The premise for BBC2's forthcoming Top Dogs was simple. Get 64-year-old BBC world affairs editor John Simpson, polar explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a mere 65) and round-the-world sailor Sir Robin Knox-Johnston (70) to experience each other's area of expertise. Thus Simpson took his chums to a conflict zone on the borders of Pakistan while Knox-Johnston took them round Cape Horn in a small boat. But it was when Sir Ranulph took John and Robin to the Arctic that things didn't quite go to plan, with Simpson ignoring medical advice to have a jimmy riddle from inside their tent and taking his gloves off to, ahem, facilitate the operation. "My hands were exposed for barely three minutes, yet every single finger got frostbite, and I had to be evacuated by motorised skidoo," Simpson tells this week's Radio Times. "Luckily, it wasn't necessary for me to have any amputations, unlike Ran who tells the story of how on one of his expeditions, he cut off his own fingers and put them in a drawer. That said, I've lost all feeling in the ends, which is quite an unpleasant feeling. I've even had to devise a new way of typing, where I leave my fingers resting on the keyboard, rather than hammering them down on top of it, as I used to." Asked if it was all worth it, Simpson gamely says that he "wouldn't have missed it for the world" but with the firm proviso: "I can't say I had a nice time in the Arctic." You're telling us, John..
