A few days ago, I pondered whether or not I was getting Planet Green in my area. Well, I have since confirmed that Cox Communications does indeed offer the station (note to self: program Channel 102 to the Favorite Channels line-up). Unfortunately, I also confirmed that they don’t offer the Fox Reality Channel, so I’m now on a quest to get that added sooner than later.
David Lyle, President of the network, gave a nice synopsis of his baby for those of us who aren’t fortunate enough to have actually experienced it firsthand. “We’re not all Fox programming and we’re not all reruns,” he clarified. “Fox Reality Channel has the best of acquired programming from the U.S., like ‘Amazing Race,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen,’ ‘Last Comic Standing.’ In fact, what really distinguishes us and continues to make us stand out are the originals. We celebrate reality in all its styles, from the Really Awards, jam-packed with reality stars behaving as only reality stars can. ‘Gimme My Reality Show,’ where reality hams compete to win their own show. ‘My Bare Lady,’ it’s back for a new season. TV’s toughest competition, ‘Solitary.’ The documentary-style look at police training, ‘The Academy.’ These all fit our mandate for original shows on Fox Reality Channel, and that’s to be loud and to be real.”
Funny how Lyle didn’t clarify what “My Bare Lady” is, but since he didn’t, allow me: the series follows four American female porn stars as they take acting lessons and perform in scenes from classic drama alongside British actors in London’s West End. Or, at least, that’s what Season 1 was about. Whatever Season 2 involves, however, I think we can presume that it will still involve female porn stars, so I say bring it on.
Also worthy of your attention is “Long Way Down,” in which actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman hop on their motorbikes and take an epic ride ride from the north of Scotland to the southern tip of Africa. McGregor’s fascination with burning rubber is pretty well documented, given his appearance on “Top Gear” as well as his narration of the Mark Neale documentaries “Faster” and “The Doctor, The Tornado, and the Kentucky Kid,” but his fascination with bikes goes back much farther than that.
“My father was in a charity organization called The Round Table. My father’s called Jim, and he did this thing called ‘Jim’ll Fix It,’ where he tried to help people with kids who were ill or do something special for them. When I was about five,” McGregor said, “this little boy who was ill wanted to ride a motorbike, and they got this little tiny Honda monkey bike, it was called, and the kid rode it all around the field. And I was there, so I asked if I could have a shot afterwards. And I think it’s true to say I never got over the feeling of going like that. It’s a thrill that I still have to this day. I really love it. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is.”
“Long Way Down” is a trip which is less about the speed at which he and Boorman are traveling and more about their experiences along the way, something which was decidedly enhanced by their mode of transportation.
“When you meet people, there’s a kind of novelty factor in Mongolia or the Highlands of Ethiopia when you rock up on a big old bike,” said McGregor. “People aren’t used to seeing them, so there’s an interaction with the people, which is quite different from the way they treat you in a car. I also think people are slightly subconsciously probably sympathetic towards you because they understand that if it’s cold, you are going to be really cold. If it’s wet, you are going to be wet. You have no protection from the elements. So, therefore, as a traveller, people kind of look after you when you’re on a bike, which is something I really enjoyed. In Mongolia, when we would turn up to some tent, people would invite us in and kind of look after you that way. You don’t leave your environment into theirs; you’re already in it, because you just turn up. You don’t have to step out of anything.”
McGregor and Boorman worked out their route quite explicitly with the assistance of the Royal Geographical Society, in London. “We went to visit them,” said McGregor, “and we did some work in their adventure-planning office where they’ve got maps for all over the place. We got advice from them, and we got advice from UNICEF, because they have such incredible local knowledge of what’s going on in each of the different countries in Africa. And then we picked our route. It’s a fairly well-established path down through the eastern side of Africa. And then we decided, when we got to south of Malawi, that we wanted to cut right across to the west side, so we could come down through Botswana and Namibia and come into South Africa that way. We were going to go into the Congo. We wanted to go over the border there from Rwanda to see the gorillas in the Congo, and because our cameraman, Claudio Von Planta, had done some work with some rangers there who have been trained to look after the gorillas. Just before we got there, quite a number of the rangers themselves had been killed in some local conflict, and so we were advised and decided not to do that. We saw the gorillas instead in Rwanda.”
Producer David Alexanian stepped in to add to McGregor’s comments, which – at least from his perspective – were far too modest. “It’s much easier for me to talk about how brave the guy is,” he said, “because not only is he doing something that’s quite difficult, but we did travel through places like Sudan, and we did get up to the Eritrean border, where, I guess two weeks prior to our arrival, there was recently the kidnapping of those British diplomats that happened right there. And, you know, we were in the Northern Congo and Gulu, quite close to areas of Northern Congo, Northern Uganda, quite close to the Congolese border where there’s activity with the Lord’s Resistance Army. So we were in these places, and I think what we found more often than not is that we didn’t feel threatened. And I think…I don’t want to be here and promote this sort of casual approach to taking on these trips, but I think if you read what exists oftentimes today, you wouldn’t travel to these places. You do have to be careful about the route choice, but chances are you are going to be okay.”
After all this traveling, what’s next for McGregor and Boorman?
“Well,” said McGregor, “we’ve done London around to New York, so we’ve done the Northern Hemisphere. We’ve done Scotland to Cape Town. I suppose the obvious next trip would be from South to North America. Stay tuned!”
