Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [19]
So I said yes. In spite of the fact that the survival time in the river Thames in the middle of winter is under four minutes, The Other Boat Race seemed comparatively risk-free.
“Put your back into it, lad. Come on. Give it some welly.”
The speaker was Tim Foster, a David Beckham lookalike who had won a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics. It was day two of the show, and I’d been separated from my teammates and stuck in a coxless four with two ex-Olympians and an Oxford rowing champ. As I struggled to keep up, Foster drew alongside on a launch and started shouting at me through a megaphone. It was like trying to play doubles with Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors, and Stefan Edberg, while McEnroe made wisecracks on the sidelines.
I couldn’t help thinking I’d made a terrible mistake. Wouldn’t I just look completely ridiculous in contrast to these hulking great athletes? Any sane person watching the show would think: “What are these national heroes doing in a boat with a fat bald bloke?” As if to ram the point home, the boat was so unbalanced by the fact that I was on one side of it that we ended up going round in circles.
Still, at least I wasn’t doing significantly worse than the other “civilians” on my team. For one thing, we were all far too small to excel in this particular sport. With the exception of Jonathan Aitken, a former Conservative member of Parliament who stood six foot three, everyone on the Oxford team was five-eight or under. As Richard Herring, one of my teammates, pointed out, rowing boats are normally crewed by giants and coxed by midgets. Our boat was being coxed by a giant—Aitken—and crewed by midgets.
In addition, five of the people in the eight-man Oxford boat were asthmatics. I discovered this on the first day when one of our coaches made us race a team of sixteen-year-olds from a nearby school. Afterward, as we were all bent double on the riverbank, five of my crewmates pulled out inhalers and started puffing away. I immediately asked one of the producers if I could approach Ventolin about a possible sponsorship deal, but he said it would be against BBC rules.
Nevertheless, provided we all stayed in the boat, our humiliation would be limited to not being able to row. It was only when the BBC filmed us out of the boat that things got a little sticky.
For instance, the producers discovered that I knew a member of the Cambridge team—a fellow journalist named Grub Smith—and they decided it would be fun to exaggerate the rivalry between us. To that end, they asked if they could film us playing golf and in a moment of madness I agreed. Needless to say, I made a complete dog’s dinner of my first tee shot and the ball landed at the feet of a cameraman standing about ten yards away. He immediately dropped to his haunches and followed the progress of the ball as it dribbled to a halt. Rain forced us to abandon play after six holes, by which time Grub was two under, while I was already in double digits.
However, that wasn’t the most embarrassing episode in the eight-week shoot. That occurred when my teammates and I spent the day in the company of Sir Steve Redgrave, one of only four Olympians in history to win gold medals at five consecutive Games.
“So, Sir Steve,” I said, trying to break the ice, “how d’you think the England squad is going to fare in Athens without you?” This was a reference to the fact that he’d announced his retirement at the 2000 Olympic Games and wouldn’t be competing in 2004.
He gave me a blank look. “Which