Pilgrims' progress
Jeff Brazier and Harry Clark find themselves on a spiritual journey
BBC
- Catherine Pepinster
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When Harry Clark first joined the Army at 16, his Roman Catholic family gave him a St Christopher medal, blessed by their priest, to keep him safe. It’s been with him ever since – during six years as a squaddie, winning the second series of The Traitors and trekking through the Alps alongside six other well-known faces for the latest series of Pilgrimage.
This enthusiasm for his faith might well surprise viewers used to seeing Clark succeed with his masterclass in duplicity and cunning on The Traitors. After all, how does fooling the Faithfuls square with his Christian beliefs and the Commandment “Thou shall not lie”?
“That was a game!” Clark says of the hit show, hosted by Claudia Winkleman. “The pilgrimage was different.” And he seems convinced that it was meant to be. “I was saying to God, give me a sign and this came along.” A sign for what? “A sign to show that God is there, that I’m not alone.”
Clark, 24, does not so much wear his faith on his sleeve but on his arm – and his hand. He has tattoos to remind him of his family and their Roman Catholic beliefs. He shows me the one on his right hand: “Be who God meant you to be and you’ll set the world on fire.”
I thought everyone would hate me after The Traitors
Harry Clark
Raised on a Slough council estate and one of five children, Clark – who left the Army in 2024 – attended Catholic schools, was an altar server and went on retreats. But he had never been on a pilgrimage.
This one, through the Austrian and Swiss Alps, travelling 300km along a revived medieval Catholic route from near Innsbruck on the Austrian Camino and concluding near Lake Zurich in Switzerland, arrived at the right time.
“I left the Army and had no sense of direction,” says Clark. “Then I was blasted into celebrity, getting on The Traitors. I did it for the money and I’ve still got it, invested it. But after that I thought, ‘Everyone is going to hate me.’ I spent time with celebs and it wasn’t nice. Then Pilgrimage came along and it was my saviour.”
Harry and his fellow celebrity pilgrims – boy band singer Jay McGuiness, actor and comedian Helen Lederer, standup comedian Daliso Chaponda, presenter Jeff Brazier, retired Paralympian Stef Reid and journalist Nelufar Hedayat – bonded as, over 12 days, they travelled along part of the Camino pilgrimage route. They talked faith, the meaning of life, happiness, ageing and grief as they walked, staying in guest houses, a convent and pilgrim hostels. They were, says Brazier, “like one another’s therapists”.
The 45-year-old, who never met his biological father (a Thames skipper who died in the Marchioness disaster and had walked out on Brazier’s pregnant mum) went to Catholic schools. But he turned to meditation when Big Brother star Jade Goody, mother to his two young boys, died of cervical cancer in 2009, aged just 27. “My early reflection on God was that if there is a God, then these things would not have happened to me.”
He had to raise their children, Freddy and Bobby (now an EastEnders actor) alone. “By the time the boys lost their mum, turning to God was not an option. I just knew I had to [raise them]. I had a can-do attitude. But it was a shield and I was denying myself all the emotions.”
It is spirituality – daily meditation, ice baths – he says, that keeps him balanced. Brazier worried that his fellow pilgrims might think his own beliefs – “a commitment to self-development, my relationship with the planet and everything in it” – were “a bit of a cop-out… but everybody was receptive to different points of view. You are sharing your vulnerability.”
The pilgrimage gave Brazier time and space “to clarify the direction I needed to go in”, although it did not change his mind about his feud with Jade Goody’s mum, Jackiey Budden, over contact with her grandsons. “You could leave me on a hilltop for two years and I would not see it differently.”
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For Clark, the pilgrimage was a transformative experience: “Nobody sees the side effects of celebrity, it’s difficult. I was uncomfortable in the celebrity world. But here, there was a connection with other people. You can be so lost but then you are found. The pilgrimage came along at the right time.”
Authors
Catherine Pepinster
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