Naked, afraid and loving it: Kentuckian returns to nitty gritty of reality TV
Last March, just as the world was beginning to tremble with fear in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Andrew Shayde of Lexington was facing a frightening challenge of a different kind: as a participant on the Discovery Channel wilderness survival show “Naked and Afraid.”
On the show, whose twelfth season begins airing on March 6, pairs of strangers are left to fend for themselves in remote, often dangerous locations for 21 days without food, clothing or shelter. Shayde and his teammate, Elizabeth Hensley of rural New York, were set down in a jungle in Limpopo, a northeastern province of South Africa.
There they set up a makeshift camp on a dry river bed, fortifying it with stacked rocks. Sweating in the hot sun, they were forced to bathe in and drink from a muddy waterhole, taking care to boil their drinking water to ward off bacteria and parasites. They ate less-than-appetizing river clams, caterpillar-like worms, a snake and land snails the size of a softball. Hensley was stung by a scorpion. Flies, ants, ticks and spiders were everywhere.
And in a few particularly harrowing moments, they became aware that a leopard was prowling around their shelter after the film crew had gone home for the night.
“You were worried about your fire going out because of the predators,” says Shayde, 39, a comic book writer and development director for Arbor Youth Services. “We barely slept at all, because you can hear animals in the woods around you all the time. There’s something very caveman in you that alerts you to their presence. And once you feel like you’re being hunted, it’s almost impossible to go back to sleep.”
The dangers on the show were real, not staged, Shayde says; participants have to sign liability waivers in case of injuries or animal attacks.
“Animals do not work for the production team,” he says. “If they want to eat you, they will eat you.”
And true to the show’s title, all participants appear without a stitch of clothing, although their private parts are blurred onscreen. “You strip down naked once you arrive,” says Shayde, whose episode is one of three from the new season that can be seen now on the Discovery+ app. “You just wear a necklace that contains your microphone. Being nude was weird for the first hour, but after that, your brain just moves on to other things. All you’re thinking about is working together with your teammate with the goal of surviving until Day 21.”
Shayde is featured in episode 10, which is expected to run on May 8.
It was a return to reality TV for Shayde, who competed on CBS’s “The Amazing Race” in 2002 with his father, Dennis Hyde, also of Central Kentucky. But unlike “The Amazing Race,” which took them to Miami, Mexico, England, Scotland and other parts of Europe on a quest for a hefty cash prize (they didn’t win), “Naked and Afraid” was a decidedly unglamorous affair with no competition, except against nature itself, and no prize beyond the satisfaction of having survived.
“You’re basically in competition with yourself,” says Shayde, who lost 26 pounds during the three-week ordeal. “The question is, are you tough enough? Strong enough? Having survival skills is important, of course, but the biggest thing is, do you have the mental strength? A lot of people tap out on Day Four.”
Shayde and Hensley, working well together without the disagreements and conflicts that some pairs on the show experience, did not tap out. “I knew it would be brutal, and it was,” he says. “They call it the Mount Everest of survival shows, and it’s definitely not for the faint of heart. But I just love travel and I love adventures. Anything wild, risky, dangerous — I love it.”
In keeping with the show’s rules, Shayde was allowed to bring one item with him to the jungle. He chose a kukri, a type of curved machete, which came in handy for chopping palm trees and the random gross foodstuff, not to mention reassurance while the leopard was nearby.
Hensley — who brought a flint firestarter, also helpful — did have some emotionally difficult moments on the show, Shayde says, but he was able to help her through them as they forged their friendship. “There were times when she was really missing home,” he recalls. “To me, being kind and finding joy in the experience was just as much a survival tool as fire and water.”
As in “The Amazing Race,” Shayde’s sexual orientation — he’s an openly gay man, and one of the administrators of an LGBTQ+ community Facebook group in Lexington that now has more than 2,600 members — was mostly irrelevant on “Naked and Afraid,” but it did come up in some of his onscreen discussions and interviews.
“There is something inside me that wants to show the world that LGBTQ folks can be just as gritty and determined as anyone else,” he says. “That was an added weight on my shoulders.”
Once the “Naked and Afraid” experience was over, Shayde faced one last tribulation: getting home. By the time he was scheduled to fly back home in late March, flights from Johannesburg to the United States were canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Cut off from phones and other news sources in the jungle, Shayde had no way of knowing how dire the pandemic had become, and that most of the world was in lockdown. “I talked to my mom and she told me March Madness was canceled,” he recalls. “As a Kentuckian, I thought this must be the end of the world.”
Afraid that his son might be stuck in South Africa, Shayde’s father reached out for assistance from U.S. Rep. Andy Barr’s office, whose staff called Shayde in Johannesburg. In the end, the show’s producers were able to book a flight for him to England and home from there.
“Andrew did real well, I thought,” says Dennis Hyde, who was able to view his son’s episode on Discovery+. “Thinking on your feet, seeing what your resources are, making the most of them — he did great with all of that.”
Would Hyde be up for another reality TV trek with his son? Absolutely — with one condition. “I like the adventure part, but I don’t quite get the naked part,” he says. “If I can wear clothes, I’m in.”
This story was originally published March 5, 2021 at 7:49 AM with the headline "Naked, afraid and loving it: Kentuckian returns to nitty gritty of reality TV."