Bill Nighy narrates a series of magical journeys down some of the world’s most scenic rivers.
It’s an opportunity to fly hot air balloons over France’s Dordogne, sail a 100-year-old wherry down Norfolk’s River Bure and dive the sunken wrecks of Canada’s St Lawrence.
In Bosnia, the cameras jump from Mostar’s famous bridge into the Neretva, and board a war canoe of the Tlingit First Nation on the Yukon in the northwest of Canada. As the show makes a voyage downstream, the documentary meets the people who live, work, play and depend on the banks of these breathtakingly beautiful rivers.
This adventure treks up to Canada’s far northern reaches for a rough and tumble journey down one of the wildest rivers in the world. The beauty of the Yukon is epic, rugged and far removed from what most know. The unusual journey starts in an aircraft piloted by a painter, who flies Channel 5 to the glacial headwaters atop a mountain. Here they bear witness to the azure blue that the waters take on and never let go as the Yukon rolls down.
The first step is to visit the indigenous First Nation of the Tlingit people and the Kwanlin Dün. With the Tlingit, the programme learns about how their youth are taken for learning and language trips on Lake Atlin to help deepen their culture and roots; with the Kwanlin Dün, then the show makes a visit to the fast-moving waters in the gorge that gave these people their name.
The communities visited all bear a history of striving to get to and remain in the north.
In Carcross and Dawson City, Channel 5 learn about the rear-wheel paddle steamers that once coursed the length of the Yukon by the hundreds. In the heyday of the North, they ferried and served the notoriously brief and chaotic Klondike Gold Rush. Dawson City is the greatest nugget from that time, and still to this day the minds of residents are paved with the memory of a gold rush that lasted exactly one year and ballooned the city in size 100 times over.
In another northern city, cameras see how it got its name of Whitehorse when they managed to harness the power of the river into electric dams. Later the show heads to the wilds of Lake Laberge, where they follow an image-hunter who camouflages his cameras to capture spectacular images of wild animals.
And finally, after enjoying a shot of rum that preserves a human toe, it’s off to visit a graveyard of abandoned and slowly disintegrating rear-wheel steamers. This episode is a stomp across an area three times the size of England, and the farthest north that the series will travel.
The World’s Most Scenic River Journey’s, Channel 5, tonight, 7 pm
