Top Gear

Hello and welcome to a Top Gear special.

That is Resolute, the most northerly town in Canada, in the Arctic Circle.

We're here to have a race.

400 miles over mostly frozen ocean in that direction to the North Pole.

I shall be travelling using husky dogs, sledge and skis.

I'm gonna try and beat him in a car.

That's never been done before.

No-one has ever tried to drive to the North Pole.

Here's why.

On the way, he would encounter ice boulders as big as cathedrals.

Polar bears the size of hatchbacks, temperatures that would freeze the fuel in his tank,

and, if Al Gore is to be believed,

open water into which he would sink.

Victory, then, would be mine.

Time to meet my team.

The engines powering me to the Pole would be ten husky dogs.

Where the car would crash through the thin ice,

they'd be fine.

Driving them would be Matty McNair, one of the world's leading sled dog explorers and racers.

The dogs have been living here for 4,000 years.

They can go through anything - cold, blizzard.

I have a lead dog that can go through hard packed ice.

He figures out a good route.

So that's terrain, weather - they're made for it.

I've just been weed on!

Did they have to wee on me?!

They're fast!

To beat the human lamppost, I would be using, a Toyota pickup truck.

It's a tough old bird this

but for the trip to the Pole, it had been sent to Iceland,

for a few modifications.

The biggest change, apart from the gun, obviously,

are the enormous wheels - Cuban wheels, I like to call them.

They give it extra height.

The tyres are hand-made - cost £2,500 each.

They are so vast that the front suspension has been moved forwards

otherwise you wouldn't be able to open the door.

Other changes - it's got heavy-duty diffs, heavy-duty suspension,

it's got a sump guard about that thick in case we hit a pretty much solid piece of ice.

At the front, I insisted it was fitted with these spotlamps,

although that might have been unnecessary, since it's currently 11.30pm

and this is as dark as it ever gets.

Inside, there was marine satellite navigation

and underneath, a long-range fuel tank filled with a freeze-resistant mixture of diesel and avgas.

All I need to complete the picture is a guide and a navigator.

Richard Hammond has been given Matty McNair, one of the world's leading Arctic experts.

Me. I've been given him.

Can I make it clear now that I'm only here because the producer said I had to be. I don't like snow.

I hate being cold. I hate outdoor pursuits.

I hate the idea that I've got to "push my body to find the limit."

I can't stand this stupid clothing that makes this rustling noise.

I hate the zips and the toggles and all the pockets and that.

- And I hate your stupid truck. - Listen, if we make it,

you will be the first person to go to the North Pole who DIDN'T want to be there.

DOGS BARK

We have the right tools for the job, which just left us.

We're not what you'd call polar explorers.

So earlier in the year, we'd been sent to a cold-weather training camp in the Austrian Alps.

We were put in the hands of some Arctic experts who showed us what salami was and

how to put an anorak on.

To be honest, our minds kept wandering.

- There WAS a man who ate a car once. - Was it that bloke who hate everything?

Then, a doctor snapped us to attention.

- Your foreskin has been frostbitten. - Right.

Shall we go straight to the frozen penis?

Aarrghh!

- He'd been walking with it hanging out of his trousers. - With your willy hanging out? - Why?

- It comes down to organisation. - Good job he didn't do it on the London Underground. He'd be arrested.

On public transport with it out...

The doctor moved on to how we'd do our number twos.

You've got to be quick.

- We've nearly missed entire programmes... - Sometimes, Top Gear is delayed by an hour.

I get the runs, especially if I go abroad, which the North Pole is.

- Doctors say better out than in. - That's not true of your penis in minus 50.

Essentials for the Arctic crap.

- Take your bog roll and your gun with you. - Take your gun with you? - To the loo? - Absolutely

Bears love to creep up on you when you're taking a crap.

That's not sporting of them.

The next day, it was time for outdoor training. To be honest, it was freezing

so we went for a coffee instead.

If it's like this when we get to the Pole...

We should cross that bridge when we get to it.

How can you practise being cold?

Snow is snow. There's no point going out there catching our death.

You wouldn't be able to go - you'd have a cold.

Eventually, though, the weather cleared,

and I gave May and Hammond their first ever skiing lesson.

I can't go because of the wind...

Richard, in particular, would spend a lot of time skiing beside his dogs.

Aarghh!

- Keep them so that the tips are like that... - Aargh! - Don't worry about him.

You need to go more downhill or level your skis out.

- If I go more downhill, I'll slip! - James wasn't much better.

Just put them on. I'm coming down here otherwise I'll fall over.

It's the same here as it is there.

Push off and kick this arse out of the skis with your heel.

- Don't cross them. - Aarghh! Thanks a bunch!

- It's taken me 20 minutes to get there! - We can go together. - I've got only one ski on.

Progress was painfully slow.

It's not on.

Aarrghh!

Oh, God! Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!

Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!

Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!

Sorry!

Right.

We've done... See where we've come from?

Yeah.

- 30, 40 yards and you've got 400 miles to ski. - Jeremy...

We were then taught how to erect a tent.

Our instructor was a former special forces soldier who arrived with a pixelated face.

He was very bossy.

We can do it now or four o'clock in the morning.

The only good thing is it can't possibly be colder in the Arctic.

You have to push it. You've got it stuck in here. You have to get out...

- I didn't break it. - Who broke the elastic then?

The man with the funny face was getting more and more irritated.

I've just had a brilliant idea. Why don't we just tow a caravan?

James, feed it through.

Put your foot on that.

Put your foot on there.

If this blows away, it's game over.

There's no, "We'll just get another tent."

It's a case of this tent is it.

Go on, catch it.

You haven't got that end put in.

These are packed with ice.

HE LAUGHS

Take it back to where we're putting the tent up.

Finally, quite a bit later, the tent was up.

- It's... - I think you can sleep in it.

WIND HOWLS

Sadly, our ordeal was not yet over.

The man with the ruined face was going to show us how it would feel

to fall through the polar ice.

In your own time, I want all three of you to jump in.

- What's the problem? - Hang on.

At the Pole, we'd all three be standing with safety harnesses on...

It's a silly test. I'm not doing it.

The point of this is that you have to be able to take your clothes off and put more clothes on again.

I can practise that in the hotel room.

You've got a tingling down your arm...

Pull yourself out. Come on, put some effort in!

You don't want to stay in there all day. Drop the pole.

- How dare you... - Hands above your head!

Hands above your head!

OK, roll in the snow, roll in the snow.

- Roll in the snow! - Roll in the snow, Jeremy.

That'll make it much better, rather than a big, pink, fluffy towel.

- That looked awful. - I'm staggered.

Do you know what, though?

I like to think of us as a unit on Top Gear,

and as a unit, we've done that test.

'Our instructors were not impressed with that theory,

'and decided we needed our heads banging together.

'So they drafted in the legendary Arctic explorer, Sir Ranulph Fiennes.'

The problem we have

is that we can't really get into our heads

that this is a particularly dangerous place to go.

But you think it is.

I don't think it is, I know that it can be

because of what's happened to me in that area over the last 36 years.

You will have the polar bear problem,

you will have the ignorance problem,

cos you lot are apparently ignorant,

and thirdly,

the fact that you will all start hating each other

because of the extreme cold having an effect...

The hatred is very real.

You don't want to laugh about it.

'Then we moved on to frostbite.

'He showed us what had happened to his hand

'after it had been immersed in polar water for just a few moments.

Have a look at that - that's my left hand.

So, eventually,

all those red areas were amputated.

That is... If you look at the proper hand there,

you can see how much is missing and froze off.

That was a three-minute mistake.

If we were in the car, say, went through a hole into the ice

and you fell in the water at that temperature,

what are the chances of survival?

If your whole body fell in

and the car had gone in and your tent had gone in,

cos you presumably stow that in the car,

you could probably survive for, if there was no wind, hours.

But I'd prefer in those circumstances

to go quickly rather than slowly, really.

Back in Resolute, I was glad I'd had the talk from Ranulph,

but not so glad that I'd had a skiing lesson from Clarkson.

- What? - You're not very good.

Because you taught me the wrong kind of skiing!

You may as well have taught me to play the banjo!

DOGS BARK 'And as zero hour approached,

'I was also struggling to bond with the dogs.'

Ah, there's a pile of poo there!

Mind you, Clarkson wasn't doing much better with his snow driving.

Er...

'And James was rubbish with a shotgun.'

Woah!