Here’s something unusual about Race Across the World (Sunday, 8pm, BBC Two), a sort of competitive gap year where five pairs compete to cross South America on the tightest budget in the shortest time in an effort to have the most annoying conversations back home with the people they know: I have ended up, against my better judgment, liking the contestants.
Something about this feels fundamentally wrong. The TV arc I am used to is meeting various sets of people willing to participate in a reality TV programme, which already marks me against them (Step 1); making impulsive snap judgments based on accents, the way they look, or one slightly annoying thing they said in their intro reel (Step 2); spending more time with them and having my early impulses proved correct and, quite often, magnified (Step 3); then, in the final episode, watching one person win over all others and feeling nothing (Step 4). That is TV as I know it and how I like it.
So Race Across the World feels wrong. To recap: we are three weeks in, one couple down, nobody has a map or even a cursory grasp of Spanish and, somehow, they have rattled along from Mexico to Colombia without spending much more than a grand. There is Dom and Lizzie, the annoyingly-good-looking-in-that-really-healthy-way siblings who lost touch somewhere between childhood and university, who are bickering their way from boat to bus; Rob and Jen, married 33-year-olds from Reading hoping to overcome recent adversity by refinding themselves and each other; uncle-nephew combo Emon and Jamiul, who are staggeringly inept, and keep missing crucial buses because they are looking the wrong way; and Jo and Sam, my favourites, a 54-year-old and 19-year-old mother-son pair who guide each other tenderly through tantrums, distractions and the fact that he has seemingly never bought a bag of crisps unassisted in his life. I do not want to like a bunch of people sweating into backpacks and having the holiday of a lifetime. But here we are.
Race Across the World is an astounding piece of TV because it somehow captures all the vibrant highs and exhausted lows of travel in all of their raw glory: the flooded hotels, the 18-hour coach trips, the moments of giving up, the bafflingly undesirable toilets, communicating in a nonsensical language halfway between English and Spanish; but then also the late-night beers, the dancing with strangers, the helpful locals hand-drawing a map on the back of a notepad, the ecstatic feeling of a comfortable bed.
I salute every member of the camera crew. Not only do they have to document the entire round-the-houses trip each duo makes, they actually have to undergo it, too, and do it in a way that makes every missed bus feel like an urgent threat to you, the luxuriant viewer at home. They have also managed to finally take me to Step 5: genuinely caring how this one ends and the impact it will have on the lives of those who lived it. Not sure how I feel about that. Going to chain a few episodes of Ibiza Weekender to get back on a level of literally not caring about the fates of the people I’ve just watched entertain me.
