How Race Across the World's jobs really work

Yahoo

29-04-2025

Jobs on Race Across the World play an important role in the BBC show.
The contestants must earn cash along the way otherwise they risk running out of money and being out of the race. Over the course of five series, there have been some bizarre but cool jobs including duck herding in Thailand.
This year sisters Elizabeth and Letitia, brothers Melvyn and Brian, former married couple Yin and Gaz, teenage couple Fin and Sioned as well as mother and son duo Caroline and Tom are racing to get to the finish line first in Kanyakumari, India. They were given the lowest budget in the show's history with just more than £1,000 per person at the starting line at The Great Wall of China.
The BBC have said the five teams are given a travel guide with local job ads so they could top up their cash throughout the journey.
BBC commissioner Michael Jochnowitz has said all of the jobs are real. Where the contestants are banned from using their phones, they make the jobs accessible in a guide pamphlet.
He told The Radio Times in 2023: "We don't create any job opportunities. We don't go to any of those places and say, 'For the purposes of the show, can you provide this kind of service?'
"Those are real jobs, real places, real money or accommodation and things like that so again, because they don't have access to a phone or the internet, we basically just give them a guide of potential opportunities in the area."
Executive producer Mark Saben added in the same interview: "We use as a rule of thumb, it's like what you'd find on a board in a hostel or something like that so we want [it] to feel absolutely as authentic as it possibly can be."
Former 2024 winner Alfie Watts also gave some insight into how the jobs really work behind the scenes of the BBC show recently.
Speaking on YouTube in video titled 'Rigged or real? The reality of Race Across the World', Alfie explained: "That's the only TV part of the whole process. It's not that they're not real jobs, of course they are. They're job listings. Just think.
"Are we going to get full working visas to go to Malaysia to earn £25 sweeping up a kitchen? Just think, it's a TV show. It's on BBC. That's what I'd say. It's meant to be fun and exciting. Sometimes you need to have that are there as part of TV. The jobs are one of those things."
The first leaving the checkpoint hotel get the choice of the jobs for the RATW route, according to the former winner.
Alfie added on his YouTube video: "You're not allowed to (choose the same jobs). Production organise the jobs. The first one to leave can have the first dibs on the job. Not everyone can do the same job. That is how the different routes appear. It's cleverly manufactured, again not set up. But probably manufactured.
"Because they will choose jobs at different ends of the country. If you want to do a job and earn money, which let's face it, in Race Across the World you need to do or you run out of money. Then you will end up at different ends of the country to each other. That's where you get to do your sightseeing as well. If you don't want to work, that's fine but it's a terrible idea."
There have been controversies and even fury on social media over the jobs in RATW.
The most recent example is in the celebrity edition. Celebrity Race Across the World winners Scott Mills and Sam Vaughan faced the heat over being paid £72 to sell hot dogs in the final which seemed like a lot to viewers at home.
They raced from Belém, Northern Brazil — the gateway to the Amazon — through five checkpoints across the length of South America to the Andes, Frutillar in Southern Chile. Their biggest Celebrity Race Across the World fear of running out of money almost came true.
In a risky move before the final checkpoint, they stopped to complete a job making hot dogs topped with chopped tomatoes, avocados and mayonnaise. They boosted their budget with a healthy £72.92. It's thought this decision making won them the title of Celebrity RATW winners.
Some viewers, however, were skeptical because the jobs had been lowly paid throughout the series. Mills told Yahoo UK in our exclusive winners' interview last year: "You didn't see it on the television but we were there for hours."
Of being paid the big sum of cash, Mills also said: "It is true. I don't know why we got that [amount] but we did."
However, Vaughan had an explanation as to why they were paid so much on the job. He said: "Because that part of the country is affluent and everything. It's all relative, all the jobs that you can do are on a similar par on what you achieve. So it's not as if we pick that." Mills also said Chile was "expensive".
RATW fans know the frontrunners in series one were unable to pay to get to the checkpoint.
Race Across the World continues at 9pm on BBC One on Wednesday.