Race Across the World
BBC1
Do you ever wonder when watching Race Across the World whether we Brits would be as kind to strangers if a foreign TV company set a similar show here? Obviously one would like to think so, but I can’t really imagine a stallholder handing over their actual shoes as a gift like that nice elderly woman did to Brydie in northern Japan.
Also, if such a show was set here none of the trains would run on time, which would be embarrassing. And when the contestants eventually did manage to board the teeming carriage, obviously squatting on the floor in the corridor taking the full pungent whiff whenever the lavatory door opened, they’d be thrown off for not having the right off-peak, flexi, third Tuesday in every month on a full moon ticket. Then again, perhaps these producers only keep the heartwarming bits in and there are plenty of times the contestants are told “eff off, freeloaders”, which we just don’t get to see. I’d feel better if that were the case.
Anyway, Race Across the World is a good show because it’s about humans living on their wits without modern tech and, more importantly, it shows that the world is a far friendlier place than you’d think from watching the TV news.
Oh, and it’s also about squabbling under pressure. Alfie and Owen, best friends aged 20 from St Albans, gave us our first little tiff when Alfie lost the map. Or one of them did and the finger points very definitely at Alfie, because he seems to be scatterbrained (at 20? Bloody hell, mate. Wait until you get older). “I need 15 minutes away from him. He’s so frustrating,” Owen said. To be fair, if you are trying to travel 15,000 kilometres from Sapporo to Lombok in Indonesia with no phones, credit cards, internet, air tickets and only £1,390 to spend in total (about £27 a person per day), a map is quite key to your chances.
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Brydie and her mother, Sharon, seem the most confident of managing their money because “we live every day on a budget”. Sharon is a cleaner, her mother was a fruit picker and her dad a miner who had to survive with his family through the miners’ strike. “I could live on a penny,” she said.
I have high hopes, comedy-wise, of Viv and Stephen, a retired couple who seem to stop holding hands only when she massages his aching shoulders. This is mainly because Viv described her own husband as “an acquired taste”. He is “quite loud”, “not very tactful” and “unintentionally offensive”. The director must be praying that Stephen doesn’t change his spots for TV.
The interesting question here is, will the tortoise’s age and wisdom (Stephen and Viv) beat the hare’s speed and vitality (Owen and Alfie and siblings Betty and James)? “We need to outsmart them because we can’t outrun them,” Viv said. Well. So far the hybrid of youth and wisdom is just inching it. Eugenie, 60, and her daughter Isabel, 25, reached the first checkpoint, the Japanese city of Nara, before anyone else. Owen and Alfie arrived fractionally later. They reasoned that they hadn’t really come second but “joint first” because they were a mere two minutes behind. Yeah right, lads, try pulling that one at the London Marathon.
★★★★☆
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