Fronting up for Loney Planet

By GRAHAM REID

It was a great moment in television travel shows. After three days trekking up the magnificent mountain, Ian Wright, frontman for many of the Lonely Planet programmes, arrives at the summit of Kilimanjaro as a spectacular dawn breaks.

The sky is illuminated in shafts of gold and the world from this rare vantage point seems to go on forever. Wright's response to the beauty before him?

"I'm knackered," he says before slumping backward, exhausted by the altitude and arduous journey.

While New Zealand television travel shows are sponsored to the point of sanitising the realities of travel, and the front people are manicured to perfection, Lonely Planet is for people who see the world in the unvarnished way it most often is.

This is travel through tired eyes, in times of weariness and wonder, and with a great deal of humour. It is about seeing people and places, not public relations executives and a hotel with a doorman.

When Wright and his crew of four travel - "Oh yeah, economy class" - things sometimes go wrong, much as they do for anyone travelling. And occasionally the camera captures that in its humour and humanity.

"People aren't stupid," says the likeable London-based Wright. "Sometimes people on the tele think they're getting away with it but everyone goes, 'See that geezer last night? He didn't do that.' Or, 'Whorra loada rubbish.' People know.

"So it's refreshing when someone climbs Kilimanjaro and says, 'That was crap, I'm never going to do that again.' It was true. I've never been so physically and mentally knackered, couldn't even begin to describe it."

Wright, who got the frontman job six years ago by answering a newspaper advertisement ("sent in a piss-take video, Channel 4 loved it"), usually makes six trips a year for Lonely Planet, most between three and four weeks' duration. The small crew often changes and they stay in cheap hotels.

"Sometimes the tourist board give us a five-star hotel, and they're the worst because they are so impersonal. The policy seems to be that staff aren't allowed to converse with guests, so once you're inside it doesn't say anything about the country. In a lot of places we just stay where we can.

"The budget for what we are doing is stingy. What the company [Pilot Productions] does about sponsorship I don't know. I think they get deals with flights and put the airlines' names at the end - but don't blink before that name comes up.

"It's a small outfit and, like any tele company, they are skinflints . Also, the people in the office are working, like, four jobs. We had a deal with United Airlines once and someone put it as 'Untied' in the credits. I don't think we got any deals with them again. They must have been livid."

Wright says he is offered a list of countries as potential subjects, although programmes are more planned than they might appear.

Others reconnoitre the territory and set up interviews if necessary ("you are in Japan and want to talk to an A-bomb victim, you can't just walk around in the hope of meeting one") and journeys are planned with seasons and political circumstances factored in.

A few have gone wrong: "Norway was badly rec-ed. We were doing this real long train journey at night through some of the most amazing scenery you can imagine. What was the point? It was a shame the weather was crap, too."

But mostly things work out and viewers at home, as with most of those he meets, respond to Wright's humour. The programme doesn't sell destinations, just the enjoyment of travel for its own sake.

The association with Lonely Planet travel books is tenuous. The production company bought the brand and the publishers "keep a check on the programme because they couldn't have it not being like the ethos of the books."

"I don't see it as a programme for travellers because travellers who watch it can only be a few per cent. So it has to be entertaining. There's that fundamental thing underneath where everyone is up for a laugh and a chat, although there are cultural and religious differences.

"When people are relaxed you can chat much easier and get better stuff . It's also hard for them to be in such a bizarre environment to have a camera shoved up them. That's intimidating, so my job is to make people feel relaxed."

Wright - whose travels have taken him through three passports and destinations as diverse and distant as Easter Island and Greenland, Mongolia and the Australian Outback - is being modest. His screen presence may appear unshaven and untutored but his willingness to give things a go and eat anything endears him to locals and lounge-viewers alike ("I've always had tin guts and I don't get sick much either").

And freedom from sponsors' constraints means Lonely Planet pokes its cameras into most places.

"Perhaps other travel shows do what the sponsors say. What a pain that would be. . But the people from the country want you to see it in the best light, so you are in a privileged position.

"You are getting in on people that would maybe take months through normal travel. That's the privilege, because you are there three to four weeks and it's like five months condensed."

Before joining Lonely Planet, Wright was an intrepid traveller. He spent three months in Guyana, three in Egypt, seven around India and Nepal and six months in Europe.

He is an accomplished theatre performer and painter, writes plays for school children and runs drama and art workshops. Between getting his passport stamped he also paints and sculpts.

"I get into making things, like icons. In England people buy icons for about 10 quid which are just postcards stuck on bits of wood, just rubbish.

"So I worked out a way to make them with treated wood and an image and two lots of varnish that crack because they dry at different times.

"They look brilliant, also you can put yourself into them. You take a Polaroid of yourself and subtlely slip yourself into The Last Supper. There's one with me at the back with a bottle of beer. They're great presents for friends."

Because he travels so often he consciously makes time for friends when he comes back from a month in some exotic, or otherwise, location.

"But there's no way you can complain or even moan a little bit. You can't come back from Cuba and go, 'Oh, it was so hard.' The mates are like, 'Oh really, Cuba too hard was it, Ian? Oh, do sit down, poor lad.'

So where does he go for his holidays?

"The last thing I want is to get back on a plane. I can't do a beach holiday, they are the dullest things on earth. I love English seasides in winter or out of season because they have a weird ghost town thing. The sea is rough, there's a fresh breeze and there's hardly anyone about but still the odd amusements are open. And old bed-and-breakfasts with a few grannies who say, 'Are you married, young man?'

"There's something about that, the creaking of things in the wind, I just love."

Lonely Planet screens weeknights at midnight on the Discovery Channel and on Prime 9.35 pm Thursdays.