ICE to meet you

LEE MACK and HOLLY WILLOUGHBY on how wellness guru Wim Hof is changing lives in their celebrity survival series

- TESS LAMACRAFT

FREEZE THE FEAR WITH WIM HOF NEW TUESDAY, 9PM, BBC1 REALITY

The Italian Alps provide a breathtaking backdrop as eight brrr-ave celebrities face a variety of chilly challenges under the guidance of extreme athlete Wim Hof for an epic new BBC1 adventure series.

Hosted by Holly Willoughby and Lee Mack, the six-part spectacular Freeze the Fear with Wim Hof sees the Dutch motivational guru - famed for his astounding feats of cold endurance - push the group, who are living together in a mountainside tented village, to their very limits with increasingly difficult tasks in sub-zero temperatures.

Here, Holly, 41, and Lee, 53, tell us more...

You've been a fan of Wim's for a while, haven't you, Holly?

HOLLY Yes, I live in a scaredy-cat world, I'm afraid of everything, so anything that I can find to help with that, to add to my toolkit, is great.

A friend gave me one of Wim's books. I read it and thought, “This guy is amazing!

I started doing some of the breathing exercises, got the app, and told my husband how brilliant Wim was, which became the seed for this programme [Holly's husband, Dan Baldwin, is the show's executive producer).

And, Lee, what did you make of Wim Hof?

LEE He's amazing, and he's also a proper bona fide lunatic. Everyone has a kind of onscreen persona, but Wim is the real McCoy. If he shows you the splits on camera, he'll be showing you the splits off-camera, too.

What appealed to you both about the show's format?

LEE I've never done a show like this before and I'm not normally a massive fan of this genre of television. But what I loved was, with this there's no fakeness; there's no negativity or trying to starve people to deliberately get rows going like we see in a lot of TV.