Third Man Syndrome

In 1916, struggling across the mountains of South Georgia after the loss of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton sensed that his party of three had become four. T.S. Eliot carried the idea into The Waste Land, and the Third Man has shadowed explorers ever since: the belief, at the far edge of exhaustion, fear or grief, that someone unseen has come to walk alongside.

Poet Kathleen Jamie has written a new narrative poem in which that presence speaks, and sets it among people who have met it: Stephen Venables, descending alone from the summit of Everest; Peter Hillary, on the long haul to the South Pole; and mountaineer Sandy Allan, kept company on Nanga Parbat by a white rabbit in a red waistcoat. Is it the mind protecting itself, or something else?

Presented and written by Kathleen Jamie

Produced by Victoria Ferran

Broadcast: 4th October 19:00