At the beginning of the first of three episodes of Fiennes Return to the Nile, which begun on National Geographic this week, actor Joseph Fiennes explains that he doesn’t know his cousin Ranulph very well.
Luckily, the rest of us do, given that he’s been cavorting his way around the world in very public feats of derring-do for a good half-century. Everest? Check. North and South Poles? Check and check. Seven marathons in seven countries in seven days? Check, check, check, check, etc. What better way, then, for the two to get properly acquainted then a trip along the Nile, recreating one of Cousin Ran’s earliest adventures for our viewing pleasure?
To be fair to Joe, who, the opening montage reminds us, has swooned his way through Shakespeare In Love, and more recently been Bafta nominated for his role in Channel 4’s The Handmaid’s Tale (not quite so romantic, that one), he knows what the part he has to play. He’s the dazed young pup to Ranulph’s grizzled old wolf, happy to roll over and invite us to tickle his tummy.
“Whoa! There’s a camel there! I’m going to try and touch the camel. Oh I touched the camel!” says Joe, sticking his arm out of the vintage Land Rover Defender in which he’s navigating the traffic jams of Alexandria. “Joe’s doing well. So far he’s run nobody over,” says Ran. (What he is doing, he’ll discover later, is driving for 18 miles with the handbrake on.)
The pair embark on a series of set-piece activities that may not be strict re-enactments of the elder Fiennes’ 1969 journey – for starters, that one was by hovercraft – but do make for some jolly telly. Under the thin guise of preparing Joe for some of the trials ahead, Ranulph has him driving up monster sand dunes, getting up close to killer snakes and scorpions, learning to deactivate anti-tank mines with a penknife and learning to cut off your own fingers with a saw, as Ranulph famously did when he got severe frost bite in the Arctic: “It took two days to get through the thumb,” he says.
Fiennes Returns to the Nile has something of the structured larks of Top Gear but without the oafishness, and what makes it a cut above, no digit-severing puns intended, is the fact that the pair are (delightfully posh) family, and there is a softness and an intimacy that comes with that. Under a palm in the cemetery at El Alamein, where Ran’s father fought in the eponymous battle, he remembers – or rather doesn’t – the man who died a year later, four months before Ran was born, and in whose footsteps he made sure to follow by becoming Commanding Officer of the Royal Scots Greys.
So yes, the younger Fiennes is hamming it up a little: let’s face it, you don’t crawl through tiny tunnels in subterranean Egyptian catacombs, stumbling over skulls and sarcophagi, if you’re not reasonably gung-ho and in reasonable shape (just for the record, he also looks dashing in a shemagh). But the odd couple road trip isn’t a screen trope for no reason. This particular Joe is actually no ordinary one, even if, out of deference to his legendary cousin, he’s not letting on.
Fiennes Return To The Nile starts on Wednesday 27 Feb at 9pm
Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
