If you want to feel better about the state of the world, try watching a race across it. The sixth season of BBC adventure challenge show Race Across the World is about to conclude; it’s not only the best hour of the week on British television, it’s also the best portrayal of what humanity has to offer.
The premise of RATW is simple: five teams of two people are sent on a highly photogenic journey. They are given the equivalent amount of money that flights would cost to get them from point A to point B, but are not allowed to travel by plane. They only have what they can carry, a paper map and no phones. In this series, they are going from Palermo to Mongolia with £1,297 each, which is approximately £23 a day.
The beauty of RATW often comes in the landscapes but mostly in the casting of the pairs competing. The team at Studio Lambert sifts through thousands of applications and creates beautiful television by selecting teams that vary in age, situation and maturity, but who are all usually navigating a new stage in life.
In the running are two teenage best mates (in the lead heading into the final episode) with a family death to confront, a young brother and sister who have been caring for their ill mother, a widower and his late wife’s sister both grieving the woman they have lost, and a father recovering from a heart attack and a daughter navigating her burgeoning independence.
Throughout the nine-episode series, there is only one elimination. So although there is some jeopardy about where each team will place and whether they will run out of money before reaching the final checkpoint, the main focus is the relationships between team-mates. We follow them experiencing the world through home stays, work days and travel calamities, grappling with unfamiliar languages and having to spend 50 days in close proximity to their race partner.
The race favourites this year – and I suspect the nation’s favourites too – are Jo and Kush, 19-year-old Scousers who want “one more sidequest before the adult world.” They applied to the race as a joke. These young men are the antithesis of toxic masculinity.
We get to watch them joke, dance, sing, eat, stress, cry, fail and succeed, and it has been the most uplifting television. These young men recognise one another’s strengths, weaknesses and emotional needs in an intuitive and caring way.
One minute Kush is proudly watching Jo play basketball, the next he is crashing from anxiety and Jo is staying up all night to talk him through it. This honesty about anxiety, fears and grief is the openness we need from young men. Early on, Kush said about his hosts “I don’t understand the jokes, but I can feel the vibe”. I watch this and somehow I think that the kids will be OK.
RATW is also inevitably an exploration of grief. Pairs who have not spent concentrated time together alone before navigate shared personal space, sleep deprivation and the general stress of travel, accentuated by race conditions and camera crews in pursuit.
One of the most unlikely pairings is Margo, 59, and her brother-in-law Mark, 66, who shared care for Julia, Margo’s sister and Mark’s wife as she suffered from cancer. Her dying wish was that the two of them develop a friendship; but from the outset they are the oddest of couples.
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Margo is a free spirit, line-dancing with strangers on a ferry from Sicily to the mainland, while uptight, rigid Mark basically pretends not to know her. When they have to share a bed, he wraps himself in a “modesty cocoon”. But there is joy in watching them compromise and adapt.
Geography teacher Andrew, 54, and his daughter, junior doctor Molly, 23, are from Derry. Watching Molly try to win respect as an adult from the man she calls “daddy” is a difficult watch at first. Andrew, who is recovering from a heart attack, speaks over his daughter and is used to being in the driver’s seat. But as they rub against one another with some friction, we see Molly finding her feet and Andrew growing in understanding about their new relationship.
Some of the best moments are the home stays. Language doesn’t matter, the host families are so generous with their homes, their cultures, and their food. Watching humans break bread and sing and laugh brings hope. In the penultimate episode, Kush and Jo play music with their Mongolian hosts, while a local star demonstrates a type of Mongolian throat singing that Kush was introduced to by his late father. Thousands of miles from home, it is a moving moment of kismet.
In every country, there is optimism, helpful strangers, annoying missteps and stressers, locals to play basketball or guitar with or new families to share their trade and food. Shy smiles, sweet dances and singalongs on a global stage.
The show makes me want to travel the world again, and to see where Jo and Kush go next – taking on new work and new countries as well as the manosphere. These two could handle just about anything. They may not win, but they have already won.
Race Across the World concludes on May 21; all episodes are on BBC iPlayer.
Jamie Klingler is founder of London Book Club
