DICING WITH DEATH

I should have died many times in my early adventures. Like a character in a video game, I’m getting low on ‘lives’, so I have to get smarter, wiser and more riskaverse – or one day I simply won’t come home. I have just heard that the cave we filmed in with comedian Rob Brydon, and also the cliff face I abseiled with the actor Warwick Davis, have since collapsed. Both incidents would have killed us and the crew.

This is why, having made it out alive from so many close scrapes (often small, unseen, forgettable moments, but ones that could so easily have gone the wrong way), I finally consider myself a bit smarter. I like to say that my knowledge now is the sum of all my near-misses. And on that basis, I can call myself ‘experienced’.

I have lost count of the many helicopter trips we took that left me cold inside and amazed to be alive. I particularly remember a tiny single-engine, two-seater chopper that took me back to civilisation after we finished a desert shoot once in Morocco. We flew over a huge mountain range being buffeted by the worst and most violent desert winds I have ever encountered. It was like being in a bad horror movie coupled with an even worse rollercoaster. The pilot was ashen and sweat was pouring down his face as we were thrown around like rag dolls in this tiny toy machine, with a barrel of extra fuel tied to the skid beside me.

I genuinely didn’t think the machine would make it, and I mentally prepared myself for the end. Strangely I was at peace, just annoyed my life was over when I was still relatively young.

THE PILOT WAS ASHEN AS WE WERE THROWN AROUND LIKE RAG DOLLS. I DIDN’T THINK WE’D MAKE IT