The Americas with Simon Reeve S01 720p iP WEB-DL AAC2.0 H.264-playWEB

Simon Reeve begins his most ambitious journey yet, travelling the entire length of the Americas.

Genre: Travel
Stars: Simon Reeve

The Americas with Simon Reeve review - a travelogue to test even the zestiest presenter

Carol Midgley

Monday October 07 2019, 12.01am BST, The Times

"e;Champagne!"e; I imagine the Canadian tourist board said on hearing that the BBC was making a documentary travelling through Canada. Then I imagine their faces turned a little sad. Because the first episode of The Americas with Simon Reeve, in which he will travel the length of the two continents, was not a reverie on spectacular landscapes, caribou and grizzly bears. It was about dirty oil, people living in freezing hovels while down the road billions of dollars were being made, a drug overdose crisis in Vancouver and hundreds of indigenous women going missing, presumed dead, to indifference from the police. Maybe cancel the fizz.

Reeve is never not good company, propelled by his sheer zest for life, but positivity evaded even him on parts of this grim but absorbing journey. It was hard to watch that interview with the teenager whose mother had disappeared a year earlier and hadn't even been spoken to by the police. In shock and trauma he kept saying: "e;My mum's a good woman ... She's a nice woman."e; As a snapshot it was bleak and heartbreaking.

As was the item on the poor middle-aged woman living in an Alberta shack with no running water trying to shield herself against cold, which can reach minus 50C, with a flimsy curtain; her toilet was a commode. Locals can't afford homes on this prime land where crude oil is mined. This woman had one tiny heater on wheels; it was her apparent gratitude for what pitifully little she had that was the most moving.

In Vancouver Reeve looked on as local authorities shovelled up the pathetic belongings of the pavement homeless and dumped them. There is an opioid overdose epidemic there, although we can hardly clutch our pearls since the Office for National Statistics has revealed a record 726 homeless people died on the streets of Britain last year.

But there was beauty in this documentary too, noticeably at the beginning, in the Alaskan mountains, where Reeve said that the landscape reduced him to tears. But, ah, depressing news here also, with global warming melting the snow and nature "e;taking a beating"e;. Was I the only one thinking: "e;Well it won't help, will it, landing a plane on that glacier?"e;

General
Complete name: The.Americas.with.Simon.Reeve.S01E01.720p.iP.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-playWEB.mkv
Format : Matroska
Duration : 59 min 14 s

Video
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec: Bit rate : 5 058 kb/s
Width : 1 280 pixels
Height : 720 pixels
Frame rate : 50.000 FPS

Audio
Format/Info : Advanced Audio Codec: Bit rate : 128 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Language : English

Subtitles : English, English SDH

Screens