‘I would be terrible at this!': inside the fiendish TV guessing game whose players have no idea where they are

The Guardian

a day ago

Outside a cinema in east London sits an absolute beast of a bus. It is jet black from wheel wells to roof, the windows are obscured by metal plates and it is so massive rock stars might kip in it prior to hopping on stage and yelling: 'Hello Milton Keynes!' Essentially, it looks like a gothic Megabus commissioned by Alice Cooper. It does, however, have one key design flaw: it's impossible to see out of. Once you're inside, you will have no idea where you are going.
For the next five weeks, expect to see a lot of this vehicle. It's the star of the BBC's latest big reality series, Destination X. Based on a Belgian hit, it sees 13 contestants ferried around Europe in total ignorance of their location, with the worst at identifying it being eliminated. Viewers are encouraged to guess along as its OTT challenges see contestants locked in boxes in village squares, peeping through a tiny window to work out where they are, or being whisked up a snow-topped mountain and made to hunt for clues while dangling from a rope 2,000 metres above sea level. Given that they spend an entire month living and sleeping on a coach together, there are points where cabin fever-ravaged contestants become so suspicious of each other that heated arguments flare up. It is, essentially, The Traitors meets Race Across the World – hosted by Rob Brydon.
Today, I am its newest contestant. For the next couple of hours, I will be joining Brydon and a handful of other first-time players onboard the 'X bus' for a whistlestop blind tour of London following a quick screening of the show at Hoxton's Curzon cinema. While this may lack the scale of a pan-European jaunt, the crew's commitment to realism means that they have painstakingly recreated the kind of temperatures you'd expect from a summer in southern Spain. Well, that or the air-conditioning is broken.
'Bloody hell! Is it hot enough in here?' exclaims Brydon as he gets on the bus. He takes a moment to remove his navy blazer and mop his brow, before leaping straight back into presenting mode.
'The clues are there!' he announces as the coach rumbles to life and we drive off to the sound of the most Rob Brydon thing imaginable – an impression of a TV star whose best-known work came before the 1990s. 'As David Frost used to say, the clues are there as we go through the keyhole …'
Exactly how you play this game is a mystery. It seems really quite random. But there's one thing that is obvious from even a quick watch: you need your wits about you, because this is one devious TV show. The first episode opens with the contestants waiting in a packed German airport. But all the other passengers are actors. The check-in staff are fake. It is littered with details that the unknowing participants will shortly be tested on in a game they have to survive to avoid being kicked off the show – from fake couples loudly arguing about the allowable weight of luggage to names read out over the PA system. Before the passengers are even allowed on the bus, they're stuffed into a helicopter, blindfolded and disorientated by being flown around for an hour. Hopefully, they didn't come up with this idea based on the fact that the East German Stasi used the same tactic with political prisoners being driven to jail.
But there is sneakiness here that even the Stasi didn't think of: to make contestants think they have landed in the same place as they took off, they employ three sets of identical twins as fake airport staff. One set are in the original location, the second at the landing site. All the contestants need to do to figure it out is read the microscopic names on their identity badges.
'That is the nuts!' chuckles the executive producer Dan Adamson. 'We just thought: wouldn't it be funny?'
Very sly. But while they go to extreme lengths to confuse the contestants, presumably they don't deliberately make them think they're in completely the wrong place? For example, at one point in Destination X's first episode we're shown a teaser of a screen being driven up alongside the bus as it barrels down the road, and playing a video through the window. That's not an attempt to show fake scenery, is it? 'No, we're showing them a clue,' says Adamson. So we can trust what we're shown through this bus's windows should they open?
'We don't have the budget to CGI,' says Brydon. 'Otherwise I would have been a bit taller!'
As if on cue, the bus window pops open. We're crossing the Thames on Tower Bridge! Well, hopefully I can trust that. Not that it is particularly useful info. How on earth do you do this?
'We had players who would try to track the sun,' says Adamson. 'We had one player who every time we went in a tunnel would count to see how long it was. They were trying to work out the speed and the distance of the coach. And they would react to weather, you know: it's getting warmer, it's getting colder …'
'I would be terrible at this,' says Brydon. 'If I saw the sun, that would tell me it's daytime.'
The more you hear about the show, the harder it is not to be blown away by the logistics involved. The sheer number of staff and kit meant that, according to Adamson, they had to travel in a convoy of about 50 vehicles, all of which did 11,000km in 32 days, before the 190 staff retired to one of the 7,000 hotel rooms they booked during the shoot. Every piece of food or drink had to be removed from its packaging and put in an unmarked container. To give contestants a fresh air 'safe zone' after a journey, they'd park other coaches alongside the bus to create a four-walled square, top it with a camo net to prevent them seeing out and install a carpet and running machine. When Brydon arrived on location, he said the sheer scale meant it was often like they had 'built a new town'.
It is, however, hard not to wonder: is this the most environmentally responsible way to make a TV show? At this point in our race towards climate catastrophe, isn't it in poor taste to pump 11,000km worth of vehicle emissions into the atmosphere – particularly given that it comes from the channel behind The Traitors, who know only too well how to create astonishingly addictive TV while barely leaving one building?
According to the BBC, 'Destination X is certified by Bafta Albert, which encourages sustainable TV and film production, confirming that consideration of carbon emission reduction was given throughout the production.' They point out to me that they had a 'carbon action plan' whose measures included crew taking big minibuses to reduce the number of vehicles and minimising the diesel generators used – meaning they were certified two out of a possible three stars by Albert. The coaches were also not petrol, but Euro 6 diesel engines. So choosing to do all these miles is less an issue with the climate crisis, and more one of the air quality local kids breathed.
Talking of air quality, that presented its own challenge for the contestants cooped up on a coach together. 'We set ourselves one rule: no number twos on the bus. That gave us a problem. Suddenly it was like: why do these people have to go to the toilet so often?' says Adamson of the fact that they had to pull the coach over every time anyone needed to go.
'Everyone had to be really open about it – you couldn't be discreet. You'd be blindfolded, chaperoned, have someone waiting outside while you did your business … I can't believe how much time we spent talking about toilets.'
At this point, Big Ben starts chiming. For a brief moment I can't work out whether it's real or coming over the coach's sound system, until I look at my watch and realise it's 2.12pm – not a usual time for a clock to chime.
'He shouldn't have been allowed his watch!' exclaims Brydon.
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'On the original Belgian format, they had a clock on the bus that they controlled the speed of, and they would slow it down,' says Adamson. 'But we decided not to do that, because it was a little too machiavellian.'
'You know what they did have on that bus, though?' shoots back Brydon. 'Very good air con.'
Over the course of the next hour, the windows pop open again, only to reveal that we are once more crossing the Thames, this time on London Bridge, now going north. Production staff repeatedly insist that there are clues all over the bus even though all I can see are a couple of half-inched boxes of popcorn and some flyers from the Curzon, plus a few bags of rapidly melting mini Wispas.
'Is it worth mentioning to the driver that the air conditioning is ineffectual?' asks a reddening Brydon. 'We're all sitting here like lobsters in a pot.'
By now, he's looking a tad dishevelled. Which is a shame, because one of the most fun things about Destination X is Brydon going all flamboyant with his sartorial choices: from dressing like an airline captain to checked blazers that wouldn't look out of place on Toad from The Wind in the Willows to a moment he turns up dressed as Indiana Jones. 'I did look to Claudia Winkleman on The Traitors,' he says. 'I've gone for it!'
At this point, the coach grinds to a halt. We're ushered to a recreation of 'the map room': the cubbyhole that contestants use to make their guess by placing an X on a digital map. They normally get two minutes – I'm given one. Bearing in mind the Big Ben bells we were played, I try to scroll across the map to find where Big Ben's bell was created: Whitechapel Bell Foundry. But I can't find it on the map. So as I run out of time, I go for plan B: Westminster, home of Big Ben.
'The person whose guess was furthest from the location is …' announces one of the show's producers, once we've all placed our X, '… Alexi!'
Great. Last place. If this were the actual show, I'd have been booted off the coach at a random European destination. But as I step off the X bus, I find that we are … back at the Curzon cinema where we started. Exactly what sort of clues were meant to tip us off to that being our destination?
'Didn't you see the tubs of Curzon popcorn and Curzon flyers?'
I thought they'd been nicked from the cinema!
'There were fake tickets hidden in the cushions as well if you looked.'
Brilliant. Clearly, I'd be terrible at the show. But it's not like I missed out on much.
'The prize?' I hear Adamson reply. 'Oh yeah, it's excellent … have a bag of melted Wispas.'
Destination X is on BBC One on Wednesday and Thursday at 9pm.