Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof (Tuesday, BBC1) begins with a warning: “For your own safety, please seek advice before attempting anything you will see.” Even if this week’s show’s challenges are oddly low-energy activities like showering and lying down on yoga mats, I totally agree with that warning (I’ve been working from home for a while).
Freeze the Fear is a strange program. Wim Hof is a wellness expert who says scientific things about the health-promoting properties of the cold and wants to teach his methods to a random selection of celebrities. “I want to show celebs that they can get even better!” he says. He sporadically refers to them as “the celebrities” as if they were a special class of people. Scientists often warn us that experiments that work on mice don’t always work on humans. The same is probably true for celebrities in television experiments and us normal people with our very different brain shapes and bank balances.
In lieu of peer review, Hof has comedian Lee Mack and TV presenter Holly Willoughby
Wim isn’t exactly a scientist, although he does say “cardiovascular” occasionally, so he’s sort of a “scientist” (my term). In some ways he’s better than a scientist, at least for TV. While Richard Feynman spent his time writing academic papers like a chump, Wim Hof does tai chi on snowy cliffs wearing just a poncho. As Rosalind Franklin conducts complex experiments to explore the properties of DNA, a nearly naked Wim Hof races through the snow to jump into a hole in the ice. Einstein said “E = mc2”, Wim Hof says “Stress wears off. energy increases. And you feel: Wow! Crap! I feel good.”
Instead of peer review, Hof has comedian Lee Mack and TV presenter Holly Willoughby quirky watching while wearing warm clothes. They rarely bother the court with rigorous analysis of its techniques. In fact, rapper and Cluedo character Professor Green is one of the closest contestants to a real scientist in this program. And something tells me he’s a groove professor, not biology.
The lack of scientific input is strange, because while some of Wim Hof’s broader claims about the power of cold have been confirmed by experiments, others are not. The ` clearly heard the word ‘some’ in that sentence and thought ‘well enough’, and if Lord Reith is spinning in a cold, cold grave, they no doubt suspect it’s because he’s a Wim Hof fan is.
It’s a bit difficult right now to make celebrities cry on TV because nihilistic cruelty has gone out of style
Freeze the Fear is also a product of other trends. Most modern reality television starts with a whiteboard with someone scrawling the words “Celebs in tears?” and also, “Work out details later.” One day someone will do a show called simply Celebs in Tears, and then the TV will be over, the sun will finally go out, and it will be Ragnarok time.
It’s a bit difficult to make celebrities cry on TV right now because nihilistic cruelty has gone out of style (on TV, not in life, of course). These days, celebrity discomfort on TV has to be related to self-discovery and hugs. Her suffering must be for her own good and also for the edification of the viewer. When celebrities are forced into icy water or fall from great heights, it’s less about satisfying viewers’ inner sadists and more about satisfying a quest for meaning. And we viewers should also look at such programs educationally, think: “Today I learned something about the nature of life” and not just hoot hysterically when people fall over.
In the first episode of Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof, eight people jump into the ice hole that Wim jumped up a few heels into. Later in the episode, they rappel down a cliff face first. “Stephen hit the bottom,” says Lee Mack, although there was never really any doubt about making it to the bottom of the cliff (it was a question of whether they could make it without falling at high speed). Then the eight celebrities go to a large communal tent where they live like ordinary Smurfs. Wim gets a whole tent for himself nearby, like Papa Smurf.
This week’s episode hits the show’s central dynamic issue: Cold isn’t a very televisual situation. The program makers need to know this, so at the beginning of the episode they show us a giant bridge and promise us that before the show ends, celebrities will fall off it. Wim jumps off the bridge to demonstrate what feels like a terrible waste of a TV personality, until you realize he’s actually suspended from a rope. Smart `. They don’t tell us that explicitly, but we have a hunch that this rope must be an emergent property of “the cold.”
The main activities in this episode are a bit boring. In the first half of the show, while Holly Willoughby and Lee Mack look on, Wim encourages each of the celebrities to take a cold shower, very catering to niche tastes. “You just don’t want a cold shower, you just want a nice warm shower,” says Professor Green, outlining the danger of the situation for us. The celebrities have their cold showers. This makes them a) wet and b) cold and c) invigorated. I write everything in my notebook. Because yes, I am also a scientist.
In the second half of the show, all the celebrities are lying on the floor and Wim is guiding them through some breathing exercises until many of them have some kind of emotional breakthrough. I’m not qualified to say what’s going on here, but luckily nobody on the show is either. Soon, Willoughby and Mack are discussing how cathartic this experience must be. They are “psychologists” to Hof’s “scientists”. More Statler and Waldorf than Freud and Jung.
I understand why people are drawn to this adorable weirdo
Look, everyone on this show is vulnerable, open, and well-meaning. Some, like TV presenter Gabby Logan and footballer Patrice Evra, speak movingly about real trauma in their lives. Wim bangs a big gong and before long we’re seeing footage from next week’s show of Wim and his daughter once drinking tea while sitting in neighboring ice vats like Depression-era tramps or classical philosophers.
I understand why people are drawn to this adorable weirdo. Appearing friendly and charismatic, he wears a poncho while offering an individualistic silver bullet for self-improvement. And god knows you can’t have enough of that when you’re stuck in the wreckage of a welfare state. Meanwhile, Britain is mired in an identity crisis. In a nation ruled by partisans and tax dodgers, ` management saw this bearded Dutchman quite clearly wandering through the snow in the near-nip and thought, “Is… is this the leadership?”
I’m less sure how they can justify uncritically supporting Wim Hof’s methods beyond the meta-narratives of other corporate health gurus. On the other hand, in times of inflation, fuel poverty and ill health, it is certainly useful to be on public broadcast for an hour every Tuesday to argue that cold has healing properties.
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