Most of us got our history in three doses: a school unit we half remember, a documentary our parents had on in the background, and whatever's printed on the sign at the lookout.
Which means we all reckon we know the big ones. Hillary. Batten. Upham. Ask anyone in the country for a sentence about Ed Hillary and you'll get the same sentence back.
Turns out that sentence is about two percent of it. Scratch any of them and there's a stranger, funnier, sadder story sitting underneath the tidy one. The bits that didn't fit on the sign are almost always the best bits.
That's the show. One legend an episode, told the way you'd tell it to a mate who's just sat down with a beer. The good stuff first. Tangents left in. Me stopping halfway through to go "hang on, that can't be right," and then going and checking.
I do the research properly, three days deep on a good week, and then I do my best to forget I did it. No dates for the sake of dates. No lecture voice. If a claim is shaky I'll say it's shaky rather than smoothing it over, because the shaky bits are usually where the story actually lives.
Some episodes are very funny. Some are about people who died badly. Some are both.
A bloody legend is what you call someone who did something ridiculous and got away with it. It's also what a story turns into after enough people have retold it.
Both meanings are doing work here. Half the job of this show is separating the person from the legend that grew over the top of them, and being honest about which one we're actually enjoying.
