Does anyone else ever feel a mite sorry for the North Pole? It always takes second billing to its more famous namesake, and you can see why. The South Pole belongs to a continental land mass. Antarctica has penguins, historic huts, and chaps going outside, maybe for some time. The North Pole, stuck up there on basically a huge floating icicle, is hedged about with ifs and buts. Who got there first? No one knows. And when you stand precisely at 90.00.00 degrees north, the drift of the ice soon shifts you off it. If the Poles were siblings, the South would inherit the land and the title. The North would have to lump it in the Army. But it now has a new celebrity endorsement.
Harry’s Arctic Heroes followed four servicemen wounded in Afghanistan as they made their way across 160 miles of sea ice towards the North Pole. Between them they’d lost a variety of limbs, acquired sundry prosthetic replacements and clocked up an aggregate of 32 operations. It’s not easy walking to the North Pole at the best of times. Ice cracks known as leads have an annoying habit of opening up freezing sea lanes. Elsewhere gigantic lumps of impassable rubble lie across the route. With vital bits of your body missing, it’s that little bit harder. For company the four soldiers had two expedition leaders whose charity, Walking with the Wounded, this trek was raising money for, a Norwegian guide and a member of our dearly beloved Royal Family.
You wouldn’t want any old Windsor hiking along with you at minus 34 degrees, and you might have thought you wouldn’t want this one in particular. Indeed, when the press saw the party off from somewhere inside the Arctic Circle, one of them was chastised by the third in line to the throne for asking a stupid question. Half an afternoon in charm school, I remember thinking, would do His Royal Highness no harm at all. But it turns out he is rather engaging in front of a television camera, as his performance at his brother’s wedding hinted. (Read Adam Sweeting’s priceless description of Harry in theartsdesk's review of the big day here.) H, as he's known to brother officers, may not say much of substance, and he’s clearly not leafed through a Thesaurus in recent years, but he hits the right tone with a natural and unaffected lack of swagger. Even with iced snot dangling from his nostrils. “If I go in and I do get hit,” he said of a potential return to Helmand, “I hope I end up like these guys.”
These guys were Captain Guy Disney, who lost a leg to a rocket-propelled grenade; Sergeant Steve Young, an injury to whose back from an IED prompted doctors to predict he may never walk again; Captain Martin Hewitt, paralysed in the right arm thanks to a bullet in his shoulder; and Private Jaco van Gass, who lost an arm to a grenade.
It would probably be appropriate to declare an interest, in that I know one of the participants. Not, one hastens to add, the eponymous Prince, but the Norwegian guide who helped them across the treacherous terrain. I wrote the book that accompanied the BBC series Blizzard, that re-enacted Scott and Amundsen's race for the South Pole, in which Inge Solheim took part. I distinctly recall in the hotel in Greenland (where they shot the series) he presented himself for his first day at work in a rippling Superman T-shirt – without, I swear, a trace of irony. Inge would no doubt be happy to hand over the shirt to each and every one of the quartet, who were movingly lost for words as they stood after 11 days’ walking at the top of the world.
This film played a very straight bat with the material. The camera work made suitably ravishing use of the piercing northern light, while John Hurt inimitably supplied the atmospherics on the voiceover. You’d like to hope that the film might have been made without a royal name on the masthead, but then barely a thing gets green-lit these days without some celeb or other as our gurning guide. HRH H modestly pushed off after three days and ceded the limelight. Decent of you, sir. Decent. Clearly a North Pole sort.
- Watch Harry's Arctic Heroes on BBC iPlayer
- Walking with the Wounded website
