Spectacles

by Sue Perkins

  Along the side of the entire Dalton Highway there are delineators. These are white and red sticks positioned at regular intervals along the route, giving you some idea as to the visibility. In clear conditions I knew I could see nearly twenty.

  Almost as soon as we were under way, I felt a change. Nothing physical. It was instinctive, limbic. Something wicked this way comes – that kind of thing. After a few minutes the steering became a little harder, the tyres a little lazy. The wind started to smack against the window with more of a scream than a whistle. We were now nearing the highest and most exposed point of the route – the Atigun Pass, as it crosses the Brooks Mountain Range, where the ice road snakes violently to the right and up a long and punishing 12 per cent gradient.

  Suddenly, from nowhere, the snow started. Not like snow I knew. The snow I’m familiar with has a simple trajectory – falling simply from top to bottom. It comes from up above, it lands at my feet. Simple. This snow was different. It emerged from everywhere – up, down, left and right – and swirled in huge circles around us. Visibility went from fifteen to five delineators in less than ten seconds. The incoming blizzard turned the air white and then the road white until visibility dipped again from five to two to one. Then nothing. Just a wall of white – nothing but white.

  A large drift started accumulating on the front right tyre and I tried steering to correct it, but the back kicked out, and suddenly we were – I didn’t know – sideways, maybe? All I knew was there was a ravine somewhere to my right and I did not want to fall down it.

  In a second the vehicle was wedged solid with snow. Suddenly, and rather magnificently, Charlie went into overdrive. I could smell the testosterone coming off him. Every anecdote, every adventure, every cell in his body had been leading him to this. His hero moment. He jumped out of the passenger seat and fiddled with the tyres (to this day I have no idea what he did, but goddam it, it was TECHNICAL) before pulling me out of the driving seat. This was no time for feminist badinage, so I let him. Charlie was the only one of us who was experienced enough to get that car moving again.

  And I was the only one experienced enough to get the entire Ice Road community rocking to my CB skills.

  It’s amazing what you learn about yourself when you come face to face with death. What I learned is that when I confront my own mortality I like to do it in the voice of Fenella Fielding.

  For some reason I began to speak like her. I guess I figured that the only people out there listening were men and that in order to get them to save us I’d need to sound really HOT. Is that the action of a feminist? Oh God, I don’t know. I really hope so. It was merely self-preservation. I’m sorry.

  As Charlie wrestled with the screaming motor, I was pleading down the airwaves in my husky new accent. Most accidents, I remembered from our safety briefing, are caused by eighteen-wheelers ploughing into smaller vehicles. Eighteen-wheelers can’t apply their brakes in these conditions – it’s just too dangerous. They’d jack-knife on the ice and career to their deaths.

  ‘Northbound four-wheeler stuck at the Atigun Pass,’ I pleaded. Although, with that voice, I might as well have been saying, ‘Anyone of you big lads fancy a blowie, on the house?’

  I kept on going until the radio crackled.

  Man:

  Hello, little lady.

  Oh God, not that again. It must be an Alaskan thing.

  Man:

  How can I be of assistance?

  Well, hellfire, I just bagged me a mountain man.

  I don’t remember much about the man who rescued us, other than he was hugely disappointed when he finally made the connection between the sexy voice emanating from his CB and the goofy nerdulant coming towards him, sobbing. He’d expected an incandescent Emily Blunt; he got Gareth Malone. With tits. I also recall that he was wearing a T-shirt in minus thirty degrees. Honestly. How hard can you be? Alaskans.

  Our saviour chaperoned us through the blizzard all the way to our final destination – Prudhoe Bay. By that point night had finally fallen and we were so exhausted both Charlie and I fell into our first proper silence together. For the first time in weeks we no longer fought against it, and instead gave in to the blissful quiet.

  We parked the four-by-four next to a row of super-trucks shivering in the fierce crosswind. Daisy chains of cabling connected their engines to batteries so they didn’t choke in the cold. Stalactites hung from the fenders and slivers of silver ice nestled in the tyre treads.

  The complex at Prudhoe was a vast industrial hangar catering for the itinerant thick-necked strongmen who make their living on the oil fields. We entered a voluminous hall – polished floors, hard lines, long empty steel tables. We hadn’t eaten for hours and were starving. We could smell food but couldn’t see any. We couldn’t see a soul. Then, we realized that on each wall sat a giant vending machine. Not the sort of vending machine I grew up with, those derisory affairs in leisure centres which sent a pack of Discos down a steel chute, rendering its contents dust as it smacked down to earth. These were industrial monstrosities, dispensing every food product known to man: Thai green curry, Singapore noodles, burgers, fries, chow mein, pork balls. You name it, the automated metal claws could get it. We jabbed wordlessly at buttons for hours, and pre-prepared international cuisine rained down from the sky.

  When I finally got up from the table I remember feeling the twang of muscles I never knew existed, newly warmed sinews spasming from the shock, I guess. I hobbled to my room, which was on the second floor, past a deserted launderette the size of a tennis court. Huge drums spun and stuttered; inside, endless loops of checked shirts and Y-fronts belonging to the myriad men lodging there. I went past a state-of-the-art gymnasium – treadmills beeping, rows of stationary bicycles flashing. No one running. No one cycling. No one.

  Everywhere you looked it was like a Stanley Kubrick film – beautiful, chilly vignettes of the automated soulessness of the future.

  Where was everyone? Where had they all gone?

  ‘Is there anybody there?’ I shouted. Nothing.

  For a brief moment I panicked. What if the BBC commissioners had changed their minds again? What if the show had gone from The World’s Most Interesting Roads to The World’s Most Dangerous Roads to The World’s Most Sex-Starved Oil Workers? Or, even worse, Redneck Psycho-Killers.

  I remember clearly that my door had four locks. I remember I made use of each and every one of them. I remember a perfect silence save the thrum of the launderette and the gym and the canteen, and all those other vast, empty mechanized spaces that carried on beating in the absence of human life. I cried. I cried because for a while I had felt truly under threat, lost and insignificant and vulnerable. I cried for my family and friends and my dogs. And I cried because I missed home. Finally at the end of the road I allowed myself the memory of home.

  Then I dried my eyes and rehydrated a lasagne using the mini-kettle.

  I hope it was dangerous enough for you.

  It felt dangerous enough for me.

  The Ho Chi Minh Trail

  The second time I got into a four-by-four in the name of television I was at least up to speed on the correct title of the show. Forewarned is forearmed. This time my companion was the effortlessly brilliant Dame Liza Tarbuck. Instead of it being a Boorman-esque pairing (me soliloquizing about Bandura’s socialization theory and he about the latest tweaks to the BMW series 3 engine), we bonded over the fact we both love Diana Ross and both like behaving like four-year-olds.

  I’m pretty sure we are the first women ever to have self-driven the Ho Chi Minh trail. I know we are the first women to have done it singing ‘
Love Hangover’ the entire way. When the film was wrapped, I can only imagine the hell endured by the editors, picking their way through endless loops of poorly harmonized 70s disco with inane interjections about the landscape. I imagine the soundtrack in that cutting room went something like this.

  Me/Liza:

  Ah, if there’s a cure for this

  I don’t want it. [Ooh look there’s a pig on the back of that motorbike.]

  Don’t want it.

  If there’s a remedy

  I’ll run from it, from it. [Christ, it’s hot – got any sunblock?]

  Think about it all the time [Mind that water buffalo!]

  Never let it out of my mind

  ’Cause I love you.

  I’ve got the sweetest hangover [If you had to sleep with one of the researchers, which one would it be?]

  I don’t wanna get over.

  Sweetest hangover …

  As opposed to my trip to Alaska, I couldn’t tell you where I went. Not a Scooby. It was like a magical mystery tour, but with the word ‘magical’ replaced with ‘breathtakingly unhygienic’ and ‘morally questionable’. At no point were we shown a map or given directions or provided with any information that could have pinpointed our location. As a result, I can tell you everything that happened, I just can’t tell you where it happened.

  Liza and I would punctuate the tedium of endless driving with games – the finest of which was the Water Buffalo Game. This involved driving into a massive, wet, freshly laid buffalo turd and seeing how heavily you could saturate the driver-side camera in shit.

  I told you – four-year-olds.

  This meant that when it came to viewing the footage back in London, the editor of the B camera had to listen to us singing ‘Love Hangover’, punctuated occasionally by a flying wet dung-ball smacking into the camera. I like to think it’s the video of the track that Diana always wanted to make but was too creatively blocked to realize.

  One day, while travelling through the tiny village of I HAVE NO IDEA, Liza was at the wheel and spotted a ripe beanbag-shaped pile of fresh manure in the road ahead. This was around the same time I spotted, from the passenger seat, a young schoolboy, in pristine uniform, walking alongside us. Liza steered right, and before I could say anything, she had squarely hit the shit.

  Liza:

  [roaring with pride] Bull’s eye!

  Me:

  Oh God …

  In the rear-view mirror we catch sight of the schoolboy, dripping with wet cack.

  Liza:

  [bellowing] I am so so sorry!

  Me:

  We’re not all like that!

  In fact, we are – we are all like that.

  Though technically a road trip, this adventure turned out to be more of a tour of Asian brothels. Whether the BBC budget was tight, or the production company had spent all the money on GoPros and other camera gadgetry, I don’t know. What I do know is that night after night we stayed in rooms that wouldn’t have looked out of place in The Human Centipede 2.

  In the first hotel (definitely a brothel) there was a six-inch gap under my bedroom door. Every hour, on the hour, I’d hear a knock, followed by a thick smoker’s cough and a muttering in I DON’T KNOW WHAT LANGUAGE. Each time I would wake up, shout ‘No thank you!’ in my loudest, poshest voice, then try to bank another sixty-minute kip before it happened all over again.

  The room was dank. In the corner, by the open-plan toilet area, stood a black Biffa bin full of stagnant water. Mosquitoes scudded across the surface. I studied it for a while. I was new to Asia and Asian sanitary ware – what on earth was it there for? Eventually I decided it was a kind of makeshift plunge pool, so stripped off, climbed onto a chair and then plopped inside.

  Insects nibbled my shoulders. I sluiced then dragged myself out again.

  At 5 a.m., after the regular punctuation from wannabe punters, I woke again – this time to a frenzied squawk, followed by silence, then a pool of blood running under the door towards the bed. It was obviously cock o’clock.

  An hour later I got up for breakfast. As always when away from home, I had the vegetarian option – a cloudy soup with morning glory and garlic. Delicious. Delicious right up to the point I drained the bowl and found a chicken’s foot bobbing around at the bottom. ‘For texture,’ said the woman serving.

  As we were packing up our things, I muttered over to Liza, who seemed to be trying to get GPS on her phone,

  Me:

  Interesting bathing scenario …

  Liza:

  What d’you mean?

  Me:

  Last night. You know – the bath …

  Liza:

  What bath?

  Me:

  That massive bin with the scoop in it.

  Liza:

  You mean the toilet water? The water to flush the toilet with?

  I swallow very hard.

  Me:

  Yeah. Yeah, that water – the toilet water. Yeah.

  You learn fast in Asia.

  I have become very familiar with these rooms over recent years – the black mould creeping up the wall, the overhead fan with exposed wiring, the air con that weeps stale water down the walls. The soundtrack is familiar too: the endless scuttle of roaches and geckos. Do you know that big geckos actually say ‘GECKO’? I didn’t, until one spent the entire night doing so right next to my pillow.

  ‘GECKO! GECKO!’

  I thought it was Liza taking the piss, but when I turned on my head torch, I became aware of its enormous dry body scuttling around next to me.

  Once we arrived at a hostel (brothel) in I DON’T KNOW WHERE, and the door to my room was locked. Finally a bloke came out, red and sweaty, followed by a young girl. The room smelled of sex and stress. Reception seemed most put out when I asked if they might be able to change the sheets. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t sleep at all.

  At some of the out-of-town places prostitution is a family affair. The mother cooks the dinner, while the daughter stares at the diners and touts for business. It’s a dynamic that makes me very queasy, no matter how long I spend in Asia.

  I think back on these nights and all I remember is thick heat and the listlessness that comes with it, plastic tables and chairs, the smell of fried garlic, the hum of a fridge full of Lao beer. The sound of men laughing at another table, possibly at you,

  very possibly at you.

  Several days into the shoot, and after a twelve-hour drive, we arrived at a hostel like the one in Hostel. Within minutes there was a power cut. It was the first time I remember being grateful for darkness – just so I wouldn’t have to see the inside of my room. As dawn broke, I woke to the sound of Liza knocking at my door. She had the focused mania of the truly sleep-deprived. She hadn’t slept a wink and one eye seemed larger than the other.

  Liza:

  Right! We’re leaving! We’re going home. I’ve been up all night studying the map and I think I know where we are.

  She points to a red squiggle somewhere between Vietnam and Laos.

  Liza:

  If we get in the car and drive due west, we can get to a checkpoint and get out of here.

 
Me:

  But what will we say?

  Liza:

  We’ll say we’ve been held prisoner by a documentary crew who won’t tell us where we are or what we’re doing and that we want to speak to the British embassy.

  There’s a sudden noise from behind us. It’s Ian, the director.

  Ian:

  What are you doing, girls?

  … he says to the two forty-something women in front of him. We jump.

  Liza:

  Nothing!

  Me:

  Nothing!

  Ian:

  Right, well, let’s get on then, shall we?

  We hop into the car, ready for the off. The fan blasts hot air into our faces.

  Me/Liza:

  ‘Don’t call a doctor, don’t call her momma, don’t call her preacher, no I don’t need it …’

  We set off. The convoy ahead inched forward at a snail’s pace, then came to a halt. We craned our necks to see the cause of the delay. There, at the side of the road, was Ian, taking a piss. We stared at him. He carried on pissing, waving us on with his other hand. It really doesn’t get more dismissive than that.

  From that moment on, the battle lines were drawn. Him versus us. Man versus perimenopause. Whenever he handed us some notes, or moved to direct us, or even give us a friendly pat on the back, the poor guy would hear a chorus of: