Hooray! An adventurer on a real mission, not an ego trip
The opening shot of The Americas With
Simon Reeve (BBC2) was spectacular, an image that once would have demanded a hollywood budget — the camera soaring over Alaskan mountain crests to spy the presenter as a speck on the snowfields below.
Footage like that is possible now thanks to high-definition lenses on drones. But it didn’t explain how the perpetually boyish Simon came to be wading through remote Arctic drifts in the first place.
Too many telly adventurers let us believe they’ve parachuted from a helicopter, or maybe ridden in on a polar bear. Simon Reeve’s documentaries are fact-finding missions, not ego trips, so he dispelled any mystery straight away: he was flown in by plane and spent much of the journey in mild terror.
The 65-year-old light aircraft had quilted covers like the fingers of gloves to keep ice off its propellor and a single hairdryer sputtering out puffs of heat to prevent the instruments from freezing. Not surprising, then, that when it skidded down onto a glacier, Simon’s teeth were gritted.
That’s the attraction of his numerous globe - t r o t t i n g programmes. These aren’t macho travelogues in Steve Backshall’s style or Romesh Ranganathan’s parades of sarcastic wit. Simon’s technique is to begin with the facade that tourists see and then peel it back, uncovering what each place is really like.
Once we’d visited a cabin at the top of the world and watched the eerie green northern lights, he took us to the places where people actually have to live.
In the Inupiaq native settlement of Kaktovik, where alcohol is banned and dogs are chained up as sentries against marauding polar bears, the highlight of the week is bingo night. Grim-faced locals mark off the numbers on their cards with mechanical efficiency.
Unwisely, Simon interrupted one gaunt woman to ask about her winning technique. ‘Keep up with the caller!’ she snapped.
Across the Canadian border in Yukon territory, he met grandmother Grace, living alone and jobless in a trailer insulated with cardboard. She had one electric heater to stave off the bone-freezing cold. even that hairdryer from the plane would have been welcome.
Some people thrived on it. Caveman Bill quit the rat race to live in a foxhole scraped out of the permafrost. When Simon met him, the temperature was minus 14C — so balmy, Bill felt, that he was wearing open-toed sandals.
The show’s aim is to take us from the Arctic Circle to Patagonia at the tip of South America, from polar bears to penguins. This first series, though, will only get us half way. It’s right not to rush: there are a lot of tourist myths to debunk.
World On Fire ( BBC1) isn’t rushing either. Writer Peter Bowker’s story is so dense, woven from strands following multiple characters, that it sometimes feels as though not much is happening, despite all the things going on.
No one seems able to decide who they love or whether they’re going to join up and fight. Meanwhile, the Nazis invaded Poland weeks ago.
When there is action, though, it’s better depicted than we usually see in costume dramas. Once again the Polish resistance clashed with German stormtroopers and was instantly overwhelmed, in a convincing firefight. And Bowker’s dialogue glitters. Cynical small-time crook Tom warned his sister Lois: ‘A bloke isn’t going to say he loves you more than once, not unless he’s feeling guilty.’
With such pithy writing, World On Fire promises to become a haunting portrait of World War II’s opening months.
It just needs to get a move on.