In Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip, three sassy women from three different generations headed to Colorado to follow in the footsteps of Isabella Bird, a British explorer who moved to cowboy country in 1873.
But somebody at the BBC thinks women won’t be able to relate to the story of a pioneering Victorian, who left her sickbed in England to scale the Rockies, without riotous giggles at horse’s willies and girly renditions of “Wannabe” in the back of a badly driven Range Rover (women drivers, right?).
So wedded to this puerile perception of “girls do adventure travel” is this commissioner that they have even recruited an actual Spice Girl. Mel B, aka Scary Spice, aka Melanie Brown, joined Ruby Wax and Emily Atack, a comedian/actor best known for her role in The Inbetweeners, for the journey.
Bird initially hoped the fresh mountain air would improve her ailing health and ended up travelling over 800 miles on horseback and taking up with an infamous one-eyed outlaw known as Mountain Jim. She’s a fascinating character who challenged societal norms, communing with nature and herding cattle with cowboys. Combined with the magnificent terrain and the oddities of America’s interior (The Rocky Mountain oysters served to the gang early on? Turns out they’re bull testicles), the entertainment value of this three-episode show should have been a shoe-in.
But the insistence on girly chat and comical timidity felt like misogyny masquerading as feminism (like much of the 90s/Spice Girls era, in fact). “Who’s going to sob first?” cackled Wax as if they were about to be put in solitary confinement for three weeks rather than go on quite a nice jolly around one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
There was a lot of discussion about Atack’s love life and much singing to Whitney Houston and Lizzo. What could have been a moving discussion about Atack’s concerns over her fertility felt diminished by quick platitudes and the speed at which the show moved on to sillier stuff.
Our intrepid trio herded cattle and learnt that a third of Colorado’s ranchers are women but, of course, back in Bird’s day none of them would have been. They got sore thighs riding astride, just like Bird, and they all (presumably not like Bird) laughed at one stallion’s phallus, helpfully pixelated for the modestly minded viewer.
Wax, Brown and Atack eventually attempted to climb (with the help of ropes and a professional) a local peak. The latter two were in fact pretty good, making their way to the top of quite a sheer rock face. And yet, still, the focus was on their shrieks of terror and their jokey attempts to motivate each other by invoking a sort of bitchy competitiveness.
One can’t help but feel much of the problem was in the editing. The three women did show a real appetite for the climbing, the fishing, the horse riding. They appreciated the extraordinary views, Bird’s courage and Atack gamely knocked back those bull testes. And there’s nothing wrong with some good girly chat.
But a disproportionate amount of camera time was spent on them whingeing as they squeezed into fishing outfits or shrewdly observed things like: “It’s hard to imagine someone coming here before there was any kind of civilisation at all. No Starbucks.” Trailblazers felt like a deliberate attempt to make women seem naturally ill-suited to the terrain and for viewers to be extra wowed when they were able to give it a go anyway.
The attempts to draw parallels between Bird and our female hosts were clunky (isn’t societal pressure to consider your fertility constraining?) and the thing is, we didn’t need it. The very premise of the show – three female entertainment stars tracing her steps 150 years later – is evidence of how much has changed, not how much they might have had in common. Bird’s story is remarkable all on its own.
Wax and Brown have an OBE and an MBE between them, and Atack is a successful comedian in a male-dominated industry. All three women could be seen as feminist trailblazers, yet little of their prowess was on display here.
Still, the history and the views were nice.
