If my entire life could be summed up in one crushingly literal tableau, it’s this one. I’m sitting in the middle of a forest. I’m cold, I’m damp and I’m out of my depth. Attached to me is a bright red cable that may as well be an umbilical cord. Attached to that is the most aggressive alpha male I’ve ever met. Somehow, he’s convinced me to cook his lunch for him. It consists of a tiny, pink, shrivelled, burst chipolata, drooping uselessly on a stick. None of this is lost on me.
His name is Nick ‘Redneck Rockstar’ Rhoades. He’s a professional hunter from Tennessee and a contestant on the new Discovery Channel survival show Tethered (which begins on Thursday at 9pm), in which two strangers are shackled together, dropped into the middle of nowhere and forced to fend for themselves for 10 days. I’m tied to him to get a taste of what that feels like.
In his episode, Nick was sent to the Great Smoky Mountains in the States, where he climbed cliffs and rode rapids and had to kill and eat a possum for sustenance. Today he’s taken me to a beginner’s survival course in some woods quite near Thorpe Park, where his job mainly consists of cooking a sausage. It’s more or less the same thing, really.
Although, to be fair, we could be doing anything. The primary selling point of Tethered isn’t survival – it’s the relationship that forms between its contestants. For the entire duration of their adventure, they’re permanently connected by a four-foot rope. This forces them to eat together, sleep together and go to the toilet together. It can make for some extremely fraught moments. In one episode, Nick lost his temper so completely with his partner – a Haitian social worker – that they actually ended up coming to blows.
I couldn’t rule out the possibility of something like this happening again, because Nick and I couldn’t have been more different. He’s American, I’m British. He’s outdoorsy, I barely move from my sofa. He’s covered in tattoos, I freak out if I get biro on me. He kills things for a living, I write for a newspaper that’s traditionally been quite vocal in its support of quinoa. Early signs weren’t great – as we were being tethered together, Nick was grousing about his inability to seduce any of the women in his hotel bar the previous night, despite repeatedly yelling his no-fail pick-up line (“You’re fuckin’ awesome!”) at them at the top of his voice. The whole thing could have gone very badly indeed.
However, it didn’t. And I attribute that to one thing – my immediate, shameful willingness to subsume my personality at the merest hint of trouble. The easiest way to get through the day, I figured, would just be to let Nick get on with it. He was the expert, after all. So wherever Nick wanted to go, I’d just trail around four feet behind him like an abandoned child. At least that way, if we did the wrong thing and died, I’d be completely absolved of all responsibility. It’s a nice feeling, knowing that you can use your final breath to blame someone else for stuff.
However, for all our differences – and even though we were only tied together for a few hours – the Tethered dynamic did start to creep in a little. Before long, we actually found ourselves getting along quite well. The rope, it turns out, really does make you bond very quickly. As we built our fire, we talked about things I wouldn’t usually dream of discussing with a stranger – work, politics, his ex-wife, her other three husbands, fatherhood – and by the end of the day, I felt like I’d actually changed a little bit. Perhaps I was a little more able, a little more willing to understand different viewpoints.
As we unshackled at the end of the day, I couldn’t help wondering if Nick’s time with me had changed him too. I asked him what his plans were that evening. “I’m gonna sit in the hotel bar, watch some little black dresses, then go back to my room and drown myself,” he yelled. So no. No change whatsoever. Oh well.
