Te Radar revealed to Weekend his five favourite things about Antarctica.
Te Radar is mourning the death of Captain Oates - the event itself, and the necessity of cutting it out of his live show, Te Radar's Antarcticana.
"His feet were so destroyed he couldn't get his boots on. He crawled out in his socks. It was his birthday."
Known best to most of us as a single quote: "I am just going outside and may be some time," Lawrence Oates' sacrifice during Robert Falcon Scott's fatal expedition to the South Pole came too late to save his teammates, but it's the little details that fascinate Te Radar. "Oates smuggled five extra tonnes of hay on to the Discovery to feed the Siberian ponies," he says. "How do you even do that? Really big suitcases?"
Antarcticana is all about the things we don't know about Antarctica, but in a one-hour Comedy Festival show, even some favourite stories have to be allowed to wander off in their socks. Here are Te Radar's 5 favourite things that didn't make the cut:
SNOWBALLS TO AUSTRALIA
"One of the greatest things about Antarctica, says Te Radar, "is the way it inspires people to do things. Inventor Arthur Pedrick was inspired to harvest its abundant frozen fresh water by patenting a system of pipes. Snowballs would be dropped into these pipes from the top of a mountain, reach incredible speeds and be propelled into the heart of Australia's desert, thereby greening it into arable land that would feed the world. Pedrick also patented a device for allowing only ginger cats into his house. He was an ideas man. A good ideas man? That's debatable."
INEXPRESSIBLE ISLAND
"This is an amazing story and one I would have loved to include. Scott's Northern Party, a group of six men assigned to collect geological samples, were unexpectedly cut off from their rescue ship by early winter. They were forced to carve an ice cave from a snowdrift and winter over. Less than 3m x 4m, rank, dirty and squalid but it beats my house because it had two bathrooms. Yes, they dug two latrines: one for the officers and one for the enlisted men, because Rule Britannia." The tales of chipping meat off frozen seal carcasses in total darkness, then retrieving the bits from wherever they pinged off to so that they could be cooked, are grim, he says, but hilarious. "The first they'd know of their dinner was being hit in the eye with frozen seal shrapnel. Don't try that on My Kitchen Rules."
REVERSE MERMAIDS
Anywhere mysterious and inaccessible is going to bring out the cryptozoologists and the conspiracy theorists. Spend any time online and you'll read that Antarctica is actually just a rim of ice mountains encircling a flat earth. Or it harbours aliens, dinosaurs or reverse mermaids. "Early Japanese whalers reported sightings of a white creature with human legs but the head and torso of a large fish. They called the Ningen, which I can only presume is Japanese for 'hilariously bad at swimming' or 'worst mermaid ever'."
SCOTT IN GENERAL
The story of Scott and his failed attempt to reach the South Pole first is one of the best known Antarctic tales. "But there are details left out of the official version that make it all the more human and real," says Te Radar. There was provision for a fatal dose of morphine in case things got too grim. Crawling out of the tent in your socks never occurred to them until Oates invented it." There's evidence Scott respectfully arranged the bodies of his dead colleagues before he died himself. "Scott was dead a year before his artist wife Kathleen found out; she was commissioned to carve the magnificent marble statue of Scott, damaged by the Christchurch earthquake. Asking a newly widowed woman to rustle up her masterpiece seems insensitive but she nailed it. In her letters she called him her Ducky Darling and reminded him to brush his hair."
GREAT HOLES OF ANTARCTICA
One thing Antarctica is full of is nothing. It's riddled with holes, crevasses and general absences. "I had a segment on the Great Holes of Antarctica I had to cut, leaving a hole in my soul, if not the show, which is really ridiculously full of stories that are both inspirational and bleakly hilarious. One hole is the suspiciously triangular entrance to the supposed Nazi base to where Hitler escaped after World War II. You can see it on Google Earth. But there are so many holes: the upturned lifeboat over a dug-out hole that was the home of Shackleton's Endurance crew on Elephant Island, the only upside-down boat you still had to bail out every morning." Shackleton's other crew, his Ross Sea Party, suffered unimaginable hardship; as they sheltered, starving in Scott's abandoned hut they chipped away at an ice wall, "but not quite far enough to discover the abundant stored provisions just a few feet further in." In a way it's a metaphor for the show: there's always more to discover as you chip away at Antarctica.
Lowdown
Te Radar's Antarcticana
New Zealand International Comedy Festival
May 14-19, 7pm
The Classic, 321 Queen St, Auckland.
comedy.co.nz
comedyfestival.co.nz/find-a-show/antarcticana/