#Ever forward radio series

#Ever forward radio series

I have more in common with most types of murderer than I do with sporty dog owners, but nevertheless I was sad to say goodbye last night to Me and My Dog: The Ultimate Contest (BBC2), the four-part series presented by Chris Packham and Sian Ryan that takes your mind off impending nuclear destruction for an hour, by offering you the sight of dogs and their owners taking part in various challenges in gentle, kindly fashion. The marines and his mother should be proud of their boy. And, within these parameters, it did a fine job. Does brotherhood not survive injury in its service? If not, isn’t that the saddest, most brutal thing – tales of IED explosions notwithstanding – that you have ever heard? Touching on such matters might have given his story an even wider application.Īn ITV documentary about a courageous man tackling a rare world record is, I understand, never going to be the place to delve too deeply into questions of masculinity or mental health, and this was a programme designed to pay tribute to rather than interrogate its subject.

But I would have liked to have known more about how it felt to go, as he put it, from being a marine to someone being spoon-fed by his dad? To come to terms, at 20, with the loss of such a powerful identity? He says he didn’t get depressed but “very low” after his amputation, but what did those around him think? At the end, he is invited to the Royal Marines’ sportsman’s dinner to be awarded their colours and he says that being accepted back into the brotherhood meant more to him than anything else. And his physical accomplishments will surely be an inspiration to many. I can imagine that Andy himself did not want the makers to dwell on the past, but rather to face, like he does, ever forward.

Which is, of course, a tribute to the man’s indomitable spirit and talent, but in skipping so lightly over his 18 months of rehab (after two weeks in an induced coma) and the eventual decision to have his injured leg amputated, the programme itself felt oddly skewed, leaving the viewer emotionally underinvested. The rest of the programme concentrated in the main on Andy’s desire to beat the world record and become the fastest single-leg amputee in the world over 10km, and his training to that end. The inclusion of such a detail – along with his almost throwaway comment that losing his mother to leukaemia when he was 12 had been harder – promised more than Paragon (ITV) ultimately delivered. “Because there’s an unwritten rule that if you’re still breathing when you get in, you’ll make it.” “It was the best feeling in the world to hear it,” remembers Andy.

They then waited for a helicopter to come to take him to safety. He lay on the ground, temporarily blinded, while the patrol’s medic James Smith applied a tourniquet to the damaged femoral artery in his right leg. I n 2009, five months into a tour of Afghanistan, 20-year-old Royal Marine Andy Grant was injured in an IED explosion.