Destination X review — Traitors wannabe as iffy as Rob Brydon's blazer

Times

6 days ago

The first puzzling thing about BBC1's new game show Destination X (and there are quite a few) is why the host, Rob Brydon, has chosen to dress like Alan Partridge in his Knowing Me, Knowing You era. I can see now why they needed those two buses: one for the contestants and one, presumably, for Brydon's many double-breasted blazers.
Another mystery is why the programme-makers decided to make this show so needlessly convoluted and drab. Heed the lesson of the woeful ITV game show Genius Game hosted by David Tennant, which I wrote was ridiculously complicated and duller than the instructions on a tub of tiling grout.
It is rumoured to have been axed already, having achieved viewing figures of only 661,000 by the end of the eight-episode run. Unless Destination X gets much better very quickly it may suffer the same fate.
To be fair, it is not as bad as Genius Game, even though it seems to be mildly desperate to launch the catchphrase 'Where the X am I?' judging by the number of times Brydon said it.
Destination X is billed as a cross between The Traitors and Race Across the World, but I think it is nothing like either. The beauty of The Traitors is its melodramatic campness and that the premise is fairly simple. The viewer knows exactly what is happening, who is wrong, who is right, who is backstabbing whom.
Here, though, we are in the same boat as the contestants, mainly because we are being urged to 'play at home' by entering a virtual map room via a QR code on screen. My heart sinks whenever restaurants make you use a QR code to bring up their menu, so I'm not doing it on my sofa.
The idea of using 'Europe as a boardgame', the contestants travelling across the continent on a bus with blacked-out windows and occasionally high-tech goggles to stop them seeing where they are, is not a bad one and could be seen as a sort of offline version of GeoGuessr, a game in which players must work out the location of somewhere in the world from Google Street View imagery.
Except here they get to peer out of a 'box of tricks' in a town square at staged cameos of, for example, a bunch of tulips ('Is it Amsterdam?') or a St Bernard dog (are we in the Alps?). The person in the map room whose eventual guess is furthest from the correct location is sent home.
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It started fairly promisingly, if stagily, in a German airport, where we had the usual reality TV slop of a contestant saying effectively, 'I'll win this,' before promptly being eliminated at the departure gate. I did like the observation tests, the minor details and names they had to remember, which is a good grey matter test.
But by the time Brydon had later finished explaining the unnecessarily confusing rules I had mentally checked out. The show lacked momentum, with the events feeling a bit random. I ended up not caring 'where the X' they were or who got sent home. It's not a good sign, is it, that one contestant asks to leave before episode one has finished.
And if you're going to hire the very funny Brydon, why not give him more opportunities to be funny? Instead it all felt strangely humourless and as airless as that bus. On the plus side, Brydon's blazer choice for episode two is in a nice cranberry red.★★☆☆☆
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