The Man Who Cycled the World, BBC2, 7pm I Am The Elephant Man, Channel 4, 9pm Two neatly-observed documentaries attested to the varying forms of triumph which can result if you doggedly apply human willpower. The Man Who Cycled the World followed 25-year-old Fife pedaller Mark Beaumont on the opening Europe-to-Asia leg of his recent 18,000-mile, seven-month-long record-breaking circumnavigation of the globe.
The Man Who Cycled the World, BBC2, 7pm
I Am The Elephant Man, Channel 4, 9pm
Two neatly-observed documentaries attested to the varying forms of triumph which can result if you doggedly apply human willpower. The Man Who Cycled the World followed 25-year-old Fife pedaller Mark Beaumont on the opening Europe-to-Asia leg of his recent 18,000-mile, seven-month-long record-breaking circumnavigation of the globe.
Jauntily, the programme outlined the ultimate victory by one well-brought-up, well-resourced and thoroughly modern young westerner over punctured tyres, broken spokes, rain, searing heat, inedible food, incomprehensible local road signs and inconsiderate motorists.
How Mark Beaumont kept going, I do not know. He just did. Night after night, he pitched his one-man tent in whatever roadside field lay adjacent after he'd ground out his daily target of 100 miles.
He overcame occasional nausea. He fell behind his mileage schedule, but didn't panic. He ignored sore muscles. He grew a beard that made him look rugged, self-assured and manly, not untrustworthy and scrofulent.
He remembered to conduct regular mini-cam confessionals, never apparently succumbing to the sort of self-pitying angst/senseless rage that would mark my own addresses to myself ("Day 2: seven miles covered, another ruddy spoke burst; blister on bahookie means I give in").
On a different scale of achievement, I Am The Elephant Man let some pinpricks of light shine into a gloomy cavern of unspeakable pain. In a rural Chinese backwater so far-flung as to be medieval, 26-year-old Huang Chuncai tottered stoically beneath the 25-kilo weight of the tumours which, over the course of a straitened lifetime, have consumed one eye, his teeth and grossly distended his face.
Simply to speak or eat, Huang Chuncai needed to push the tumours' folds and flaps aside and hold them away from his ruined mouth. His body's natural growth has been stunted by them, his spine deformed.
When Huang Chuncai attended his village school as a child, his fellow pupils pointed and laughed at him. He gave up going. We saw his ageing mum cry about the hellish inversion of the natural Chinese order.
As an eldest son, Huang Chuncai is meant to look after his parents in their declining years, but they still care for him. In addition, Huang Chuncai's brother and sister have both left relatively well-paid jobs in urban trainer factories to come home and share the domestic burden posed by his condition. What will happen to all of them?
Of more immediate distress, Huang Chuncai's tumours had begun to restrict his breathing, strangling him to death.
Luckily, cancer surgeon Professor Xu, from a hospital in the city of Guangzhou, found Huang Chuncai and gave him the first medical examination of his life, thereafter pronouncing himself willing and able to do something to improve his new patient's health.
Huang Chuncai's first bout of surgery made grim viewing, especially when five kilos of tumour were laid out on the floor. With remarkable bravery, Huang Chuncai had earlier said that all he'd ever wanted to do was carry on living.
His doctors uttered resigned clinical truths, things such as: "Every step is an experiment". Likewise, the medics' urgent shouts in the operating theatre constituted a lexicon of things no patient should ever hear ("Clamp it! Clamp it!", "Send more blood!" and "Is that the mouth?").
Back home after six weeks, with much more surgery to come but speaking more clearly, Huang Chuncai at last had something that was discernibly a face. For him, you had to smile.
