Pale, male, stale and clueless: why we should send travel TV presenters into exile

In spring this year, comedian Michael Spicer tweeted a clip that went viral. Seemingly a trailer for a new travel documentary, it showed Spicer ambling around the British Isles making inane observations about trees, marvelling at unremarkable art, and churning out cliches to camera before concluding: “I am a famous, white, middle-aged man and I can make whatever tedious programmes I want.” Satire, but given the risible nature of travel programmes today, it could easily have been real. With almost five million views, the clip threw up a serious question: why are commissioning editors insulting us with these shows?

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched with ever-increasing blood pressure as travel and comedy have merged into one lazy hybrid in which a self-regarding celebrity drags a reluctant friend or parent to a foreign land with funny-looking people and funnier food, and embarks upon a puerile mission to embrace the natives and discover something about themselves – usually very little – while eating grilled scorpions and gatecrashing a stranger’s wedding before flying home.

Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant found a winning formula with Karl Pilkington owing to the extreme nature of his hatred for travel. A caricature, Pilkington embodied the insular little Briton who packs crisps and PG Tips into his rucksack, making him ripe for mockery, the idiot we’ve all seen abroad. But now a disdain for travel has morphed into a genre of its own, with actor Eugene Levy set to front an Apple TV+ series The Reluctant Traveller, which came about after Levy rejected the offer to present a travel show. The producer leapt on his aversion to travel as the selling point. Levy “joins the pantheon of bumbling blokes exploring the world”, said Esquire, noting his “affectionate grumble” through the show in which he’s asked to stay at the Gritti Palace in Venice, trample through a rainforest in Costa Rica and drive a dogsled across a frozen lake in Finland. Oh, the hardship.

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I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to tune in from my modest abode in north London to watch a celebrity sitting on the edge of a bed at a Hilton in Bangkok, eating a bag of Monster Munch and moaning about the heat – hammed up or otherwise. I want to listen to a presenter who is thrilled to be in a different country, someone grateful for the opportunity to share their knowledge and expertise. Armchair travellers want to feel a presenter’s excitement radiating in 4k as they meet the oldest geisha in Kanazawa, explain the origins of Kathak dancing in Uttar Pradesh or walk into a baijiu cocktail bar in Beijing. Travel shows need experts to make them a success, yet for some unknown reason travel is the only genre in television that isn’t taken seriously, with a real lack of specialists being chosen to front documentaries. I wouldn’t expect Peter Kay to present a programme on the Tudors any more than I’d expect Ant and Dec to front Frozen Planet, so why does travel get the short straw?

However, it’s not only inexperienced white men who reveal their own prejudices when presenting shows on destinations they’re unfamiliar with; white women can be just as guilty. In her Japan series, Sue Perkins describes Tokyo as “otherworldly” and “alien”. Alien? To her, maybe. But no more so than London would look to a Japanese tourist on their first trip. In Travelling Blind, comedian Sara Pascoe is tasked with leading blind traveller Amar Latif through Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar and remarks to him: “That’s just a weird woman shouting on her phone.” Weird? Why is she “weird”? Because she’s Turkish? A Japan expert would have seen beyond the cat cafes and neon lights, just as a Turkish expert would perhaps have translated what the woman on the phone was actually shouting.

A presenter’s role is to bridge the gap between the audience and the subject, not perpetuate the idea of “them” and “us”. Viewers who aren’t regular travellers may harbour reservations about other countries and their people, and mockery may only deepen prejudices and firm up fears of the unknown. Brown and Black presenters with insider knowledge of a country would naturally sidestep those pitfalls.

The other tired old format is the ex-army bore who fancies himself as a modern-day Shackleton, striding across faraway lands in a linen shirt, hoping to bring back news. To my mind, this has more than a whiff of colonialism about it.

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As an author of three books on global rail travel – currently working on my fourth – I’m partial to a railway documentary or two, but I’ve lost track of the number of series presented by middle-aged white men: Chris Tarrant, Michael Portillo, Ian Hislop, Tony Robinson, Bill Nighy, John Sergeant, Nick Knowles... The list goes on. Portillo aside, who seems to have a geunine passion for and knowledge about train travel, the problem with this line-up is not simply a lack of expertise – most of their insights are available on Google – but that an audience is viewing the experience of global rail travel through one prism. I meet single young women on trains all the time and our experiences of boarding at night, dining alone and sleeping in mixed carriages are far more complex than those we see portrayed on TV.

Both Ade Adepitan and Amar Latif have been welcome additions to our screens, offering refreshing perspectives on travelling as a wheelchair user or a blind person in BBC Two’s Africa with Ade Adepitan and Travelling Blind respectively. But we need a far greater array of presenters – and far less of the stale, male and pale – if we truly want to see the world around us portrayed in all its dazzling diversity.