Last night I caught the documentary Don’t Look Down on Channel Four, it was another look at the extreme with a big X. Like all these things they tend to hype up the activity when jot isn’t really extreme. If you remember the Base jumping documentary ‘Men Who Jump Off Buildings‘ then they had to do little in the way of egging the pudding.
On this documentary they had to make climbing up a crane seem like a very dangerous thing indeed to do. To all intense and purposes they don’t climb the crane instead they walk up the stairs that the crane operator uses to get up there and the head along a children’s playground an extreme jungle gym if you like. Yet we are to believe that this is extreme.
I have to say they soon show you what’s what, when they start hanging off the structures by their hands. Although again this is little more than a circus trick. Given the UK had seen no deaths in this branching of Free running, I wonder how long till we do now the documentary has promoted this past-time. The trip they make to the Ukraine makes them seem just as nuts as one might perceive them, all with a death wise with 16 young men dying so far.
That journey to Ukraine is something of an eye opener, although the final sequence up the Moscow Bridge makes it look fun. As the ascent looked more like climbing than anything you’d previously seen, followed by a series of stunts by both of the guys. One a real sign of trust and the other a backflip on the top certainly had the wow factor. Interestingly I had a friend whose party trick was doing a backflip on a small round bar table.
Don’t get me wrong the show was certainly nauseating in terms of the exposure in the footage. However whilst they big up climbing along a crane. They made little or no comment on balancing along a beam 160m in the air. Which given that I have tried high lining, you can’t understand how much harder something becomes when you add in the height.
I am wondering how long before someone does a documentary on high lining as you can see from this link it is certainly exciting. Something like the video below!
SKYLINERS – A Documentary by Seb Montaz from sebastien montaz-rosset on Vimeo.