Expedition Africa

A bold recreation of HM Stanley’s traipse through Africa in search of Dr Livingstone.  History Channel, Thursday 21:00
3 Americans and 1 Brit.
3 Chaps 1 girl
3 experienced adventurers 1 novice.
3 sane 1 idiot.
Interestingly each person in the group gets to be the minority instance only once.
I was looking forward to this mightily having read a good deal about Stanley after my non-classical education had left me lacking in things interesting to think about.

The Brit is perhaps my favourite explorer, Benedict Allen.  The Mr Magoo of exploration, he just “keeps it real” and I mean both as complements.   He was my first introduction to “alpine style” TV exploration.  Just him and a camera at arms length, Les Stroud perhaps being the more well known, but he approaches things in a different manner.

Benedict Allen is more a writer of books who happens to have a camera.  His explorations are often calamitous, rocketing to popular fame by eating his dog in one particularly unfortunate expedition.

I remember reading/hearing his publicist gets the blame for the Indiana Jones hat which seems to be welded to his head, but our Benedict seems to spend far too much time in it for a mere publicity stunt.

The 4 team members are well chosen (if you want conflict and probably in today’s TV it’s exactly what they want).

Pasquale is the nominal leader.  He will not fail to remind you he is the leader at every opportunity in that peculiar way of mouthing words he has, his upper lip goes up and down like a portcullis.

Benedict and Pasquale are always at loggerheads.  Perhaps it is because I am English I side with Benedict here.  If you are crossing an arid wasteland zooming ahead and losing sight of your water supply being carried by a rather dodgy looking donkey does not seem a good plan of action.

For Pasquale it seems the donkey and water are just distractions from the real business of getting from A to B as fast as possible and if a few people die of heat stroke along the way and the rest die of dehydration it’s but a small price to pay for such ripping speed.
In the latest episode the team of 4 have rather split into 2 teams of 2.

Pasquale has a supporter in the shape of an American journalist who has very little experience in such adventure.  A rather painful character that has over-identified with the native porters (these people with heavy bundles on their heads are the actual backbone of the expedition, this is no lightweight jaunt, this is siege mode travel).

Whenever this journo opens his maw something along the lines of “We have to consider the porters” drops out.

Often though the word “me” would appear to be interchangeable with the word “porter”.  The whole porter thing seems to be something by which he projects his own anxiety.

With Benedict is the woman in the team.  She brings increased ratings and presumably woman-le-ness to proceedings.  She is an expert on things creepy-crawly which so far has limited her to saying “watch out that snake is poisonous”.  I certainly would need an expert to point this out to me otherwise its possible to confuse it with the other sort of snake you run up to and hug affectionately.

Part Six is coming up tonight, Benedict is going to have a brush with Malaria, this puts the whole project in jeopardy in more ways than one.