Fiennes: Return to the Wild, review: odd-couple adventure bridges two very different family members

The name Fiennes means one of two things. Either it denotes treading the boards, or trudging the ice caps. One branch of the family acts. The other explores. So far apart are these two lifestyles that it’s always been hard to imagine one type of Fiennes hanging out with the other.

It was a surprise, therefore, when five years ago Joseph Fiennes and cousin Ranulph Fiennes teamed up to travel down the Nile. Now they’re back in Fiennes: Return to the Wild (National Geographic) and the pairing feels just as charmingly improbable.

The idea as before is for the younger actor to accompany the older adventurer along the course of one of his long-gone journeys – in this case, through the wilds of northwest Canada. For context, there’s footage to show just how much peril explorer Fiennes put himself in back in the day. Shooting rapids, trespassing close to bears, clambering over crags etc.

Now they travel by land cruiser on tarmarcked highways, with a bit of placid boating thrown in. The photography is spectacular, the conversation gentle. The impression lingers that the two cousins barely know each other, and perhaps got together only at the behest of a production company.

Joseph asks deferential questions about Ran’s intrepid exploits, and gets gnarly answers in patrician tones. The curiosity goes only one way. Maybe it’s meant to. Thespians don’t talk shop on National Geographic. Their mutual incomprehension was nicely illustrated when Fiennes Jr tried out a series of terrible puns on Fiennes Sr, who being hard of hearing wasn’t tuned into the same wavelength.

Neither of them likes fishing, but needing footage they went anyway, though no sturgeon obliged by leaping onto the line. The younger Fiennes is the more poetic, and enquiring. It was he who asked a guide about the inexorable melting of the Athabasca Glacier.

To give the programme a sense of present danger, he slithered on ropes down a deep crevasse, bringing back amazing footage and, when he dropped his glove, proof that things can go very wrong very quickly. His cousin talked jauntily of amputating his frostbitten fingertips, and brandished a row of lumpen stumps.