On paper, it sounds like a dreadful idea: take four celebrities, with a partner apiece, put them in some old cars and let them race each other on dangerous jungle roads until Martin Kemp ends up in hospital. There is also a part of me that immediately says: “Yeah, I’d watch that.” So I did.
Much of the pre-publicity that Eight Go Rallying: The Road to Saigon (BBC Two) received was down to one participant, Noel Edmonds, slagging off the whole enterprise as fakery. His complaint might have had more merit if it had been his first time on television.
The programme was open about all the behind-the-scenes trickery involved in not killing famous people. There was a real endurance rally taking place – 1,900 miles from Chiang Mai in Thailand to Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, in Vietnam – but the celebrity pairs were merely camp followers, competing for their own made-up trophy. There was obviously a huge support team on hand and their services were frequently required. When Miquita Oliver’s mum, Andi, got too tired to drive (Miquita was no help; she failed her test), their car was put on a low-loader and a taxi was called.
It may have amounted to a gap-year trek on wheels, but at least the cars were genuinely ill-suited to the task: Mr and Mrs Edmonds were given a classic MGB GT; Martin and Shirlie Kemp got a 1972 Mini; the musicians Tinchy Stryder and Jordan Stephens piloted a Hillman Imp; the Olivers a ’59 Morris Minor. The teams were obliged to navigate with a Tulip map – which uses balls and arrows to guide the user – and therefore spent much of the initial leg driving in circles and bickering. Imagine the first half hour of your holiday, just after you leave the airport car park, and you are pretty much there.
That is not to say there was no drama or that it was all contrived. Not far out of Chiang Mai, Tinchy and Jordan destroyed their Hillman’s engine on a steep mountain road. The Kemps rolled their Mini during a time trial, leaving Martin trapped inside (he escaped with a bruised hand). By the close of the second day, half the teams were consigned to completing the next leg by minibus.
If Eight Go Rallying sounds like something Alan Partridge would come up with, we can thank Noel for providing a glimpse of how such a commission might have panned out. He was a fountain of Partridgisms. “Guilty as charged, I’m a competitive person,” he said at one point. “I think my track record in the highly competitive world of broadcasting suggests I’m a competitive person.” And he actually wears driving gloves.
In the end, there was plenty of drama, mainly involving Noel slowly realising he was the only one taking the rally part seriously. “What we have to remember is that this is not a race,” he told his wife, Liz. “It’s an experience, which we have to win.” I stand by my assessment: yeah, I’d watch that.
Supercars, Superfam (BBC Two) is a sort of bite-size reality soap about brothers Kash and Shabs, who run a successful high-end supercar-customising business and who also still live with their parents, even though Kash has been married for three years and has two kids. They seem to earn a good living; between them, they own a lot of expensive motors.
There is a good story to be told here, maybe even several good ones: Shabs getting cold feet about his arranged marriage; Kash being challenged to a drag race by a rival; their sister Mari working as a “modest model”. But the brief episodes (12 minutes long) spend a lot of time reviewing the past and telegraphing the future, while never bothering to alight on anything for long. It looks like a trailer for itself and it is filmed as if the cameraman had accepted a dare to spend the shoot standing on one leg.
Explanatory graphics zip by in a bid to stitch one scene to the next, but every episode seems to be fast-forwarding towards an important moment that never arrives. It is not that I am not interested – I am fascinated. I just wish it would sit still long enough for me to watch it.
