Travellers' Century - Production

Production

BBC Four controller Janice Hadlow commissioned the series from Icon Films for broadcast as part of the channel's Journeys of Discovery season.

The series combines footage of explorer and travel writer Benedict Allen following in the footsteps of his subjects with interviews and archive footage to provide an insight into their lives.

Benedict Allen is the real McCoy and has boldly gone where very few have gone before. He is uniquely placed to reveal what these classic journeys tell us about travel and travellers and what makes the British such a restless race. —Executive Producer Jacquie Hughes

Allen has written that the series was made to answer a question he had first asked himself when he lost his dog team in the Bering Strait pack ice and his prospects looked grim. Where does the troublesome urge of the British to wander off alone, often without even bothering to give a half-decent excuse, come from?

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    —Karl Marx (1818–1883)

    “An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
    —George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)