| Around the World in 80 Days RE-ENACTING the epic odysseys of Phileas Fogg and Michael Palin for a 21st Century audience, Around the World in 80 Days offered a visually stunning circumnavigation of Planet Earth. Once again, the limit was 80 days, but this time a team of celebrities [2 people on each leg] handed on the baton in the ultimate relay race, undertaken non-stop in real time. There were very few rules; No flying – although every other means of 21st Century transport was at the disposal of the celebrities who were encouraged to use as many as possible – from elephants to Bullet trains. They carried a carpet bag, just like Fogg, which contained various items eg: a GLOBE (a Geo-Locatable Object Emitter, designed especially for 80 Days by BBC Multiplatform) to feed live data to the 80 Days website to allow the audience to track the celebrities’ journey. They also carried an 80-day journal to record their experiences. And just as Michael Palin’s friends requested souvenirs from his travels so our celebrities were tasked with bringing home curiosities which were auctioned off for Children In Need. To honour 80 Days’ illustrious predecessors, the start and finish of the race was at The Reform Club in Pall Mall. But from the moment the first celebrity set foot in the Channel Tunnel, this was a journey through a very different world – new Europe, conflict-ridden Middle East, expanding China, and a journey up through the Bering straits that is now possible due to melting ice caps. 80 Days was an ambitious visual feast. At the same time, sumptuous but gritty and real, with the celebrity travellers having a genuine choice to make about the way they travelled.
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