the headlines: president trump has halted us funding to the world health organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. the president claimed the who had "failed in its basic duty and must be held accountable." he also accused the agency of promoting china's "disinformation" about the start of the outbreak. more than one in five deaths in england and wales are linked to coronavirus. new figures show 6,000 more people died than expected at the beginning of april, that's a record high. there was also an increase in deaths from causes other than the virus. polling is under way in south korea's parliamentary election. the vote, using paper ballots, is going ahead despite concerns that coronavirus will affect the turnout. in fact, the turnout looks high. voters must wear masks and plastic gloves and maintain social distancing. the result is expected to be influenced by the government's

handling of the pandemic. it is liz30am. now on bbc news, hardtalk. welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. my guest today is an extremist of a very special kind. nothing to do with his political views, but recognition of a lifetime spent embracing physical challenges at the extreme limit of human endurance. sir ranulph fiennes has taken on and conquered the polar ice, the world's highest peaks and the most gruelling deserts. he's been described as one of the world's greatest living explorers. so, what is the motivation for this life of extreme adventure?

sir ranulph fiennes, welcome to hardtalk. thank you very much. seems to me, your entire life, you've spent testing yourself, challenging yourself. why this preoccupation with tests? it doesn't come about in that particular way, it comes about because of being brought up in south africa, arriving in the uk, not getting a—levels — that's what it comes from, because that's not what i wanted to do, it's what my dad had done, commanding the royal scots‘ greatest tank regiment when he was killed in the second world war, and i wanted to command that same wonderful scottish regiment, but in his day, you didn't require

a—levels to get sandhurst. in my time, you did, and i couldn't, and, therefore, i had a second grade of cadet school and would never become colonel of the regiment, so ijoined the regiment, but had only eight years of army service before you were thrown out. and so i didn't do what i wanted to do, and i did as long as i could in the army, and then i found myself with no income, i married my wife, jenny, who had virtually no income, and so we thought we'd do what i'd tried to do in the army, which was to do expeditions with soldiers, but that was paid for by the taxpayer. doing it with just my wife, the new word was sponsorship. get everything for nothing. you've already developed several themes there, and one of them is important to your life and i think that's, in a way there's a sense of disappointment that you were not, despite the fact that you tried

very hard to emulate your father... and it should be said your father actually was killed in action in the second world war, so you never knew him. you were born after he died, but you clearly wanted to emulate his brilliant military career, but you were not able to. was that always, and is it now, a disappointment to you? it is the biggest disappointment. i wanted for 2h years to do that, and then found that i'd failed and couldn't do it, so i had to turn to something else. you've just written a book about elite special forces throughout the course of human history and you actually write about your dad's own regiment, the royal scots greys, a cavalry regiment, which has been involved in some of the most famous battles that the uk military has seen. you did, for a while, serve in that force yourself. have you always found it difficult to live up to your father's reputation? yeah, i mean, i wanted to actually get, it's an awful thing to say, but to fight...

in his days, it was nazis, in my day, it was marxists, and they — harold wilson had chucked the brits out of aden — yemen, as it now is. and they were coming in, having trained the muslims in odessa in the soviet union, to become marxists instead of muslims. and we were there, thanks to harold wilson sending us, to protect the muslims from the marxists, and so i was able to actuallyjoin an elite force, having been trained by the sas without fighting, i now had a command over an elite force, like what the book's all about, 60 of them, and could change their operations procedure by what i learned in the sas, mainly to move only by night, do nothing by day, and by shouting in the dark when we were under attack from machine—guns, " retreat, retreat! " — but advance. you were a tough guy in that sense

and, as you said, you led men in very difficult circumstances, but you've also written very honestly about the way in which you didn't always find it easy to be that tough guy. you've written about school, how you hated being bullied, how you felt you had to keep your mouth shut when you were being beaten at eton, one of the leading public schools in the uk, because you, again, didn't want to let your father down. we've had other guests in this studio talk about their upbringings as males, in very male societies, and they have talked — and one in particular, a novelist from australia — talked about a toxic sense of masculinity, and i just wonder whether you, reflecting on your life, can relate to that? yeah, you're talking about an all—male background. i was brought up in south africa with a mother, a grandmother, lots of aunties, lots of sisters, no male whatsoever, so it was totally — i was spoiled rotten. and then thrown into a

pretty brutal boys‘ boarding school. yeah, i hate to call eton brutal... but in your day... yeah, and if i had a son, i'd probably send him there. but in my day, it was very different. you were beaten and all this sort of stuff — like you were at every other school, pretty much at the time. and, yes, i do remember not wanting to shout when being beaten, and that is a sort of indication, and i do remember people saying i looked " pretty" and i scowled to try to stop looking pretty. so i thought i'd take up boxing in order to become aggressive—appearing, and it sort of worked quite well. so here we are, let us be blunt, you were thrown out of the sas, britain's special forces, because of a complicated incident in which you and a friend acquired some explosive and went a bit freelance... no, i acquired the explosives, but you were being taught to blow up as much as possible by the sas

with as little as possible, and at the end of every day, i was quite good at it, so i had a lot left over. i thought, pity to give it back to the queen, you know. put it in the boot. so two months later, the boot of my car was full up with explosives. so when this guy came up with an offer to protect castle combe in wiltshire, the prettiest village, voted as such, being ruined by 20th century fox. so we planned to blow up the dam, which they'd made this lovely river into a big lake for filming, and, yes, i was thrown out of the sas for misuse... yes, let's be honest, you went a bit rogue. you undertook a freelance operation and they took a very dim view of it. but the point of the story, in a way, is that there you were, as you've already said, pretty much penniless, newly married, now without a military career. you thought the way through this, to continue to travel, to have the adventures, but to not do it with the military, was to launch a series of expeditions. yes.

luckily, my wife — my late wife of 38 years — she was into the same sort of thing. she'd been a mountain guide up in the north of scotland and she was a very determined person, and she decided that we would have to be polar because of the british media at the time were only interested in polar stuff, and if you don't get media coverage, you don't get sponsorship — which we depend upon. and, therefore, we would do the only polar expedition which had never been done by mankind, not even scott shackleton and co, which was to do the first—ever journey around earth vertically, and she decided that's what we would do. which of course was a journey without any air flight, you were on foot across the poles. yeah. no flying one inch of the 52,000 miles. yes. no. i'm noticing as we speak that the hand is evidence of some of the suffering that you have had in yourjourneys

across the most frozen parts of our planet. yes. well, when we're selecting people for a small team, i mean, we've had 8,000 applicants in the london area, we only want two people. so choice is important. one of the things i would never take is someone with previous frostbite because they become a liability on the expedition, so i wouldn't choose myself anymore after getting this sort of thing. just explain to me, because that, i think, is important to talk about, not because of the detail of how it happened, but how you responded to it. you basically had to amputate your own — or you chose to amputate your own fingers and most of a thumb, didn't you? yeah, i mean, when it happened, i sent a telegram back to the uk because by then, my wife was into cattle, and all i got back from her was, "typical ran, getting your fingers and all that, we are already short—handed on the farm," so i didn't get much sympathy. got back to the uk, the surgeon wouldn't operate for five months, so i was walking around with mummified half—fingers on the end, and any time

you touched something, it's agony, so she said i was getting irritable, and can't wait five months to have a proper amputation. so we bought a black and decker fret saw, and she brought me cups of tea, and the physiotherapist in bristol said i'd done a very good job. the surgeon was sort ofjealous, i think. which raises the question — as you undertook more and more extreme adventures, crossing the poles on foot, deciding, much later in life, you were going to try to climb all seven highest peaks on the seven continents of this planet. you clearly were prepared to endure enormous amounts of physical suffering. yeah, i had a massive heart attack on everest within five hours of the summit ridge. and, therefore, i had to retreat, and three days later i got back down to the base camp through a very good sherpa and tried again five years later, but by which time i was becoming an 0ap

and failed a second time because of passing too many bodies. 0n the third attempt, with a wonderful sherpa, passed the bit which has recently been in the news, where you get queues of people — all you do is you do it at night when there's no people. so my sherpa took me up at night, got to the top, no bother, became the first 0ap to get to the top. how old were you when you got to the top of everest? 65, yeah. but because of being an 0ap, it made more money for multiple sclerosis. and these expeditions, one of the offshoots is we've made £19 million for uk charities, and the more difficult they are, the more the public will give money to the charity. interesting you say the more difficult they are, the more money we can raise, the more we can do. isn't that, in the end, a rather dangerous philosophy? because it is tempting you to undertake adventures, and i don't know whether we call them adventures or explorations which actually... we call them expeditions. expeditions. but they are at the very boundary

of what the human body can sustain, and i wonder whether at times you've actually been irresponsible? no, it's a commercial problem. you need sponsorship, we never pay money to anybody or anything, so we need sponsorship. the sponsors will only give you sponsors if you're breaking world records, and they are only world records because the easier ones have been done. so your point about them being very hard, is what comes about. we don't attack at. we look at the previous people, normally norwegian, who have succeeded. where they've failed on the expeditions that haven't yet been done by humans, where they've failed, we discover what they did wrong, and normally, they took risks. so we actually try and avoid the risks, not confront them. isn't it the truth that you and explorers, expedition leaders such as you are running out of new places to go? running out of records to break? it depends which field you're in. if you're in polar, there are only two poles, and so you are quite right.

if you happen to be one of the people who go for first ascents of difficult mountains, there are still many horrible north—faces still to be climbed, so they've got plenty to do. it's interesting you mention that, because i was reading a back copy of the new york times from 2008, which was all about the mission that — some of the world's leading climbers undertook to k2 using a very difficult route, and i believe ii of them were killed in one of the worst international mountaineering incidents ever. and ijust wonder, with your experience, whether you fear that decision making is being compromised by this desire to push to ever more extreme limits. yes, it must be. because if you are wanting — that's yourjob to go onto the next record, and because of what i've just said, the records become harder and harder as your predecessors manage the last one. but in a sense, it's not a job, is it? and that's what i'm driving at. that perhaps there is a selfishness

that is going too far in some explorers‘ minds, because of course if they get into trouble, they are going to have to be rescued or at least rescue attempts will be made, enormous resources will be spent, and i think perhaps some people in the public are saying, what's the point? the foreign office stopped that happening. you cannot get permission to go down to antarctica in the winter when there's no rescue service. the rescue services want money by rescuing people so they like it. so, you're not ending up with threatening somebody as you have in the old days when that wasn't the case. the polar desk, if they're not going to sue me for libel, in whitehall, are there to stop you going there in the wintertime when there's no rescue service on the entire continent. every time i go in there with a new expedition, they say, "christ, it's him again." just one more thought on the way in which you've promoted and sold the expeditions. because, of course, as you very honestly say, "i need the cash to make them happen." is there a tendency

to exaggerate at times? i'm just thinking now about one of your most remarkable expeditions, which was nothing to do the ice, it was the desert, and it was your mission to find the lost city of ubar, a sort of mythical city mentioned in the arabian nights. you were convinced it was somewhere in the empty quarter between saudi arabia and 0man. yeah, my wife was convinced. well, your wife — well, she led many of your missions in terms of being the logistics commander. true. and you claimed you'd found it in 1991. now, many archaeologists and experts that i've read since say, well, ranulph found something very interesting, but it sure as anything wasn't the lost city of ubar. the sultan of oman will tell you that it was the lost city of ubar, the queen of sheba had somewhere

in order to put the frankincense on the camels to send them to the market up injerusalem and that's a huge journey, and we knew, therefore, exactly where she would have to start loading the camels with frankincense, which cost three times the cost of gold. so, it was well worth doing. it must‘ve been where water came from the coasts towards the great desert of arabia, which they had to cross. so, we were looking at the very tip of where that water reached, and we reached a place called shisr, and that must have been — and all the 0mani authorities agree, and the professor who found them, juris zarins, the best middle east archaeologist in the world, agreed that it must be ubar. so, what you're saying, quoting other jealous archaeologists, talking a load of rubbish. no, it is ubar. well, obviously you're not an archaeologist. but you're right, the 0manis, but they could have other reasons, including tourism to want to believe you were right. but in the end, it was an extraordinary expedition, whether it's ubar or not. yeah, it wasn't me deciding

it was ubar, it was the best archaeologist in the world, juris zarins. but you sit before me as a man in maturity, in your 70s. and you have not stopped and your health problems have gotten worse. and ijust wonder whether you are struggling — to put it bluntly — with the realities of ageing, when your determination to keep going, keep the expeditions alive is as strong as ever. yeah, it is, in my head, as strong as ever. but i acknowledge the fact that people, when they get to sort of 73, it starts being alarming. things drop off and you have to start going for fast walks instead of runs on your daily — yeah, that is unfortunately true. so, what we are doing is i am handing over the planning of what we do do to my colleagues, like doctor michael strahd, who's a top expedition doctor. he is taking over, right now, up in the arctic with the russian polar experts,

looking to see how the ice is behaving, allowing new expeditions where there was ice and there's now water. but i just wonder whether you're. .. again, it's a question of responsibility. you have a teenage daughter. after your first wife died, you remarried. you're a father. and yet, even in, i believe, your 70s, you undertook one of the world's toughest sporting challenges — the marathon des sables in the saharan desert. and that, for a human in good condition in their 20s or 30s, is almost unbearable. how on earth could you do that? well, you have to have a guide who pushes you really hard, more than your own mental process is pushing you. therefore, i went to this guy, rory coleman in cardiff, who took me on, looked to see what i was capable of if driven and did it successfully.

so, we made the 2.3 million figure for marie curie that we were after from that particular thing that you're talking about. and when you go off on these extraordinary challenges now, in the last few years, what does your wife, what does your daughter say to you? well, they are a wonderful couple, wonderful wife, wonderful daughter. do they ever suggest to you, you are mad? are they fed up with it? i better, for the first time, not answer that question. 0h, no...i think you have to. although you've got to remember, that back when i got born, i didn't have a father, i was brought up with just a mother. and my lovely wife is a fantastically good mum, so, you know, i wouldn't feel all that guilty. and you get to a certain age, you're going to die off anyway whether you do it out in the cold or run over by a taxi. a theme through our conversation has been motivation and tracing things back

to your early life. it intrigued me that you said this just a few years ago in an interview with the financial times, you said, "if i didn't do what i do, i do think i would get depressed. i think i would suffer depression, which i don't, thankfully. but i think i could. it's a sort of a background shadow, a sort of fear at the thought of not having a challenge." i think that is correct. and that's still something i would fear, yes. have you ever, at any point in your life, where either physically or for reasons of money, you've not been able to do what you wanted to do? have you suffered depression? reasons of money, no. because we always know that if we're doing something really difficult, we will get the sponsorship. so, no to that one. in terms of this health thing you bring up, it is very unfortunate, and the only decent thing about it is it happens to everybody.

and a thought, before we end, about the planet — you, more than any other guest i've ever had on hardtalk, have seen some of the most remote, wildest, most extreme parts of this planet of ours, i wonder whether you, in your travels today, really do feel that our planet is under pressure, is being compromised as never before? utterly. and i'm totally behind the youth, including my daughter, who's been in trafalgar square, talking about that sort of thing. you mean, she's been part of extinction rebellion? the effect on animals, as well as humans and it is dreadful and it's very much there. and we — in the arctic, let me say, it's more easy to see the difference in the arctic than the antarctic. we've seen huge difference. in the 1970s, i was designing man—hauled sledges, which were somewhat waterproof in case there was a canal. now, we are designing canoes,

which can be hauled every now and again. so the amount of water in 20 years up there in this huge area of ice, which is shrinking, is enabling people to canoe to the pole instead of man—haul to the pole. are you a supporter of extinction rebellion? whose core message is that it's no good just sort of mouthing the rhetoric of caring for the planet. the urgency of this means that we have to change how we live right now. i'm totally in support of the rebellion as long as it doesn't put people off by doing violent things or becoming too like the gilets jaunes. as long as they complain and get the political people to have a real drive, which is difficult because of their business side,

you know, very difficult indeed. but that's why it requires something like the extinction rebellion, of old and young, really trying to push the movement to get sensible carbon behaviour, which is against business. and a final thought — are you done? you had to abandon your effort to climb all seven highest peaks on the seven continents because you just weren't well enough to do it, your back gave way. is this the end now for you? of that particular one, we've done all the difficult ones, we got beaten by all the easy ones because of the old—age factor. i mean, even hillary, a few years after he climbed everest, could no longer get above 18,000 feet. it's just... but my point is, no more expeditions? oh, no. you said no more expeditions of a particular type. you've given yourself a get—out clause. so, don't exaggerate. no. in terms of that particular one, we've done the difficult ones over 29,000 feet. the easy ones at 16, 17, you just, at a certain age, i don't know what goes wrong with you, but you can no longer take altitude above a certain height. so, if it's not altitude anymore, what challenges can you undertake? well, you go back to horizontal, not vertical.

have you got one in mind? well, all the polar stuff is horizontal, not vertical. what is it? i won't tell you, because our enemy, the norwegians, may get there first. laughs. sir ranulph fiennes, we will have to wait to find out then. but for now, thank you so much for coming on hardtalk. no, thank you. thank you very much. hello there. well, there's another fine and sunny day on tuesday. not quite as chilly but there was a bit more high cloud in the sky in scotland. then it was picked up by the setting sun in stirling, with a fine end to the day here. now, some of the high cloud is pushing southwards now,

which means it could well be quite a nice sunrise across some eastern areas as we start off wednesday morning. other than that, it's going to be a chilly start to the day. you can see the skies for many, apart from the high cloud, staying clear. and that will allow temperatures to dip down, close to orjust below freezing in the countryside, to give some patches of frost up and down the country. an area of high pressure firmly with us then as we get on into wednesday, centred close to the uk — it means there's going to be more fun and dry weather for the vast majority. remember though, there will be a little bit more in the way of high cloud in the sky, which at times will make the sunshine a little on the hazy side. also thicker cloud working in across the northern and western isles. it could bring an odd light shower and some cloudy weather seeping its way southwards across western scotland. just knocking the edge off the temperatures here. otherwise it's a warmer day. temperatures reaching a high of 18 degrees. now, on into thursday, we're going to see some colder air arriving to the far north of the uk but some warmer air arriving across england and wales. so thursday is a day

of increasing contrasts. again, there will be some areas of high cloud around, which will make the sunshine rather hazy at times. we could see some showers arriving towards the south—west of england late in the day, although there is some uncertainty about exactly how many of those are likely to make it down to the ground. and across the north—east of scotland, that's where we've got some cloudy weather, an odd spot of rain, and much cooler conditions but, otherwise, england and wales seeing temperatures into the low 20s. it will feel increasingly warm. for friday's forecast, there is a rather greater threat of seeing some showery bursts of rain, particularly across parts of southern england, perhaps the midlands and wales as well. turning increasingly heavy perhaps later on in the day but, away from that south—west quarter, it's largely dry but still quite a bit of cloud in scotland and we'll start to see those temperatures cooling off around some of the north sea coasts of england as well. come inland, 17 degrees still not bad for birmingham and for london. now, the weekend, quite cloudy for england and wales. there is the prospect of seeing a little bit of rain

for some of us. the driest weather probably in scotland, where it will stay dry and bright.

this is bbc news with the latest headlines for viewers in the uk and around the world. i'm sally bundock. president trump suspends american funding for the world health organization over its handling of the coronavirus pandemic. the reality is that who failed to adequately obtain information in a timely and transparent fashion. more than one in five deaths in england and wales is linked to coronavirus. figures show 6,000 more people died than expected at the start of april. an election like no other: polling is under way in south korea. voters must wear masks and gloves and maintain social distancing.