The age of the distinguished, insightful travelogue is over – now it's all idiots abroad

Telegraph

5 hours ago

Whether it's Joe Lycett knocking back Swedish firewater made of beaver glands in Channel 4's Travel Man: 48 Hours in...; Gino D'Acampo setting fire to his deodorant spray and skinny dipping ('look: free willy!') his way through Italy in ITV's Gordon, Gino and Fred: Road Trip; or Sue Perkins smirking while snacking on giant croissants and pan-fried crickets in Sue Perkins' Big Adventure: Paris to Istanbul (also Channel 4), you might have been struck by something about recent TV travel documentaries: namely, their lack of the je ne sais quoi that marked the heyday of travel-documentary oeuvre.
The Seventies saw Alan Whicker hanging out with the Sultan of Brunei and the super-rich recluses of the South Pacific islands, all sardonic wit and (whatever the climate) his signature tailored suit.
The Eighties and Nineties, of course, gave us the affable Michael Palin, bringing to life the architectural wonders of Timbuktu and the Tuareg caravan travellers of the Sahara Desert.
In the 2010s we moseyed along the River Nile and the Trans-Siberian Railway from Russia to Mongolia and China with plummy national treasure Dame Joanna Lumley.
Not a shot of snake's blood or gratuitous nude between them.
Veteran American travel writer Rick Steves, 70, recently weighed in on the debate around the current crop of dumbed-down travel programming, noting that TV travel shows and YouTubers baiting clicks with 'grossout' foreign food and whizzing through world bucket lists are problematic for the destinations that are featured. Such programming, Steves argues, peddles the 'superficial aspects of travel and tourist traps' as it 'exaggerates a destination's potential dangers for comedic effect' ('don't drink the toilet water, guys – phnarr, phnarr!').
Seasoned travel head Noel Josephides, aged 77, chairman of tour operator Sunvil, also laments the loss of the golden days of linear television from the Seventies to Nineties, when travel shows were 'serious and their presenters were respected' by both the public and travel industry.
'I used to watch Michael Palin, Wish You Were Here…? on ITV, and the Holiday programme on BBC religiously, and if a destination was mentioned [Sunvil] could fill a whole season with bookings,' he recalls. These days, he notes, none of these things are true. 'Everything has been dumbed down and it's more about the presenter than the destination,' he complains.
Former TV commissioner Gillian Crawley tells me that she believes 'celebs with no insight' should be removed from TV travel scheduling altogether, including actors such as Palin and Lumley and today's C-list crop.
'I used to wonder why I was sending someone from Corrie to Borneo to look at the orangutans because [the actor] was pretending to be an eco-warrior at the time,' she recalls.
Instead, Crawley rates presenters with a depth of knowledge and a 'critical eye', such as Sir David Attenborough and Dame Mary Beard. 'Even Michael Portillo is better than some of the current crop,' she says of the politician turned rail presenter, 'as he at least does like trains.'
She concludes: 'It doesn't matter whether someone is posh or not posh – they're just slebs with no special insight and they can pay for their own holidays.'
However, Kylie Bawden, who has worked as a location arranger on shows including Ainsley's Caribbean Kitchen and Joe Lycett's Travel Man: 48hrs in Washington, DC disagrees with the idea that travel TV has been dumbed down. The more intimate onus of today's travel TV, she says, is as much down to social media and consumer demand as it is an erosion of standards.
'Viewers have access to celebrities via social media that was never possible in the Palin days,' she tells me. 'Today's audiences want something more light-hearted than before, but they also want to feel like there's a real possibility that they could replicate the experiences they are watching on TV. So, less crossing the Sahara desert in a camel caravan and more the best speakeasies in Washington or where to go to experience trad pub music in Ireland.'
'Parasociality', or the trend of viewers and listeners wanting to feel as if they are personal friends of the celebrities they follow, is – it seems – partly to blame. Bawden adds that destinations are often more than happy to roll the red carpet out for Lycett, Perkins et al with a view to the audience booking a holiday inspired by TV. 'Set-jetting [viewers travelling to destinations they have seen on TV] really drives bookings in the 2020s,' Bawden argues.
Gavin Bate, director and mountain leader at tour company Adventure Alternative, corroborates this link between TV appearances and booking spikes: 'When the Comic Relief celebrity team climbed Kilimanjaro and the BBC aired the programme on a Sunday night, we got loads of Kilimanjaro bookings the following morning,' he explains.
'And any kind of wildlife programme, especially the Attenborough ones, will result in people booking more wildlife holidays – especially to see endangered species like the clouded leopard in Borneo.'
James Willcox, founder of Untamed Borders, takes it a step further, believing that 'we are more likely these days to see bookings driven by the antics of travel YouTubers and Instagrammers than traditional travel documentaries'.
One thing's for certain: the era of the patrician broadcaster showing viewers destinations they can never hope to reach has lost favour, and in its place we have the pally 'everyman' and 'everywoman' travelogue, with their smorgasbord of tick-list travel experiences.
And yet, there are some antidotes to this phenomenon – in the gritty Channel 4 shows of ex-Army officer Levison Wood, for example, who slogs through inhospitable terrains from Siberia to the elephant migration routes of Burundi, and in Simon Reeve's various odysseys, in which he combines a diffident everyman approach (that appeals to the 2020s viewer) with thoughtful explorations of remote locations and communities.
Wood is back with a show later in 2025 and Reeve is currently on BBC 2, exploring 'Arctic tundra, vast forests and stunning fjords in Scandinavia with Simon Reeve.
'I am very relieved Simon Reeves is back on with his Scandinavia series,' vlogger Emma Reed, who is based in Hampshire, tells me. 'Comedians on tour or hapless celeb father/son jaunts are becoming sooo tedious.'
I'll raise a shot of snake's blood to that.