The BBC’s new reality competition Destination X combines The Traitors’ thrill of nice people lying to each other with the pressure-cooker intensity of travel show Race Across the World. As such, you’d be forgiven for imagining that the programme had escaped from a lab where scientists were trying to engineer the pinnacle of weeknight TV.
And if the first episode is anything to go by, Destination X is as good as its elevator pitch suggests. It’s presented by Rob Brydon, for god’s sake, on top form here as a kind of Alan Partridge/Claudia Winkleman hybrid. All this to say, despite a life-long aversion to organised fun and games, I have been won over by Destination X – and I suspect you will be, too.
Here’s the premise: 13 strangers embark on a coach trip through Europe, but clever headsets and blacked-out windows mean they don’t know where they’re heading. At the end of every episode, having digested various clues and red herrings, each contestant makes their best guess as to where they are by placing an X on a map. The furthest away is eliminated from the game, while the others continue in the hopes of eventually winning £100,000.
The contestants travel round in two buses – one for living and one for sleeping (Photo: Lara Shardlow/TwoFour/BBC)Got it? Good, because the way that information is drip-fed means that viewers can play along at home. And as Brydon explains to the players assembled in a faux airport lounge in Baden-Baden, even the smallest detail can be pivotal.
That might sound like helpful advice but it’s actually devious misdirection, perfectly calibrated to send the players’ antennae into counterproductive overdrive. After a blindfolded helicopter ride out of the airport, for instance, many congratulate themselves on surmising that they’ve simply flown in circles and arrived back in the same place. How can they tell? By recognising the ground staff from their take off at their landing, of course!
In fact, as Brydon reveals to viewers (but not players), the staff are sets of identical twins, and the helicopter has touched down 200km from where it started. And while that could put us in any one of five countries, luckily Brydon has a game up his sleeve to help pin things down – or more likely, confuse things further. Because while right answers are rewarded with clues, and wrong answers with decoys, there’s no knowing which is which.
61-year-old crime writer Deborah is the first to get a secret clue (Photo: Lara Shardlow/TwoFour/BBC)All this is fun in a tricksy, quizzy way, but even more so when it comes to human psychology. Much as The Traitors’ episodic challenges serve as an arena for alliances to form and interpersonal drama to start rumbling, so Destination X wields its structure to rattle those playing it. And because there’s no way of telling whose arguments hold water, dominant personalities quickly sway group opinion, nudging things evermore off course as one wrong assumption follows another.
What’s more, even correct data can be more hindrance than help. Given access to an extra clue that she can either refuse or look at and keep secret from the other players except one, 61-year-old crime writer Deborah from Lancashire decides to take endurance athlete Nick, 35, into her confidence. But while she looks at the clue, Nick confounds her plan by choosing not to and announcing as much to the other players. It’s all Deborah can do to look on, almost in tears but unable to voice why without risking elimination.
Sure enough, despite her special titbit, it’s Deborah who ends up placing her X furthest from the correct destination and is thereby eliminated at the end of the episode. Proof that it’s not the tools in your kit, but how you use them, that matters in this delightfully ruthless game – a new primetime staple, or I’ll eat my hut/hoed/chapeau.
’Destination X’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One
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