Simon Reeve reveals embarrassing moment cut from TV broadcast: "I felt guilty and stupid"

"You’re trying to get me into trouble immediately, aren’t you? Well, yes, we’re squeezing more than a million and a half square miles into three shows, but that’s telly – skipping in a shallow way through massive issues. I’m not claiming this is an encyclopaedic take; it’s just me pottering around an area I find interesting. And I did Russia in three programmes too, you know!'

You’ve snuck Iceland and Finland in there as well, and they’re not even Scandinavian!

"I was mildly worried about that, but it’s not as though I’m going to start a religious war. Obviously I’m only ever one major mistake away from being cancelled, but I think the Scandis are too nice to get worked up about it. I might get a few eggs thrown at me, but BBC viewers don’t normally express their views violently. I did get a bolt chucked at me in Belfast: it was a chunky M24 one, like you’d use to rivet down an oil tanker.

"But that was during a riot, so I’m not sure it was aimed personally at me because they hated my second series or something. Anyway, we wanted to incorporate the drama of Iceland and the issues of Finland, which has this incredibly long border with Russia and which is now a bit of a flashpoint where they’re worrying about potential future conflict."

And you? Were you scared of getting hit by a stray missile?

"No, it’s just so beautiful and glorious there – a magical, frozen winter landscape, with snow on the ground but the trees perfectly covered in snow, too – that you can’t imagine anything terrible happening there. But that’s not the historical reality. The Finns have been invaded multiple times in horrific ways, so after the Cold War, while other countries demilitarised, the Finns were thinking, 'Hang on, we’re going to wait another century to be really sure.' And now they’ve got this massive army – 900,000-strong, the largest in Western Europe.

"One of its units, the Jaeger Brigade, trains British and American forces in Arctic warfare, so I visited them for the programme, and they made me jump into a frozen lake at night, to up my levels of sisu, which translates as guts and resilience. I won’t be doing it again. I’m not a fan of cold-water swimming: I’m a wuss – unless there’s a camera running, and then it’s remarkable how quick I toughen up."

Can you recommend anything more "holidayish"?

"We got quite touristy in Iceland, trying to find the most beautiful spots to take selfies as well as footage for the show; and we went in a massive ice cave in the glacier on top of the volcano Katla [see southadventure.is]. We also scootered around Stockholm and biked round Copenhagen – and Bergen was a lovely surprise: it’s sort of an oil-boom town but it doesn’t look like Abu Dhabi – it’s more like Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. Then in Lapland, I went to meet the elves at SantaPark (santapark.fi), which a lot of Brit tourists love.

"It’s a huge, cave-like grotto, and a lure for visitors from around the world, but it turns out to be a massive nuclear bunker, too. The Finns have thousands of them across the country: if you visit an ice rink or a sports centre in Finland, you’re very likely to be going into a nuclear bunker. In Britain we’re just told to stock up on bog-roll and hide underneath those."

And what shouldn’t we do in Scandinavia?

"Don’t insult the governor of Barentsburg! It’s this Russian mining settlement in Svalbard in Norway, but I’ll tell you something we didn’t put in the programme and I haven’t told anyone else. I’d met the governor, then in the evening we were in a café in our hotel, I’d had a couple of vodkas and I was doing a little impression of him for the rest of the team. It’s possible I might have done his accent a bit and waved my arms around a bit too.

"The whole place was completely empty except for us and a couple on a far table. Lo and behold, the couple got up and came past us. And it turns out to be the bloody governor – who stands over us and says in a very menacing voice, like a classic Bond villain, 'Have a good… evening.' We weren’t followed by his goons the next day or anything, but I felt guilty and stupid. It was an act of supreme muppetry on my part – so don’t do that!"

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