Worlds Apart review: It turns out that travelling across the generation gap can be tediously repetitive
Travelling with young people can be a nightmare – constant requests for food, running out of charge for one of the myriad devices they carry with them, the never-ending call of 'are we nearly there yet?'.
But Channel 4's new reality show Worlds Apart (Channel 4, Tues, 9.15pm) made the whole business look childishly easy, especially as much of the actual travelling had been excised from this week's first episode.
Six youngsters and six oldsters had been magically whisked to Tokyo, where they first had to find each other, and then had to complete a task to win coins – the teams with fewest coins at the end would be heading home.
To be honest, watching 12 people wander around a busy city was not the most transfixing hour of television you could ever watch.
Each part between the ad breaks saw two pairs – one youngster with one oldster – get directed around the city to find a location where they did the task.
By the final part of the show, it was difficult not to have switched off, and even the 'jeopardy' of finding out which team had collected the fewest coins was undermined by the programme makers deciding not to send anyone home and they'd all get to move on to the next city.
In the end, that might prove to be the show's saving grace. At least we may get to know our contestants better, so we might actually care if they get knocked out.
Because the initial meetings between the generation gap pairs were really quite sweet.
Check-out girl Charlotte, from Swansea, declared that her partner, 73-year-old retired plumber Colin was “the cutest guy ever”.
Meanwhile, 69-year-old retired doctor Tony was taken aback by Emma, 18, who had spent much of her life in the care system and looking after her siblings.
“She's amazingly resilient,” he said. And having heard Emma's story, you couldn't help agreeing.
The way these pairs get on, interact, clash or co-operate is the key to this show's appeal and it's difficult not to feel that the best way to see that would be to give them a budget, stick them in a foreign country and tell them to get from point A to point B.
But that would be too much like another show we all know and love, wouldn't it? So they introduce tasks, and coins, and pins and devices, all of which get in the way of what we really want to know.
Are young people these days social media-obsessed snowflake agents of woke?
And is the older generation obsessed with the war, desperate to leave Europe behind and infuriatingly condescending to anyone who doesn't like toast and dripping?
The first episode – very carefully cast, by the way, especially with the older generation represented by a group of outward-looking, energetic, open-minded pensioners – doesn't make you want to watch episode two.
It's a shame that it is so repetitively tedious, because this is one Channel 4 'social experiment' which could have value. A show which will tell us we all have something to learn, and we all have something we can teach others, no matter our age or experience.
And in the end, you feel it would have been better to have commissioned another series of Old People's Home for Four-Year-Olds than create this uncomfortable mish-mash of a show.
If the journey really is better than the destination, as someone once said, Worlds Apart must be the exception that proves the rule.