Ever since Ted Lasso ended, I've held onto my Apple TV Plus subscription, because I decided I wanted to finally knock out some of the shows I've had my eye on for a while. These shows include season 2 of Little America, Slow Horses, For All Mankind and Foundation. But first, I wanted to watch all three of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's travel shows, Long Way Round, Long Way Down and Long Way Up.
I actually got the idea at the beginning of 2022. My sister and her fiancé were visiting, and while I was working they'd be watching episodes of the newest one, Long Way Up, which is an Apple exclusive. It looked interesting, particularly since they were riding electric motorcycles up through Latin America to Los Angeles, but I wanted to start with the first show.
Reader, I didn't get to it then. I finished off season 2 of Ted Lasso, which had lain fallow for a few months, and cancelled my subscription, in order to save the princely sum of $7 or so per month. My one concession toward this quest was reading the book version of Long Way Round, which I serendipitously had nabbed from my stepdad sometime in 2016. I happened to finish it when I was visiting him in April of last year, and he was happy to receive it back, so at least I closed that loop.
Then this year's season of Ted Lasso came out, and as I said, I decided to hold onto the streamer to finish up some of the shows I've been meaning to catch up on. First up was Long Way Round, which I'd actually seen before, back when I lived in London. Shot in 2004, it had them riding from London to New York via Russia, Ukraine and Canada. It was in heavy rotation on Freeview channels like Dave, so I got to see pretty much all of it back then, also because my flatmate at the time was a big motorbike fan.
Long Way Down, from 2007, passed me by, and I didn't even know about Long Way Up, which came out in 2020, until my sister told me about it. Long Way Down reunites Ewan and Charley with their producers, Russ Malkin and Dave Alexanian, as well as cameramen Claudio von Planta and Jimmy Simak, for a ride from London to Cape Town via Italy and most of Eastern Africa. Long Way Up, on the other hand, starts at the very southern tip of Argentina and goes up to LA, where Ewan had moved to between shows.
Overall Ewan and Charley make good traveling companions. They look like they're having a great time, apart from the bits where they're fighting with one another or one of the producers - there's a bit of a blowup in Eastern Europe, and another in Southern Africa, but one assumes that kind of thing is par for the course when you're spending months at a time with the same couple of people, day in and day out, including camping and eating together constantly. The book version of Long Way Round, which is essentially a diary written by the two leads, has a little more conflict than is seen in the show, so I assume there was some friction on Down and Up as well.
It's also kind of fascinating to see the amount of planning that went into each expedition. I say kind of, because the first episode of each series consists entirely of that planning, so you're left feeling a little anxious to get started by the time they actually set off at the end of that episode. But they show the difficulties in getting visas, getting their bikes set up, learning the local languages and even the security training required, since they'd be riding through a few rather hairy neighborhoods.
When they're riding through they take the time to see some sights, frequently motorcycle-related. Long Way Up is where the sightseeing really comes into its own because it's shot in HD and so it looks loads better than the previous shows. They also have a drone, so they can get some amazing shots of Patagonia, Bolivia and Colombia, in particular.
They also stop off for some Unicef-related meet-and-greets, learning about the street kids of Mongolia (one of whom got adopted by Ewan and appears in the Central America portion of Long Way Up), about the former child soldiers of East Africa, and the Venezuelan refugees transiting through Ecuador, among many others. You can see how much these stops affect Ewan and Charley, who each have a couple of kids at the start of the first show, and it's good for me as a viewer to see the work these groups are doing for these children.
The third show, taking place so many years after the previous two, has a certain sense of melancholy about it. They're both visibly older, and Charley in particular looks a little fragile, given that the start of Long Way Up refers to a pretty serious crash he was involved in that put him in hospital for a while and put the whole venture at risk. But also the years seem to have mellowed him - whereas in the previous shows he was always a bit more impulsive and quick to anger, he seems a lot calmer in this latest one.
In the section in Panama, which he has to do on his own because Ewan's bike needs repairs, he also does a nice job of presenting, showing the functioning of the Panama Canal, among other things. Watching the three shows, and the way fans mob Ewan when they recognize him, you get the feeling Charlie feels a little overshadowed, so it was nice to see a couple of segments where he was the main guy.
I also liked the electric bikes part of Long Way Up. They decided on them because they were interested in the technology, and had some custom bikes built for them by Harley Davidson. Meanwhile, Rivian provided their crew with support vehicles that were prototype R1Ts, so it was interesting to see how they managed to get charged every night where the grids weren't always so reliable and where the infrastructure for EVs wasn't always present.
There's a bit of Boy's Own Adventure to these, given that it consists of two guys leaving their families for months at a time to ride motorcycles in exotic places. Yet it's also a little moving when they ride into their final destination flanked by friends and relatives on a convoy of motorcycles, and they look so happy to be home. There are a couple of lovely moments in the first two shows where they fly one of Ewan's parents in secretly, and surprise him. Also, the moment where they get reunited with their families, just before the final ride into Cape Town or New York or LA, is always heartwarming to see.
In any case, the shows are fun to watch and are good views of these remote parts of the world. I hope they'll be on Apple TV Plus for a long time to come, but either way, I recommend them highly.
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