Civil unrest and volcanic eruptions do not tend to trouble most primetime television producers but the very real threat of emergencies makes working on BBC1’s Race Across the World one of the most dangerous jobs in entertainment.
Overseen by a department that is also responsible for the more pedestrian Countryfile, The Great British Sewing Bee and Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing, the travelling competition stands out for its ambition as it prepares for the climax of its fourth series after eight episodes and 9,300 miles on Wednesday.
In the latest edition of Race Across the World — which is produced by Studio Lambert, the company behind The Traitors and Gogglebox — pairs of contestants must travel as quickly as possible from Sapporo, Japan, to Lombok, Indonesia, to win £20,000. The catch is that they cannot fly or use a mobile phone and are equipped with just a map, travel guide, GPS tracker and a small sum of money.
Previous iterations have followed the participants as they journey through volatile countries including Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Colombia, helping it to grow steadily in popularity since its launch in 2019 to attract a record audience of seven million this series.
Tim Harcourt, Studio Lambert’s creative director, said that the scale of the programme means there is a constant risk of the production team’s plans, which are plotted up to a year in advance, being derailed by events on the ground.
“We have to be avid readers of the newspapers because we genuinely are at the whim of quite a lot of geopolitics,” said Harcourt. “If there’s any production company in the world that longs for world peace for very selfish reasons, it’s us.”
Initial plans to travel through China in series four were rejected as too risky during pre-production last year owing to concern that access would be blocked, forcing a route change that involved the teams flying from close to the demilitarised zone in South Korea before restarting the race from Hanoi, Vietnam.
“We are always trying to guess which way the wind is going with countries and whether they are liable to wars breaking out,” said Harcourt.
