Being Buried Alive?

So here we are, in a Huddersfield block of flats, having a lesson on what to do if you ever happen to find yourself buried alive, six feet under.

‘Remember, at that depth you’ve got about six tonnes of earth pressing down on you. You have to pretty much use every muscle in your body to punch up, up, up through it,’ says Antony Britton who, surreally, shows me by pummelling his way through some sofa cushions.

‘It’s pitch black and the dampness is overwhelming. The soil is up your nose, in your mouth, in your eyes.

‘It’s like being in a vice. Your ribs and head are crushed. You are literally having the life squeezed out of you.’

There is, I discover, a touch of the sadist about Antony as he tells me what else is in store.

‘If you don’t move quickly enough you’ll be dealing with broken bones, brain damage, burst blood vessels. Your eyeballs could pop out of their sockets. The key is to not panic, because if you do, it’s game over.’

Antony, 38, knows because he’s done this and, by some miracle, survived (eyeballs intact) with just a broken rib and ruptured pride.

It’s hard to be too sympathetic, because for him being buried alive was a deliberate act. An escapologist by trade (‘I do put it on official forms, although sometimes I call myself a “stunt performer”,’) he has spent 20 years thinking up ever more elaborate ways to put himself in death-defyingly situations, then exit them with a flourish.

Escaping his own burial — as he tried to do last weekend — was the ultimate challenge. In the past 100 years, only two others, he claims, have attempted it — one of them his hero, the legendary Harry Houdini, who tried it in 1915. Even he failed.

So why did this Yorkshireman, trained as a welder, think he could succeed? ‘Because I am bloody good!’ he says, puffing up his chest as much as he can manage, given that broken rib.

But not good enough. The stunt in a park near Huddersfield — witnessed by spectators at first gripped, then horrified — was a disaster. Instead of bursting from the ground, Antony was hauled out unconscious, needing resuscitation.

He was dubbed the worst escapologist ever. So, was he a loon? Worse, a loon with a death-wish?

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