Bruce Parry
The presenter of ‘Tribe’ spoke exclusively to etc.
Bruce Parry is at pains to stress that he is in no way the star of Tribe. He’s there to work. It’s just that sometimes that work involves having your arm burned with sticks and frog poison rubbing into the fresh wounds. ‘There are a number of rituals you go through that increase your strength and stamina, to make you a better hunter. I thought, “I’ll give it a go,”’ he tells etc. when we meet in the bar of a London hotel. So he was whipped, had chilli sauce poured into his eyes, and poison rubbed into his still-burning arms.
‘Your body doesn’t normally have poison entering the bloodstream,’ he continues, ‘so it just rejects it in the way it knows best.’ You can guess the rest, except that his sturdy
immune system, honed by years of walking the earth, was quite resistant to the poison: he spent the next hour and a half ‘thinking I was completely going to die.’
He has a sip of his wine. ‘I mean, it’s pretty nasty – but as soon as you start vomiting they wash it off and you’re fine in five minutes. Then you just go off hunting!’
Which is what he did, with the Amazonian Matis tribe – hunting for monkeys with blowpipes. ‘It was brilliant. We were out all day long – I’ve never been so knackered. Another day where I earned my money!’
In the flesh, Bruce Parry is slightly shorter than you’d think, just as tanned as you’d imagine, very friendly – and will not buy into the idea that he has done anything out of the ordinary by walking across Greenland’s ice fields dragging a sled, jumping over lines of cows, spearing animals or taking bizarre hallucinogens with jungle shamans.
The Greenland experience (for the BBC’s Race for the Pole) is dismissed as ‘extreme mental boredom, it was Groundhog Day every day’; the frog poison incident wasn’t anything much either – ‘I think we could do it now, it’s not hard to do.’
In anyone else this could be arrogance, but for Bruce Parry these trials are simply a means to an end. He cares passionately about the people he is visiting, and wants to bring their stories to our attention, to educate and enlighten. And if he has to drink reindeer blood on the way, so be it.
‘Kneeling down next to a carcass, it was really lovely – it’s warm,’ he recalls. ‘I’ve never understood why I’ve got such credibility for drinking blood! I genuinely don’t!’ he says of his experiences with the Nenet people of Siberia. etc. suggests that it’s because not many people would consider doing it themselves.
‘Well, I wouldn’t walk down Portobello market where someone’s selling blood and say “ooh, I’ll have some”,’ he counters, then pauses. ‘Well, maybe I would! But we eat steak with blood dribbling out of it all the time. What’s the difference? You just rationalise it and get on with it. The fact that we don’t do something shouldn’t make it so extraordinary that other people do.’
Getting stuck in
When he puts it like that it’s hard to argue against, but etc. suspects a lot of people would still see a difference between sitting down to a rare steak and chips and kneeling by a just-dead animal to slurp up some ‘lumpy’ reindeer blood. But it’s the fact that Bruce sees no difference at all that makes the programmes he fronts so revealing: he’s right there, in the thick of things. ‘When you go to another culture,’ he explains, ‘if you want to have an understanding, you have to get involved.’
Has he ever felt he’s gone too far out of his comfort zone? ‘I put myself in situations all the time that I’m not massively happy with, but it’s what my friends, and families that I’m living with, are doing,’ he says. ‘It’s respectful if nothing else.’
By putting himself into communities and situations, he argues, he can demonstrate to people at home exactly how skilled a particular tribe or person is. ‘That’s the point. It’s all very well saying there are these guys shooting monkeys with blowpipes, but when you see someone you relate to not being able to even load the bloody dart, you realise that they have a massive amount of skill.’ A stone axe is an intricate piece of technology in its own right, he goes on to say – it takes as much skill to make as a steel one. So who are we to say a tribe is primitive?
The real deal
For Bruce, challenging our stereotypes is the most important thing about the show. He could get people to remove their modern clothes, not show the TV aerials, and paint an idyllic picture of a life removed from our world – but what would be the point, when the real issue these communities face is how they’re going to get along with that world?
‘Most of these people are fully aware of the outside world,’ he explains. ‘They may still be living traditional lives but of course they have T-shirts and listen to the radio.’ He’s also quick to put down any condescending ideas of people having better lives if they only knew about the opportunities in the West. He remembers a reindeer herder from the Nenet tribe – ‘he’d spent 20 years being a teacher and professional athlete around Russia, but realised he’d prefer to come back and herd reindeer.’
Spreading the word
There are also stories of injustice to be told. The Penan people of Borneo are having their forest lands taken from them by the government, and do not have the means to defend themselves – the Tribe team slipped in and filmed illegally to get their story out. ‘I’m not a massive activist,’ he claims, ‘but it was hard not to be, I met these people and they were so angry and scared.’
It’s impossible to think that he isn’t personally affected by these journeys, both externally – as above – but also internally. Trekking alone through the wilderness of Bhutan after spending time with the Layap people and their Buddhist faith was an opportunity to take a look at himself, he says.
‘Growing up in a very Christian, military background and then joining the military myself, I was indoctrinated,’ he admits. ‘But going somewhere like Bhutan, you can explore another view of what the soul and mind is all about.’ Buddhism in Tibet, he found, isn’t about sitting cross-legged and thinking about karma – ‘it’s about dragons and demons and spirits, with Buddhism used to tackle them.’ It wasn’t what he was expecting, and after years of rushing around, it was finally time to slow down and reflect on the journey so far and where his life was going. It hasn’t made him a monk, but he does feel the need to be shown the way sometimes. ‘I suppose I’ve been on a spiritual journey most of my life,’ he says.
The man himself
Lots of things about Bruce Parry aren’t what you’d expect, and lots of them are. He’s as friendly off screen as he seems to be on it, and his handshake hurts as much as you’d think it would; but he’s also sharper, talks faster and more passionately than the laid-back guy we see on TV. On screen he has the experiences; off screen he thinks about what they mean, for him and the people he’s met. But he hasn’t become casual about the life he lives: ‘it’s the most incredibly wonderful experience a human being can have, to sample other cultures, make friends around the world, and challenge and question all my own views.’
He’s done a fair bit of sampling, too. A Royal Marines Commando at 18, Bruce Parry was head of Physical Training for the Marines by the age of 23, before leaving the forces to study at Loughborough Uni. He left early to lead conservation expeditions in Indonesia, before switching careers to TV – first as a lowly runner, then assistant director and finally location manager for music videos for the likes of the Chemical Brothers, Blur and the Manic Street Preachers.
He’d done a fair bit of independent travel (‘I’d get the Lonely Planet map, circle all the places everyone goes, then find the area the furthest distance from any circle!’
he laughs) before his first TV project – climbing a remote mountain in New Guinea. Everyone, he realised, had climbed the highest and second highest mountains in the country – but no one had considered the third, which was only a few hundred metres shorter. It was a red rag to a bull, and up he went with a friend and a video camera – discovering untouched tribes and creating a film that won awards around
the world. ‘We nearly died on several occasions,’ he says enthusiastically, ‘it was the most exciting expedition I’ve ever done! Why? Because I went somewhere different and took a risk.’
Go your own way
This seems to be the key to Bruce Parry – doing something different and taking a risk, whether it’s smearing frog poison on his arm or bringing the plight of a dwindling tribe in Borneo to the attention of the world. With all this, though, he’s not one to look down on anyone else’s travel ambitions. etc. thought he might sneer at gap year expeditions, but not a bit of it. ‘You shouldn’t be elitist, people should do what they want to do,’ he says. ‘Not everyone wants to go off the beaten track.’ But he recommends they try to wander off the path just a little: ‘just do something no one else has done, even if it’s just going to the market that’s a little bit out of town. Your trip will be better for it.’
His next trip is going to be an epic pilgrimage down the Amazon river. But before that? He’s going home. His physical home is in Ibiza now, but he still regards the UK as the motherland; as ‘home’. etc. finds this strange – can he really have a sense of home, when he seems to try so hard to be away from it? ‘This is where I’m from,’ he says, simply. ‘I long to come back, this is where I grew up. That’s why the Nenets long to get back to the tundra: it’s where they’re from, what they know best.’
He thinks about this for a moment, perhaps seeing the contradiction between his job, his base in Ibiza, and regarding the UK as home. ‘I would get bored if I were anywhere too long,’ he admits, finally. ‘Perhaps I’m a bit of a nomad too.’
And he grins.
www.bbc.co.uk/tribe
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