It’s like The Traitors meets Race Across the World, with contestants sent on a deliberately disorientating 175-mile helicopter ride – and then put onto a bus with no windows. And that’s before you consider the challenges …
It’s The Traitors on a bus! It’s Race Across the World in blindfolds! It’s the BBC’s new reality competition series, Destination X!
The premise is simple. A baker’s dozen of contestants assemble at Baden-Baden airport in Germany, from where they are transported via helicopter and a luxuriously appointed coach with blacked-out windows to various mysterious locations in Europe – one an episode – taking part in challenges en route to earn clues to help them work out where they are. At the end of each episode, the contestants enter the “map room” and indicate where they think they are by placing an X. The person who is least accurate is thrown under the bus. The overall winner will net £100,000.
The US version is presented by Jeffrey Dean Morgan – an unsettling choice for those of us who associate him inextricably with his grotesquely violent character in The Walking Dead, but perhaps Americans feel the need to be protected as they venture into the wilds of Europe in a way that, even post-Brexit, Britons do not. Whatever the reason, we have gone for a warmer, less armed-with-a-barbed-wire-wrapped-baseball-bat approach and given the gig to Rob Brydon, in an array of natty suits. “I’m actually Anton Du Beke,” he jokes.
