thats more than hot enough to melt some of those Chocolate Easter eggs. By monday, though, temperatures certainly dropped away significantly for many of us. Top of the drops manston in kent, with things 15 degrees celsius cooler on monday. Now, temperatures will be picking up over the next few days, but that said, Tuesday Morning starting on a cold note for quite a few of us, with some patches of frost developing where the skies stay clear for any length of time. And that said, across parts of Eastern England and also the south, theres probably going to be a bit too much in the way of breeze and or cloud to see much in the way of frost. High pressure still in charge of our weather on tuesday. It is sinking a little bit further south. The winds not as strong, so it will feel a little bit warmer for many of us. For western scotland, though, westerly winds will bring a bit more cloud to the highlands, the Western Isles and quite cloudy weather as well for the Northern Isles of scotland. And although we start off cloudy in lincolnshire, east anglia, south east england, the east midlands, that cloud will tend to burn back toward some of those north sea coasts into the afternoon. Its going to feel a bit warmer, the winds a bit lighter, temperatures a couple of Degrees Higher with highs up to 1a degrees. 0n into wednesdays forecast, High Pressure is with us once again. If anything, its going to be warmer for just about everyone, with temperatures around three or four Degrees Higher. Highs of 17 degrees or so for london, for birmingham, for newcastle and for aberdeen, but maybe 19 the top temperature around the cardiff area. Temperature contrast then begins to increase on thursday. The air getting a bit warmer across england and wales, but a bit colder across parts of scotland and north east england. That colder air is arriving with a very weak cold front. So, it will bring a strip of cloud, maybe an odd light shower with it. Most areas, though, will stay dry. But those temperatures certainly dropping away. Highs only 9 degrees celsius in aberdeen, so starting to feel quite chilly once again here, whereas for england and wales, its a warmer day with temperatures quite widely pushing on into the low 20s. Now, its been a very dry month so far, but that looks set to change as we head towards friday and indeed the weekend, as this area of low pressure drifts up from iberia. Its going to bring increasingly cloudy skies and the prospect of some rain. This is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. Im sally bundock. Donald trump angrily defends his handling of the coronavirus outbreak, which has now killed 22,000 americans. Reporter what did your administration do in february with the time that your travel ban bought you . A lot. What . A lot, and in fact, well give you a list, what we did in fact, part of it was up there. We did a lot. It wasnt clear your video has a gap. Look, look. President macron announces he will begin to lift the french lockdown on may the 11th. The indian Prime Minister is expected to announce an extension to indias nationwide lockdown. We have a special report from mumbai, a virus hotspot
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