Battered but triumphant

Big River Man (part of More 4’s ‘True Stories’, Tuesday) was one of the most gripping and brilliant, infuriating and disappointing documentaries I’ve ever seen.

It was gripping and brilliant because the story it told with tremendous verve, wit, imagination and style was so extraordinary. Martin Strel, 55, a hideously overweight Slovenian drunkard and gambler, addicted to red wine and horse burgers, also happens to be the world’s greatest endurance swimmer. He’d already done the Danube, the Mississippi and the Yangtse. Now he was taking on the granddaddy of them all, the Amazon. Would he make it or would he keel over from a heart attack or get eaten by piranhas or be clunked over the head by a floating tree or fall victim to that terrible fish which swims up your urine stream into your willy then stays stuck there with its ghastly spines?

It was infuriating and disappointing because you could never be quite sure which bits were actually true and which were the result of editorial tricksiness. At the beginning, the clunky, hand-held camera shots, in which Strel, prompted by his son Borut, tried unsuccessfully over several takes to announce his plans in correct English, gave you the misleading impression that this was a sweet, home-made affair executed amateurishly by a couple of Slovenians and their dog. But the credits at the end were as long and lavish as you’d get for a high-budget feature film. You’d been entertained and enthralled all right. But had you also been had?

The scenes which first properly raised my suspicions were the ones near the end where an exhausted Strel is lying in the back of an ambulance, apparently suffering a cardiac arrest, as a trauma team struggles to revive him. We see Borut yelling in his ear. Words of comfort? No. Borut is trying to prime him with the words of the momentous speech he has written for his father in block capitals on a piece of cardboard and which he hopes his father will deliver at the finishing ceremony. Next there’s a shot of Borut being chucked out of the ambulance for being a nuisance. Cut to a close-up of Borut’s face pressed against the glass windows of the ambulance doors, peering in plaintively like Tiny Tim.

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