Brits are a nation of holiday-lovers. Come the summer months, thousands of us will be packing a suitcase and heading to wherever there’s sunshine.
We’re also a nation of telly lovers, so it makes sense that our appetite for travel TV is similarly bottomless.
A lot of the current hype is down to Race Across the World, which premiered on BBC Two back in 2019 and is far and away the biggest travel show on TV right now.
The second season, released right as the UK entered the depths of the Covid-19 lockdown, went stratospheric in a way the BBC did not see coming, and has stayed popular since. Apparently, we couldn’t get enough of watching people travel across far-flung continents on a shoestring budget.
With the show regularly pulling in millions of viewers, it’s not a surprise that the BBC powers-that-be would seek to duplicate that success with Destination X.
Launched on Wednesday night with much fanfare, it’s a spinoff of a Belgian show (called Bestemmung X, would you believe) that carts its contestants around a series of foreign locales, with a twist: they can’t see out of their mode of transportation, and they have no idea where they are.
Each episode, the contestants are shown a series of ‘clues’ from the inside of the blacked-out bus in which they’re travelling. Sometimes, they get to leave said bus for other spaces, such as a field in the middle of nowhere, or a massive box in the middle of a town square. Don’t worry, though: it’s been pocked with holes, so they can see outside (a little bit).
At the end of said episode, they have to use those clues to guess whereabouts on the map they are; the least accurate person duly gets eliminated.
The show features a big-name celeb host (Rob Brydon, on full twinkly form), a host of competitors ready to backstab their way to glory, and a gigantic cash prize of £100,000.
What it doesn’t feature is a whole lot of, well, travel. The best thing about watching these types of shows is getting to soak in the glorious surroundings: we watch this stuff because we can’t go there in person. It’s pure escapism, which is exactly what Destination X offers none of.
At least the competition element is well and truly there: even in the first ten minutes, Brydon has eliminated three people from the running and is encouraging others to form alliances or else backstab their way to success by feeding their fellow competitors false clues about where they might be.
But for most of the show, those contestants are shut inside the ‘X Bus’: a massive truck with blacked-out windows from which not a peep of the surrounding countryside can be seen. We hardly get a glimpse of the outside, either, and all those interior shots soon get tiring.
They do occasionally leave the ‘X Bus’, which is nice, but often they’re plonked in a random bit of nature, or given the barest glimpses of the market town they’ve been placed into (via the aforementioned big box, which has the bonus effect of being absolutely humiliating). In the first episode, the contestants start in Baden Baden and travel to pretty market towns bustling with locals eating croissants — except we see about five minutes of that, and we don’t even know where those towns are. Are they in Austria, Switzerland or maybe still Germany? The contestants are clueless and so are we.
Once inside the bus, we could be in a boardroom in London. Instead, though, contestants are burning fossil fuels on a motorway somewhere in Germany, not even getting to see the country they’ve travelled to. What’s mind-opening or enriching about that? And what’s enjoyable about looking at a mountain range and not even being able to place where it is?
Perhaps it’s uncharitable to be comparing the show so much to Race Across the World. But RATW really did perfect the formula.
Those stunning shots of mountains or towns, accompanied by a brief explanation of where the contestants were, as well as their interactions with the local communities, helped whet the appetite of a generation of young travellers. I certainly remember watching the second season in lockdown and feeling a yearning to travel to South America, to experience those cultures, mountains and vibrant cities for myself.
By contrast, the Destination X competitors are hidden away on their black bus. If that’s not a sadder way to travel, I can’t think what is.
Destination X is streaming now on BBC One and iPlayer
