Race Across the World stars reunite including eliminated Yin and Gaz
Race Across the World's cast are reunited in full for the first time since the BBC show ended.
Fun first look pictures reveal the friends enjoying a catch up six months after undertaking the race of a lifetime. Race Across the World was filmed over eight weeks from October until December last year, with the winners of £20,000 kept secret. It has played out on our screens over eight one-hour episodes.
Six months later a one-hour catch up was filmed, including behind-the-scenes insights and unseen moments from the BBC show. Race Across the World: The Reunion will air on BBC One at 9pm on Wednesday, 18 June.
It captures the first time the five teams — including eliminated pair Yin and Gaz — have had the chance to get together again. The eliminated couple find out how the rest of the teams — sisters Elizabeth and Letitia, mother and son Caroline and Tom, brothers Melvyn and Brian as well as couple Fin and Sioned — have done in the race for the first time.
The Reunion is a celebration of their Race Across the World journeys where all the contestants have the chance to reflect on the race. They covered ground across China before the final four teams went onto travel into Nepal and India.
There is plenty for the stars to catch up on. Regardless of the £20,000 prize money, the race has changed the lives of the stars. Yin tells Yahoo UK she has had the chance to move out of Gaz's house. Sioned and Fin tell Yahoo UK that they had the chance to travel to Australia while Elizabeth and Letitia say they have been to Kenya. Brian and Melvyn tell Yahoo UK that they talk everyday now. Caroline and Tom tell Yahoo UK of their plans to do a mini Race Across the World in Kazakhstan with only the rucksacks on their backs.
In the reunion show, the stars look back on their journeys and how they were forced out of their comfort zones. They reminisce too over the beauty of the landscapes they witnessed as well as the harsh realities of being on the road. Race Across the World: The Reunion will allow viewers one last intimate look at the epic journey and how it's impacted their lives as well as their relationships.
From behind the scenes, Brian revealed how all the teams speak on their Whatsapp group. Before having the chance to film the reunion, he told Yahoo UK: "Yeah [we have a] big WhatsApp group, we speak daily. We are trying to meet up if we can but it's quite difficult to get everybody together. It is tough."
In a stark contrast to the BBC show being filmed across Asia's three most diverse nations, the contestants made the journey to London to film the reunion.
It's still a big journey for some of the contestants like Fin and Sioned who have to travel from Nantgaredig, a small village in Carmarthenshire, Wales to the capital. That's a six-hour train journey, although nowhere near as tough as some of the travels they faced on Race Across the World.
Of course, for the reunion, the teams left their heavy rucksacks at home (and Melvyn's wheelie case too).
The contestants all met at a fancy hotel, not unlike some of the impressive checkpoint hotels they visit along the way on Race Across the World. The table was set for their visit and decorated with beautiful blooms in white, apricot and fuchsia pink.
Race Across the World is available to stream on BBC iPlayer.
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But he spaced on the second verse of 'I Just Wasn't Made for These Times' — he just lost his place, chuckled, and said, 'Oh, I forgot the words.' The crowd just sang it for him until he figured out where to come in for the chorus. This could have been a sad or pitiful moment; instead, it was suffused with warmth. The communal gratitude we felt at singing his song back to him was so powerful, just like the tangible joy he felt hearing us, especially when he came in right on time to sing, 'What's it all about?' That's a moment I'll never forget. But Brian Wilson gave us a whole lifetime of those moments. As the great critic Tom Carson once wrote, Brian's eternal dream was to put his 'I Get Around' and 'In My Room' in the same song. It was an impossible struggle, but for a boy abused and despised by his tyrannical father, who kept beating him well into adulthood, music was his only way to connect to the world. His influence goes everywhere, from Dr. Dre and Tupac quoting 'Surfin' U.S.A.' for Californ-I-A to Taylor Swift going onstage in L.A. on the Speak Now tour with a line written on her arm in Sharpie: 'Don't worry, baby, everything will turn out all right.' Pet Sounds is his archetypal masterpiece, putting all of his wounded romanticism in one album. He started writing it the morning after he first heard the Beatles' Rubber Soul — he woke up, went to his piano, and wrote 'God Only Knows.' He paid the price for messing with the formula — Pet Sounds flopped. For years, it was impossible to find a copy, strange as that sounds now. But it's become one of the world's most beloved classics, coming in at Number Two on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums As Brian said in his memoir, 'The last word of the album is no but the album is a big yes.' I interviewed Brian once, in the summer of 2000. He wasn't speaking to the press, but his wife, Melinda, hooked me up because she enjoyed a super-bitchy review I wrote of an idiotic TV miniseries called The Beach Boys: An American Family, an anti-Brian screed produced by John Stamos, presenting Mike Love as the real genius of the group. (There's a scene where his bandmates call Brian 'the Stalin of the studio.') Over the phone, I asked about 'Good Vibrations' — where did a song like that come from? 'God,' he told me. 'And Phil Spector. God, Phil Spector, and the Beach Boys all combined.' He got so excited, he paused to mute his TV — it was midafternoon, so he had The People's Court going full blast. But when he said, 'Hold on, let me turn the TV down,' I thought, hell yes, Brian is muting Judge Wapner. He told me about hearing 'Be My Baby' for the first time, on his car radio, and pulling over to the side of the road to cry. 'Good Vibrations' was his attempt to capture that same magic. 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'Til I Die' is especially haunting in the extended five-minute version from the essential Feel Flows box, with alternate lyrics. It's one of his most powerful creations — but Brian was pushing so far, he scared off his band as well as the fans. The Beach Boys' classic Sixties hits have never faded away, as he chronicled the life and death of the American dream. These were the songs that made the whole world dream of Californication, from the joyride of 'Fun, Fun, Fun' and 'Be True to Your School' to the moody gloom of 'In My Room.' The songs echo each other: 'Don't Worry Baby' and 'Shut Down' narrate the same hot-rod drag race, from different emotional angles. These remain his best-known tunes — the best of the many hit collections is Endless Summer, which became a surprise blockbuster in the 1970s, when the band thought time had passed them by. Every home had one — it seemed like Seventies moms and dads got issued Endless Summer in the maternity ward. But his melancholia was there from the beginning, as in 'The Lonely Sea,' a harrowing beach-goth ballad from 1963, on the Surfin' Safari LP. 'The lonely sea, it never stops for you or me,' Brian sings, warning his girl that she'll break his heart because she's just like the ocean. In the cheesy 1965 teen flick The Girls on the Beach, he crashes a surf party to croon 'The Lonely Sea' to the bikini bunnies — dude, what a buzzkill. You can definitely see why the Beach Boys didn't make more movies after this. Brian was always aiming for history. You could hear that in an early oddity like 'The Surfer Moon,' from 1963, where he's a rookie producer making his first stab at an old-school show-biz standard. (The orchestra might sound a little lost at the beach, but blame it all on the surfer moon.) 'Little Honda' is an ode to a two-wheeled muse — not a big motorcycle, just a groovy little motorbike. The song is so expertly built, every gear shift feels huge. Yo La Tengo's 1997 feedback-guitar version is one of the most loving Beach Boys tributes. Pet Sounds was his ultimate statement — but it didn't sell enough to pay the theremin bills. The album was a rarity for decades. (I was 22 before I was ever in the same room as a copy of Pet Sounds, in the attic of Rhymes Records in New Haven, and, yes, I remember everything about that cosmos-altering June afternoon, especially how 'That's Not Me' and 'I'm Waiting for the Day' were my first-listen faves.) It's still startling to hear — especially 'God Only Knows,' a tune everyone on Earth wishes they could sing, although these are high notes only angels or Carl Wilson could reach. Brian could have learned his lesson and started playing it safe — but needless to say, he didn't. Instead, he set out to make an even more experimental album. In April 1967, Brian appeared on the Leonard Bernstein TV special Inside Pop, sitting at his home piano to stun viewers with a solo premiere of a new song: 'Surf's Up,' an epic ballad from his upcoming Smile. Brian promised this magnum opus would top his ultimate rivals, the Beatles; he was shattered when the Fabs beat him into stores with Sgt. Pepper. Paul McCartney famously visited Brian in the studio, played 'She's Leaving Home' on the piano, and told him, 'You'd better hurry up!' But he couldn't even finish the album, suffering a meltdown and leaving a pile of outtakes. It's tragic that he didn't just release that one-take piano 'Surf's Up' — it would have been enough to establish the song as a classic. By the time the song came out in 1971, it was forgotten by all except the lucky few who'd caught it on TV. Smiley Smile became the homemade basement-tapes version of Smile, with spaced-out gems like the doo-wop seance 'With Me Tonight.' Wild Honey was a marvelous return to their trashy rock & roll roots, a 24-minute rush of garage-band kicks. But nobody bought this one either — Wild Honey became their worst seller to date. The boy genius was damaged goods. Now full-grown men with beards, the band made Sunflower a soulful adult statement for the new decade — so polished it's practically their Abbey Road. Sunflower came out on the last day of August 1970, Surf's Up almost exactly a year later, which must have seemed all wrong for the Beach Boys. But it's fitting because both albums are about moving on after the surf is gone, which is why both resonate today. Surf's Up finally unveiled the title song, along with spooked-out gems like 'Long Promised Road' and 'Til I Die.' They were the last great songs Brian would manage to complete for years. Brian became rock's most notorious lost boy in the 1970s, hiding in his mansion in a druggy haze, with the shades pulled down. As he later admitted, 'I was in bed in the early Seventies.' He wore a bathrobe behind the counter of his health-food shop, the Radiant Radish. (The high point for him: 'I learned to use a cash register.') But when he managed to focus on music, he could still bring it — as in 'Marcella,' a blast of Stones-y raunch about his favorite masseuse. He came through in 1977 with The Beach Boys Love You, a cult oddity prized by hardcore Brianistas. He sings painfully candid confessions in his rough (and often out-of-tune) voice, yet with all of his melodic sparkle. As he explained, 'I wrote some songs that were about how I felt in my thirties, the same way that Pet Sounds was about how I felt in my twenties.' He vents his adult loneliness in 'Airplane,' 'I Bet He's Nice,' and the bizarrely touching 'Johnny Carson,' where he's got no company except the late-night TV talk-show host. 'I Wanna Pick You Up' remains one of rock's loveliest fatherhood songs — even if it sounds like Dad could use some babysitting himself. The Eighties and Nineties were full of comeback efforts, with scattered not-bad results. But Brian was written off as a tragic burnout. In 1987, for Rolling Stone's 20th anniversary issue, he was asked a couple of questions he sang back in 1965's 'When I Grow Up (to Be a Man).' Did he dig the same things that turned him on as a kid? 'Laughing. I like to laugh.' And did he ever look back and wish he hadn't done what he did? 'Drugs,' he said quietly. 'I wish I hadn't taken them.' But he didn't imagine having any place in the public imagination. 'Not really an identity, no. Just a high voice. That's about it.' But that's why it was such a shock when he reemerged in the 2000s in a creative rebirth, finally making music worthy of his name again, onstage and in the studio. The 2001 TV special An All-Star Tribute to Brian Wilson served notice that he was back in shape. The whole four-hour concert was an unforgettable night of Brian worship: Paul Simon crooning 'Surfer Girl,' Elton John doing the twist with Billy Joel for 'Fun, Fun, Fun,' the Go-Gos bashing 'Little Honda,' David Crosby yowling, 'This is the worst trip I've ever been on.' But Brian stole the show, making a cold, rainy March night in NYC glow with the warmth of the sun. He even went back to the great doomed opus of his youth, Smile. It was rock's most legendary unfinished masterpiece, with outtakes assembled on the 2011 box The Smile Sessions. But the definitive Smile is his fully realized 2004 version, with Brian finally strong enough to do these songs justice, in his sublimely autumnal 'Cabin Essence' and 'Surf's Up.' It peaks with 'Wonderful,' a two-minute reverie about childhood, a fragile tune he'd never had the voice for until now. Once his most infamous defeat, Smile became one of the great artistic triumphs of his life. Good vibrations, indeed. He kept revisiting these songs for decades, always hearing the new stories they were telling as they evolved over time. 'Keep an Eye on Summer,' a deep cut from the 1964 throwaway LP Shut Down Volume 2, took on a whole new meaning when he sang it on his 1998 Imagination, ruminating on how time fades away. In a 2018 radio interview, Al Jardine summed up 'In My Room' beautifully: 'I assumed it was Brian Wilson's personal story about being secluded and lonely and feeling those feelings we all have.' He wrote the last of his classics with 'Summer's Gone,' his finale for the Beach Boys' 2012 reunion, That's Why God Made the Radio. It was a farewell to his lost brothers Carl and Dennis, but as he said, 'It was like 'Caroline, No' also, because I was thinking about younger versions of myself.' Brian sings about watching the waves, maybe on the same beach where he sang 'The Lonely Sea' decades ago. 'Old friends have gone, they've gone their separate ways,' he sings. 'Our dreams hold on for those who have more to say.' 'Summer's Gone' seems to sum up the whole Brian Wilson saga in five bittersweet minutes, transforming grief and solitude into timeless beauty. The damage of his early years could have destroyed him — yet he found a way to transform it into music that will be sung around the world as long as people can sing. His life could have been a horror story — he turned it into a love song. This is a heavy loss for anyone who loves music — it seems the more we talk about him, it only makes it worse to live without him. But let's talk about him. We're all lucky to share in the world he helped create in his music. He turned it into the kind of world where we belong. Good night and thank you, Brian Wilson. Surf's up, forever. 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