With niceness in short global supply, a little bit on TV can go a long way. Reality competitions thrive on it: a large part of the joy of The Great British Bake Off, say, or The Great British Sewing Bee, or the one where people make clay pots, is watching nice people do nice things. Apart from that time when Sky History accidentally let someone with neo-Nazi tattoos on to a woodworking competition and the whole thing had to be binned, the producers of a certain type of reality show are usually pretty good at casting the right type of participant: earnest, self-deprecating, amusingly eccentric.
Race Across the World replaced arts and crafts with overseas travel, but it was another show where the pleasantness of the personnel was as important as the activity they did – and the BBC Two hit is a big influence on Channel 4’s new nice-reality effort, Worlds Apart. Another distant starting point, this time Tokyo, is the place where we once again meet pairs of contestants who will work in tandem to try to win a cash prize. The first twist here is that they’re strangers, not friends or relatives. The second is that each duo has a huge age gap: the younger member is mid-20s at most, while the elder is late 60s at least. The young people have never or rarely been abroad, while the older ones’ life situations had made them think they would never globetrot again.
