After two days of going nowhere, Jeremy's patience had snapped.
-Uh-oh. -Oh, my god, what is that?
I think that's the auxiliary fuel tank.
-I'll tell you something else... -The whole fuel tank
has dropped off the bottom of the car.
-I'll tell you something else. -What?
It smells remarkably like it might be leaking.
Oh, Christ, hang on a minute. James. James, James.
The prop shaft is gouged to hell and the fuel tank is gouged to hell.
How much is in the main tank at the moment?
If we're losing fuel, we've got to get as much as possible into the other tank.
The miles were tumbling.
We'd manage to pump some of the fuel into the good tank,
but then we hit another problem.
That's what the fuel tank did to the shock absorber when it came off.
So, I've had to replace that as well.
And we've now ended up with one full tank,
the standard tank the car comes with, the other one is empty.
Cross fingers really.
The crash had also ripped a tyre off the rim,
but luckily our Icelandic's had yet another trick up their sleeves.
They filled the tyre with lighter fuel, and...
Great success!
However, we now had barely enough fuel to get to the pole.
We were still stuck, and then came a call from "Team Dog".
In the two days that we've been trapped, he'd closed us down
and was now in the boulder field as well.
Get out of here!
Alright, let's go.
The news caused a bit of a row.
Sometimes, James, you have to move fast
-and that was... -Sometimes, Jeremy,
you have to move slowly. For example, going over the soft snow
where we've been told, time and again, there are huge lumps of immobile ice,
which is exactly what's caused that.
We wished we'd paid more attention at the Alpine training camp.
We wished we were fitter. It really was starting to get tough.
We felt certain that Hammond was ahead
but we had to stop and put the tent up...
and it was a nightmare.
It was minus 42, we were exhausted,
and Ranulph's prediction about falling out was starting to ring true.
Hang on, hang on.
-You in? -No.
Can you just **** put it in.
-Just, please, James. -I'm so unspeakably
-Be quick for once. -...outraged with you.
You're not even doing this intelligently.
You have to push it through until it goes in the other end.
-James, I'm dying here. I'm dying. -You cannot build a tent by shouting.
Oh, ****.
That frankly is a pathetic effort.
The dogs were also fighting
and Matty dispensed swift discipline.
I need to run them for a bit, this is crazy.
They mean the world to her
but they're not domestic pets, they're pack animals.
And sometimes she has to remind them who's boss.
With order restored, they blitz the boulder field
and soon we were clear.
-We've done it. We are out. -We've done it.
Come on, guys. Let's go!
Meanwhile, we were beginning a third day stuck in the same frozen hell.
Whoa, whoa. James, James...
-What? -You're standing on, like an ice bridge.
-What's wrong with that? -You'll cut your **** arm off.
To try and speed things up
we'd broken out a chainsaw to cut away the bigger boulders
and some snow ladders to cross the deeper ravines.
That's just gonna fall down.
It's not, because I'll dig it in.
Okay.
-James? -Oh, ****.
Right, get the hammer down Matty.
We are in a race, we need to make good speed on the flat. We've got to.
You know, over the last two days, two and a half days,
our average speed was less than a mile an hour.
I have... I'm--
Do you know what I was about to say?
-Do you know what I was about to say? -No, I don't.
I think we're coming to the end of the boulder field.
Look about, what can you not see?
Do you think we have actually got to the edge of the good ice.
-That's very flat over there. -James, we're out.
We've made it!
It's flat. It's so smooth
and no more going up and down.
It had taken three days of almost non-stop driving,
but this incredible machine had breached what the experts had said
would be an impregnable wall.
It had taken on the impossible and it had won.
-Seventy-five miles to the pole. -I know.
And my celebratory tin of spam.
-What if I ate your spam? -You're not eating my spam,
unless you want to go home to your wife and children with a hatchet in your head.
We knew that with just 75 miles to go on flat ice,
we could easily overhaul Hammond.
So, we decided to treat ourselves to a spot of tenting.
I am never ever, ever, ever, going to complain ever again
about the quality of a hotel.
So long as I get to a hotel and I don't have to actually build it.
"You want to build with us, sir? Certainly."
"Here's some bricks, some mortar, a lavatory seat,
some wood, some nails, a hammer, some carpet, some glass..."
-What? -Seat the pole.
We too knew that the car would reel us in, so we kept on going.
I know when to get off.
After 90 minutes sleep we pulled down the tent
for what would be the last time.
This is what I have to put up with at night.
Sleeping next to a six-foot sinus,
that then wee's in a bottle and leaves it for me to clear up.
A spot of revenge was in order.
Result.
There was another result as well.
We figured out that we must have retaken the lead from "Team Dog".
As they struggled on, we tried to rekindle some of the fun
that seemed to have gone missing from our journey.
I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with... "S".
-Snow. -Yes.
I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with... "S".
-Sky. -Yes.
I spy, with my little eye...
If it begins with "S", I'm gonna kill you.
But then, amazingly, we spotted something beginning with "P".
-It's a DC-3. -It is.
-Or a C-47 strictly. -What, because it's the military one?
Exactly.
Imagine surviving that plane crash and then finding yourself here.
That's a bad deal.
We'd run for 15 hours straight,
but even so, I knew we were going to lose.
You know, we are now the most northern people in the world.
Apart from Michael Parkinson, obviously.