Long Way Home
Scandinavia With Simon Revve
Nick Knowles Big Adventure South America
It seemed rather odd when two of my favourite travel show hosts, both known for heading off to remote difficult to access locations, almost simultaneously came out with new series that stick to Western Europe. But when I thought about, it makes sense. Both Simon Reeve and Ewan McGregor (and his friend Charlie) are 20 years older from their first televised adventures, and the world is a much more dangerous place these days. Can you imagine riding a motorcycle across Russia now?
Long Way Home is the fourth in the Long Way series, wherein McGregor (and his friend Charlie) take long trips on motorcycles. This time they make a loop through Scandinavia, including a non-motorcycle leg far north to Svalbard, and circles through the Baltics, Switzerland, and France on the way back to the UK. Alas, this time they are not using the electric motorcycles they used in Long Way Down, instead riding some refurbished old hogs, but fortunately we almost never have to listen to the racket they make.
McGregor (and his friend Charlie) are genial hosts as they visit various sites, including a number of offbeat sports that are played only locally. This is much more a regular travel show than their earlier trips, but I still managed to enjoy Long Way Home in spite of the motorcycles.
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Scandinavia with Simon Reeves is a long way from his first series, Places That Don’t Exist, where he visited self-proclaimed countries like Somaliland and Nagorno-Karabakh using the entree of working for the BBC. This latest series consists of three episodes which cover all of Scandinavia, including Iceland and yes, Svalbard. As anyone familiar with Reeve would expect, he takes a harder line, using his keen eye for contractions. Yes, we visit plenty of entertaining people and locations, but for me the best parts are when he examines how militarized Norway, Sweden, and Finland are, in spite of their image, and when he looks at how the most liberal governments on the planet are dealing with the problems and promises caused by immigration into relatively homogeneous populations.
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I had seen Nick Knowles’ name any number of times, but always connected to trips like railway tours I wasn’t interested in. When I saw a series where he was visiting South America, I decided to give it a try.
Knowles takes three episodes to tour southern Chile and northeast Argentina. (Oddly, I had seen a number of locations he gets to in older series by both Reeve and McGregor (and his friend Charlie)). He does manage to visit interesting places and people, and seems game for trying just about anything, but Knowles in the end comes across as a sort of low rent Reeve without the political insights, underlined at one point when he comes out with once of Reeve’s favourite expressions, “Flipping heck”. (Note that this series seems to have been released under multiple titles, but they all have ‘Knowles’ and ‘South America’ in them.)
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Given their age, and that McGregor’s friend Charlie has pretty well destroyed his body through multiple crashes, I doubt the duo will make any more Long Way series, unless it’s a tour of the local county around McGragor’s house in Scotland. I will watch for more from Reeve, and will give Knowles another chance if he goes somewhere I find interesting.
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