There may be many benefits to living at the top of the Erno Goldfinger-designed Trellick Tower in north Kensington – the extensive views across London, perhaps, or the knowledge that one is inhabiting an iconic example of Brutalist architecture. Less obvious is the chance to earn a quick 50 quid for allowing Dan Witchalls to jump off your balcony.
Mind you, you’d have to let him into your flat at 5am, for base jumping (or "base", as parachuting from the top of tall buildings is known to its practitioners) is a secretive pastime with unsociable hours. It also carries identical odds to Russian roulette and, speaking as one who begins to feel queasy up a stepladder, I'm not sure I wouldn't prefer to press a gun against my head.
Witchalls, on the other hand, has done the Trellick Tower several times, and at the start of last night’s unexpectedly involving Cutting Edge documentary, The Men Who Jump off Buildings, he proudly listed the other landmarks from which he has launched himself. “Wembley Stadium, Knightsbridge Guards Barracks, Battersea Power Station, Crystal Palace antennae... even the Millennium Dome.” And he had the footage to prove it – the Millennium Dome being a close-run thing because of the height – or, rather, because of the lack of it. My favourite was his cry, when leaping from the top of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, of “Kiss me, Hardy”.
But then Witchalls, Britain’s most prolific base jumper with more than 800 drops in 10 years, proved a droll companion. Whether he is also selfish and a danger unto others was the sub-textual question of Rob Davis’s film. His Danish girlfriend, Tia, had the look of someone who had long ago given up dissuading him from spending his nights throwing himself from tall buildings, while Witchalls’s father stated that his son was “very brave, but foolhardy and I wish he’d pack it up”. At one stage Davis asked his subject whether he would continue jumping if it came to a choice between this and his girlfriend, and, after some thought, Witchall firmly came down on the side of a continuing relationship with his “Viking” belle. The long-suffering Tia looked as if she didn’t believe a word of it.
Amusingly enough, Witchalls’s day job is as a roofer, and you were left wondering how he managed to fit in any sleep, let alone sustain a romantic relationship, as "base" seemed to take up every night of his week. With a few tweaks you could imagine him as a Harry Enfield character, or better, someone played by Michael Palin in Monty Python. As with many obsessives, there was a comic element to his personality, although the wife of Ian Richardson apparently didn’t see the funny side, reckoning that Witchalls was more of a devil – certainly a devil on her husband’s shoulder. For her spouse is, or rather was, Witchalls’s "jump buddy" – the necessary other – providing support and most importantly, I suspect, to act as a witness. Exhilarating it may be, but it’s much less fun if nobody’s watching.
Richardson snapped both his legs jumping from a building in Benidorm, when his parachute “did a 180” - opening at the wrong angle and slapping him against the side of the building. We saw the accident from the camera embedded in Richardson’s helmet, just as we witnessed his lines becoming tangled during a jump from an outcrop of the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, a crash-landing that left him in intensive care with three broken ribs, a punctured lung and “a fucked-up elbow”.
Witchalls’s reaction on visiting his jump buddy in hospital was interesting, a jocularity that was probably supposed to feel like manly insouciance, but also spoke of a slightly domineering “you’ll get over it” attitude. It was as if Witchalls feared his jump buddies would come to their senses and develop a taste for something safer, like motor racing or running with the bulls in Pamplona. And there was something of a sick joke about the sight, later on, of Richardson hobbling alongside Witchalls to scout another jump – an observer because he had decided to retire at last.
A bad influence or not, Witchalls had by now gone one step more extreme, and had begun to make “wing-suit base jumps”. This involved throwing himself head first, dressed in what looked like a cross between a homemade superhero cape and a flasher’s mac, and free-falling like a wombat until the moment came to activate the parachute. It was an extraordinary sight, and you had to remind yourself that this wasn't concocted out of CGI effects. I suspect Witchalls won’t be truly fulfilled until he can actually fly unaided, or until he finally kills himself, and there is only one of those outcomes which is ever likely to happen. Let's hope Tia can make an honest man of him.
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