THE KING will relive his daredevil expedition to the Arctic in a TV special.
Fifty years ago, Prince Charles set off on an ambitious trip to the unforgiving landscape, which saw him plunge into the icy ocean.
Looking back on rare archive footage of the risky stunt for a new 90-minute ITV documentary, the smiling King tells explorer Steve Backshall he “always liked to live life dangerously”.
TV wildlife presenter Steve has retraced the monarch’s footsteps for the one-off special to mark the milestone, which is released this month.
Meeting at Buckingham Palace ahead of Steve’s gruelling trek, the pair discuss the risky ice dive that terrified the then 26-year-old Prince’s protection officers, eating raw seal meat and almost coming a cropper thanks to heavy snowfall.
Cut with clips of Charles in an inflated red diving suit, Steve asks how he felt in the moments before jumping under a metre of thick ice.
“Well, you take a deep breath and try to stay on (to the ledge),” replies the King.
Joe MacInnis, the first scientist to dive beneath the North Pole, guided the King — and admits he feared for the royal’s safety. “There were some prayers,” he confesses.
“The prayer was, ‘Please don’t let me screw up’. So here I am taking the future king underwater and I’m carrying this kind of burden.
“What the hell can go wrong? And there is a long list of things.”
Charles fully immersed himself in Inuit culture during the trip, including trying local delicacy, raw seal.
He recalls: “It took some time to persuade my gullet to work, to swallow it.”
He adds: “Diving under the ice, that I do remember. And also failing to get the dog sled to work because it had snowed overnight before I got there.
So there was too much snow so the dogs couldn’t pull it. Then I had to run along behind, which nearly killed me, dressed like that.”
Steve Backshall’s Royal Arctic Challenge airs on December 15 on ITV at 9pm.
