Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10
The age of the travel documentary is far from dead just because Michael Palin has stopped wandering the globe and giving fascinating insights to a world beyond the window and the clear glass of apathy that stops some from going past what they know and wish to experience. The genre hasn’t even begun to creak at the knees and suffer from the first signs of premature ageing and won’t do whilst there are people such as Joanna Lumley willing to back to the U.S.S.R and take the viewer on a trip through three countries and whole lot of miles in Joanna Lumley’s Trans-Siberian Adventure.
The way travel is documented has come a long way since the days of Alan Whicker and the esteemed Michael Palin certainly should be lauded for opening up the experience via television to a greater audience than those who wish to pack their passports, carry a small white Panama hat and act like the perfect Brit abroad.
Travel writing and the art of the documentary is to give the audience or reader the urge to visit the lands so incredibly sculpted by the one presenting the living picture. Through either the green eyed monster in which jealousy rears its ugly head or through the genuine passion of the subject and the people who make the countries so rich and vibrant, the world starts to understand that a farmer in Patagonia is the same as one in the fields of France, all are trying to survive in a world and all have the same questions about what lays beyond the next horizon as a housewife in Grimsby or a student in Cape Town.
Joanna Lumley’s Trans-Siberian Adventure though is slightly different to the hard hitting world that Alan Whicker invited the viewer into and even Michael Palin gave scorn and joy in equal measure, even it meant upsetting some sensibilities. For Joanna Lumley, a national treasure in many eyes, this was more of a journey of re-connection with a world she left at a tender age and one in which she hadn’t seen since she was a model during the dark days of the Cold War.
From humble beginnings in Honk Kong, much changed since Ms. Lumley left as a small child, across deserts, through Western perceptions of three lands that stretch across two Eastern continents, Ms. Lumley took the viewer on a voyage of discovery on the Trans-Siberian express, past check points in which the Russian checkpoints and controls still were as much a blast from the past as the Nuclear Bomb she was allowed to touch deep under the streets of Moscow and into the heart of the Mongolian people and the newly built monolith of a statue to Genghis Khan.
Whilst very interesting in parts, the documentary seemed to lack any real bite, the passion was there but the raised eyebrow at some of the revelations, such as the lack of sincere mourning by Chinese officials for their part in the Tiananmen Square massacre, was not quite enough to really get the travel bug juices flowing.
The star though was the feat of engineering which binds all three countries together, Russia, Mongolia and China, and the railway adventure to beat them all. In this, the audience would have salivated at the thought that if only one day they could do such a thing, to undertake such a journey and risk conversing with border guards who are trained to shoot on sight and sample life under the beautiful Mongolian sky; for surely this is true travel, the chance to learn and shed protective skin, what better way than by train across many thousands of miles of untamed land.
Enjoyable as it was meant to be, Joanna Lumley’s Trans-Siberian Adventure may have missed off some the true highlights of the experience but it certainly wetted the appetite to venture beyond the front door.
Ian D. Hall