The last thing the world needs is another celebrity travelogue. You have to assume that the genre that gave us Coastal Railways with Julie Walters and Rob Brydon’s Honky Tonk Road Trip is commissioned by drawing names and places out of two tombola drums.
The celebrity travelogue is smug. The celebrity travelogue is lazy. The celebrity travelogue insults our intelligence like little else. And so it is with a mixture of delight and horror that I announce that this one isn’t bad. Zero Stars is a rare exception to the form, mixing a novel premise with bearable hosts.
The premise is this: as much as travel is meant to broaden the mind, it is also easily exploited. Go almost anywhere on Earth and you’ll be confronted with overpriced attractions promising far more than they deliver, set up by nefarious crooks who see tourists as little more than perambulating cashpoints. And this is the side of the industry in which Zero Stars is interested: tours with grumpy instructors; restaurants with dodgy food; tourist traps designed to leave visitors tired and upset. If you like to see people have fun, this isn’t the show for you.
In Sara Pascoe and Roisin Conaty, it boasts a pair of very capable hosts. Billing themselves as “comedians but, more importantly, best friends”, Pascoe and Conaty trail around the rubbish landmarks of the world treading the very thin line between enthusiasm and ridicule. This trick is so much harder than it looks. Go too far in one direction and you’re simply watching someone have a nice holiday; too far in the other and you risk straying into the sort of “Aren’t foreigners weird?” territory that already felt outdated in the 1990s.
Instead, they roam around – visiting Istanbul in the first episode – largely managing to keep themselves as the main target of humour. When a water bike excursion ends up with them frantically trying not to collide with a procession of boats, Pascoe riffs on what a disappointment she must be to her (admittedly visibly narked) guide. When they book a fortune teller who spends most of her time on the phone, they playfully compete for her affection.
Sometimes, though, you do see the cracks. I strongly believe that you can have a truly dreadful time in Istanbul, just as you can have a truly dreadful time anywhere. However, you sense that Zero Stars is pulling its punches a little here and there. For example, they find themselves staying in a five-star hotel only to discover that it is a feeder hotel for hair-transplant patients. The lobby is full of men with their heads in bandages.
Which would be fine, except that it is still a nice, five-star hotel. For the sake of comparison, I spent 45 seconds on Tripadvisor and found a hotel in Istanbul with cockroaches, dirty sheets, no working lift and (if one review is to be believed) a porter who refused to leave one woman’s room unless she gave him a kiss. And, yes, while this does sound so genuinely dangerous that it would probably push the show out of the realm of light entertainment, the series is called Zero Stars. What’s the point of making it, if you can’t commit to the bit?
Alternatively, you can see the show as a comment on the fact that, on travel review sites, as on any review site, people will always find something to complain about. Some of the reviews that flash up onscreen, for objectively nice places, are so hysterically overwrought that you pity the lives of the people who wrote them. However, in the context of Zero Stars it sometimes feels rather like having your cake and eating it.
It’s a series that wants to show you people having a bad time, but also wants loads of lovely dusky panoramic drone shots. I’d argue that you can’t have both. True, the hosts do a brilliant job with what they’re given – especially Conaty who, after spending two seasons watching footage on a screen in Last One Laughing, must be thrilled about having anything to do at all – but there’s still room to dial up the discomfort. Not to overstate this, but you really can’t call a travel show Zero Stars unless you are prepared to give someone food poisoning.
Zero Stars starts on Sunday on TLC.
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