THE man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.

This heroic and elegant statement is attributed to Roger Bannister, who has been reminiscing this week about his historic athletic achievement 60 years ago in breaking the four-minute mile.

Today, in our impatient age of the social media soundbite, Roger’s words would probably be retweeted as simply: there’s no gain without pain.

If evidence were needed of that truism, tune into Channel 4 on Monday nights to watch 13 men trying to survive on a remote Pacific island for four weeks without any mod cons (not just mobiles and laptops, but no food nor water).

The Island is the latest TV venture from survival expert Bear Grylls. But there’s one thing missing from this show – Grylls himself. After dropping the unlucky 13 in a croc-infested mangrove, Grylls leaves them to it.

They have enough water for 24 hours and just one day’s survival training.

The men are of suitably different ages and backgrounds to make the show interesting. Hence we met the 70-year-old retired copper who immediately cast himself as the bossy boots, while the young call-centre employee took the role of soft lad as he fought back tears at the thought of camping alongside scorpions, snakes and heaven knows what else.

With the canteen empty, and the men becoming dangerously dehydrated, the priority became making a fire to sterilise the insect-infested water source they had discovered.

After 12 hours of trying, they managed to light a bonfire. To them, it seemed a Herculean effort, and they were hollering and high-fiving as if they’d just run Bannister’s sub-four-minute mile.

As a woman, watching at home, I was surprised it took them that long to get an ember to catch light. Hadn’t they been a Boy Scout? Had none of them been camping? And what on earth had they learned during their one day’s survival training with Bear?

I conducted a quick poll among the men I knew, asking if they could light a fire without matches. Each said yes, but failed to give an account of how and when they had ever done so.

I guess fire-making is just something men think they can do. It may be a long-lost art, but perhaps they believe that hard-wired deep into their DNA is an innate ability to live as cavemen.

It is this hypothesis that Bear Grylls and his production team are putting to the test. He has said: “Nowadays we’ve swapped the bow and arrow for the iPhone. What I wanted to do is see, if you strip man of everything - when pushed and the bravado’s gone - would they crumble or are the skills still somewhere in there? “ Bear has already come under fire from female derring-do types who can’t see why they aren’t allowed to join the Pacific party.

But Bear dismisses the accusations of sexism. The show, he insists, is a study of modern masculinity. It’s not that he thinks women can’t hack it (indeed he is considering an all-female version), it’s just that were you to add the fairer sex to the mix it would became a totally different programme. The focus would shift to bikini bodies, love interests and men trying to outdo each other to impress the women, rather than work as a team for their own survival.

It’s actually really refreshing – and fascinating – to see a group of modern blokes on the box, denied all the distractions of the 21st century, and encouraged to just be men.

And hugely entertaining too.

 

THERE’S a game in the satirical TV show Have I Got News For You called the “missing word round”. Here’s one to play at home: The Lendal Bridge saga has been a ( ) for the city of York.

Certain words immediately spring to mind (fiasco, shambles, disaster).

But the perfect word might be shame. Certainly, the city has been shamed in its mindless pursuit of fines against unwitting visitors, but the real shame is that efforts to tackle the very serious problem of traffic congestion and air pollution will be set back, perhaps for years.