Programmes Peking To Paris

1 - Great Wall Great Challenge

From the Great Wall on the edge of Beijing (Peking) 130 or so dream- machine cars rumble off towards Mongolia. Some are a hundred years old or more, and the youngest is nearly forty. Ahead are nearly 8,000 miles of rough roads to Paris. Why are they doing this? Because a hundred years ago five madmen did it and four of them made it to Paris, led by Prince Scipione Borghese in a 7-litre 1907 Itala. Focusing on five video-diarists, director-presenter Jack Pizzey (who was on the 1997 P2P) is here for the long run to tell the story of a modern-day epic. By the end of Day1 of the 35 which the rally will need to reach Paris, some cars are already in trouble but most make it to the city of Datong where, in bed in a comfortable hotel, one of our diarists, diminutive Michele from Manhattan, checks the thread-count in the cotton sheets and shudders at the thought of the coming nights in sleeping bags and tents. Yes tents, ugh!.
Duration: 30

2 - To The Land Of Yurts

On the trail of Prince Borghese and the heroes of the 1907 race which put the motorcar on the map as a serious way of getting about, our video-diarists in their classic cars pause at the Yung-gang caves which were carved with countless Buddhas centuries ago, and then it's north through sandy hills and villages, bumping horribly sometimes over potholes but exuberant in the sunlight. A 1903 Mercedes pulls powerfully up the hills, its crew looking like bank-robbers in the welding masks they've chosen as motoring wear. The Geordie Lads in their 1934 Lagonda are musing about Chinese women, the Itala Boys' car is already playing up but they're not phased - trouble seems to be like champagne to them and they're going to spend most of the next five weeks high on trouble.
Duration: 30

3 - Ten Million Speed Bumps

The Peking racers wake up in a Chinese border town and head for the frontier. Bob of the Geordie Lads says a sentimental goodbye to Chinese cop who took him out last night on a memorable round of the bars and clubs, the Rally Director warns that once we cross into Mongolia there's no turning back because we have all only single-entry visas, and then suddenly it's the Gobi Desert. On the edge of this vast nowhere presenter Jack Pizzey pauses to show how, in 1907, Prince Borghese could navigate here and then everyone's racing across terrain like ten billion speed bumps. This is car-breaking stuff and, in the juddering cabins of their cars, our diarists gasp and groan and sometimes squeal - crunch, bang, slam, boing, whamdunkk!
Duration: 30

4 - High On Trouble

The Peking Racers are all bumping and grinding across the Gobi Desert. Except, that is, for the Itala Boys. Their 1907 car has stopped, Jonathan's underneath it in the sand peering up at its innards, and things don't look good. So what do the Boys do? "Well, would Jonathan like a latte," asks Adam? "Then he'll just pop across the desert and get you one!" Being stuck in the Gobi is not really funny at all but these are cool dudes and when the going gets tough, they love it. Soon they're singing, they seem to thrive on trouble. And there's much worse coming straight away - it's starting to get dark and there's a sandstorm howling across the desert to swallow us all.
Duration: 30

5 - Lucky Yak's Milk

Still in the Gobi Desert, the Aussies, father and son in their Holden, are confronting a spaghetti of interweaving tracks ahead. It's almost worse than the places where there are none at all. How can we find our way to the capital, Ulan Bataar? The answer is the GPS (Global Positioning System) which Jack explains as best he technophobically can, and then we're driving into the city. Shoppers on horseback are passing windows with Prada and Gucci displays, the Racers are spending our rest day under their cars, but Michele from Manhattan is leaving Dan to handle the mechanical stuff and joining the shoppers. Soon she's posing in a swirl of fox furs and the desert seems forgotten. But next day she's back in the little Chevrolet being sprinkled with yak's milk by a local beauty queen as we all get a fine send-off in the town square.
Duration: 30

6 - The Lady Won't Talk

Once out of the Gobi and past the capital, we imagine the going will be easier. It isn't. Mongolia turns out to be one vast assembly of ruts set in potholes set in craters through which the cars veer and plunge. The Itala Boys are spared this because they're trucking their sick car up into Russia: no garage in Ulan Bataar was able to fix it but Russian workshops have better machines so maybe . . . . The Geordie Lads are soon lost among wild crags but there's consolation because they get to see a mighty Golden Eagle. Then in camp, on a glorious morning, a question hits Jack as he shaves: how come the local people we see have bigger, deeper smiles than westerners? Will Pamela of the Two Fast Ladies team please put her head out of her tent and suggest why? Pamela absolutely will not.
Duration: 30

7 - The Hardest Day

A man comes trudging out of the desert to presenter Jack Pizzey's Landrover. His car is stuck in soft sand somewhere over the skyline. When we get to it, the old Bentley is up to its axles and beside it, spade in hand, we find The Bentley Blonde. This is Margaret Edgill from Ireland , and the plight of her car is nothing to what comes later. After we winch it out of the sand, it's soon getting stuck again half way across a river with the King of Malaysia stuck nearby in his yellow Chevrolet (aka The Custard Tart) and then, as we get up into Mongolia's mountains, there's the old Bentley again. This time it has died on a bleak hillside beside a freezing lake. The driver, Nicky Bailey, wants to camp beside the car and wait till spares can be flown out to Mongolia and trucked to him. But the Bentley Blonde has other ideas. Stay or go? As they argue beside the stricken car, who's going to win . . .
Duration: 30

8 - Lenin Loves Us

Out of Mongolia and into Siberia, but the 120-odd drivers still on this epic race are finding this dreaded region is warm and green. It's summer in Russia and the potholes are set in tarmac here - better than the 'washboard' tracks we've been juddering over till now. We drive through villages which look much like ones where Prince Borghese was photographed 100 years ago in his victorious Itala, to Omsk where maybe he cheated a bit and where Dostoevsky was flogged almost to death, and into Ykaterinberg to the Church of the Spilt Blood, built on the site of the 1917 massacre of the Russian royal family, and then, with spanners and grease labouring on our ancient cars to keep them going, we fetch up beneath a massive statue of Lenin. All us bourgeois types labouring like proletarians! Lenin must surely love us.
Duration: 30

9 - Cops And Thieving Hotels

No racing in Russia but we still have to be fast enough to stay one step ahead of latest scam. Just don’t bother with laundry unless you fancy a midnight visit to collect the bill! Still St Petersburg is so spectacular we forget any hassles to wonder at its Czarist magnificence, and soon now we're in Estonia and racing hard on sandy tracks through pine forests. The Two Fast Ladies' Sunbeam Rapier is going too fast, surely? But then they're driving into town and getting what girls get - chat-up lines and whistles. We compare that with the way it is for men, as the Itala Boys rumble in on their mighty red car, shouting their mating calls to every woman they see.
Duration: 30

10 - A Bullet For Car No1

The Geordie Lads are in a ditch and the Aussies are trying to get their broken Holden fixed. Gotta make it to Paris somehow! And then, on the road into the capital after five weeks of hard driving, there's an extraordinary echo of something that happened 100 years ago when the first Peking-to-Paris racers were on the home stretch. The man running second then, Charles Godard, was nobbled. He was yanked out of his car by three thugs hired by the race's organizers. Can something like that that possibly be occurring again? And who is this lying in wait to ambush the Itala Boys?
Duration: 30