Bristolian Luke Grenfell-Shaw, a keen cyclist and runner, was barely out of university and looking forward to a life of rugged adventure and sporting challenges when he discovered he had a rare form of cancer that had already metastasised to his lungs. His stage four diagnosis looked especially grim, with mutterings that he might only have months to live. But this galvanised Luke to decide to travel from Bristol to Beijing on a tandem bicycle, should he go into remission. Lo and behold, that’s just what happened, sort of, with a film crew in tow and a variety of friends and family members popping in at various points along the way to help with the cycling on the back of the bike.
Naturally, there are drama-generating hiccups to contend with, such as the Covid-19 pandemic breaking out; this meant getting into a very locked-down China at the end was tricky. On top of that, it’s revealed that Luke has a tetchy relationship with his mother, Jenny, passive-aggressive in both directions judging by what little we see. She keeps coming out to meet him in various countries to help with the cycling but over and over again, the two of them get into intense sotto voce snits with one another over careless words of criticism. It’s mentioned but quickly passed over that Luke’s dad left Jenny for another woman who promptly got pregnant, so there’s a whole other melodrama going on around the fringes of the story, semi-separate from person-with-cancer-triumphs-over-adversity main narrative.
