Travel Documentaries - leading the way to a necessary future in virtual tourism?

Annabelle Hawes asks how travel documentaries can both help and hinder the environment.

By Annabelle Hawes

It’s 2010. Copenhagen has come and gone, and the green issue hangs ever more incumbent over the policies of our world’s leaders. In our time of globalisation, increased air travel and higher gas-guzzling, plans to reduce carbon footprints may well seem powerless to halt the destruction of our contemporary lifestyles. Widespread families will continue to travel the vast distances to visit expatriate relatives living out in Australia. Couples with kids and a bit of cash on them will continue to jet off to the latest exotic destination on summer breaks. And who’s to deny them the spoils of a technologically advanced and global society?

Certainly not television. Since the likes of Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days, foreign travel has not only looked attractive, it’s been outright encouraged. A tradition of travel programmes such as BBC’s Holiday and ITV’s Wish You Were Here…? have made their mark on British screens, seducing the public with picturesque visions of palm beaches off the Hawaiian coast and luxurious shopping exploits in Dubai. Even for holidaymakers on string-tight budgets, advice and enthusiasm from such programmes encourage viewers to chew up the scenery in places ranging from St. Lucia to Singapore. If you want to do it, do it, is the motto from our presenters – more recently, Channel 4’s popular Indian Winter season started again on 20th January, with a special series of reports and features from across India.

Yet, what real cost to the planet does such mass travelling entail? Is it right that televisi

on should promote foreign travel in such a way that has seen the number of planes in our skies double in the past decade? There is, of course, another side to the argument. While television could be blamed for encouraging us to leap out of sofas and plan the next great escape to St Mauritius, it could equally, perhaps, be blamed for encouraging us to stay in, and view the spectacular sights from the box. Travel documentaries, such as Palin’s, take us on global journeys and exploits we are unlikely to encounter – or perhaps would wish to experience – while on our own exotic holidays. True, such vicarious experiences are certainly less intimate and meaningful than the real thing would be, but for sheer informative and entertainment factor, there’s little to beat A-list celebrity Ewan McGregor and Charlie Boorman being aggressively massaged by locals at a spa in Kazakhstan.

Sky One’s Long Way Round, which narrates a series of motorcycle escapades from London to New York, kept audiences glued to their seats during its 2004-2005 run – and that wasn’t for its presenter’s Hollywood credentials. The incredulous exploits of the boys in such far reaching lands as Mongolia and the Russian Steppe, provided a window onto another land, another culture, rarely, if ever, experienced by the average Brit. Although the smells and tastes of Latvian cuisine weren’t forthcoming, sympathetic participation with the presenters, coupled with the sights and sounds captured by camera, allowed for a truly immersive experience – or at least the closest one can get – on the wrong side of the Channel. If anything else, for those unable to travel conventionally, it was a cheap and more environmentally friendly alternative!

With globalisation allowing crews to push into even more remote corners of the world, the range of travel documentaries have become even more daring in scope – check out BBC Tribe’s Bruce Parry tripping out on iboga, a hallucinogen, native to western Central Africa in an initiation ceremony of the Sanema people. Yet more fascinating footage, no doubt, waits to be filmed.  In days to come, one looking atavistically might welcome such an archive. Let’s imagine, if you will, a future wherein we have exhausted our fossil fuel supplies. International travel has become scarce, if not ceased altogether. People are once more isolated within small land-locked communities. Yet a global society still exists through the means of the internet - a virtual network of social hubbub and communication. A need for travel – for mutual cultural recognition and understanding remains as necessary and relevant, if not more so, than in our present day. Whereas in our age, television encourages tourism, perhaps in decades to come, it will serve as the sole means of experiencing the wonders of the world through a ‘virtual’ tourism. It may also serve as a necessary filmic reminder of a world and cultures we have lost.