For some reason, watching Race Across the World never gets old. It’s the same premise, of course – five couples race a gobsmackingly vast distance, via a series of checkpoints, to a remote end goal.
Their quest? To get there first – and win the £20,000 prize pot.
It’s not a lot of money, as prize pots go, but to be honest, the travel is its own reward. Over the years, contestants have travelled across Canada, across South America and (ambitiously) from London all the way to Singapore.
This time around, they’re heading from the Great Wall of China (or, more accurately, Huanghua Cheng in China) to the southernmost tip of India. It’s a distance of 14,000km, to be completed with a series-low budget of £22 a day, and the contestant interviews promise a pleasing mix of naivete and enthusiasm.
All the ingredients for success are still there, in other words. Race Across the World has always excelled at being the best kind of comfort watching, and there’s more of the same this time around: excitement, adventure, travel inspiration and the schadenfreude of watching people struggle from the safety of your sofa.
The contestants are a rum bunch, too. We have two brothers (Brian and Melvyn) who last went away together in the 1970s and want to reconnect; Welsh couple Fin and Sioned (at 18 and 19, they are most certainly naïve) and sisters Elizabeth and Letitia, who have lived in separate countries for the last decade.
And what group would be complete without a mother/son duo? This time around, it’s the exceedingly posh Tom and Caroline. Tom, we are told, has spent the last eight months travelling; Caroline has never done anything of the sort.
Most intriguingly, there’s also Yin and Gaz, a divorced couple who are doing the route together after the death of Yin’s second partner. It’s an interesting dynamic – Yin declares at one point that she and Gaz would “never” get back together; his eyes say otherwise.
As the pairs set off on their mammoth journey, frontrunners quickly emerge. Letitia, it transpires, has lived in China and actually speaks basic Mandarin, giving their team a head-and-shoulders advantage over the others.
As they bounce their way in and out of Beijing on their way south, others flounder. Caroline and Tom end up trapped in Beijing (Tom breaks down at the bus station, leaving her to sort tickets), while Yin and Gaz end up stuck on the outskirts of the city. The question: should they opt for a high-speed train or risk it with low-cost, achingly slow public transportation?
Dotted in among the frantic activity (the maps illustrating where they’re actually going are very helpful) are lovely moments, as well as funny ones. The extremely sheltered Fin and Sioned visit a local food market at one point and are appalled at what’s on offer.
“Chinese food at home is a lie,” a dejected Fin tells the camera. “It’s a massive lie.” Smash cut to him eating a deep fried chicken leg two minutes later in the name of cultural experimentation.
And as the teams race to the first checkpoint of Huangling, brothers Melvyn and Brian end up stuck far inland, serving meals at a local restaurant. When they’re shown to their ‘room’ for the night, it ends up being something out of a horror movie: dirty toilets, planks for mattresses and broken windows.
When the pair spot a key in the door – who would want to steal anything? – they break down in fits of giggles. “This is exactly what I wanted to happen,” Melvyn tells the camera afterwards. “Can’t remember the last time we laughed like that together.”
I’m not crying, you are.
Race Across the World is streaming now on BBC and iPlayer
