Race Across the World series 1

[2] The first series featured five pairs of competitors at the start of the race: Natalie and Shameema, Jinda and Bindu, Darron and Alex, Josh and Felix, and Sue and Clare.

[4] Retired PE teachers Elaine and Tony Teasdale were the first to reach the final checkpoint in Singapore, and were crowned the winners.

[7] Colour key: The checkpoints in the first series were: The race started from Old Royal Naval College in London, finishing the first leg at the Amalia Hotel in Delphi, Greece.

They quickly spent this on a train to Budapest and a coach to Athens, swapping buses to reach Delphi on the sixth day.

As they came last in the previous leg, Elaine & Tony chose to travel non-stop by train and bus to Tbilisi, and managed to reach Baku in first place on Day 13.

Elaine & Tony travelled by taxis exclusively over a thousand miles from Kazakhstan until Samarkand, partly financing their spending spree by working as farm hands at a nomadic camp in the Kyzylkum Desert.

[19] Natalie & Shameema took advantage of a free car ride from Kuryk; however, their departure was delayed for 36 hours while their driver made arrangements for his trip.

Darron & Alex went to Chengdu, where they worked in a flower shop to earn money, before using local knowledge to find the fastest connections.

All the other teams travelled to Xi'an before heading south to Guilin in Guangxi, although Natalie & Shameema went to Jiayuguan first to see the Great Wall of China at Jiayu Pass.

Elaine & Tony were a long way behind the other teams, so they decided to spend money on taxis and express train to reach Vietnam before the border closed for the night.

Darron & Alex, despite a 22-hour advantage on their closest rivals, had to work in Hội An selling sugarcane juice as they were running low on funds, which allowed Elaine & Tony to catch up with them and they crossed the Cambodian border on the same bus.

Both Josh & Felix and Natalie & Shameema opted for the southern route, and ended up on the same train to Ho Chi Minh City.

Although their bus broke down in Malaysia, they were the first team to reach the last checkpoint on the observation deck at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore, ahead of Darron & Alex.

[20] Jeff Robson of the i newspaper regarded the series "flawed but engaging", and considered that although the show lacked the "challenges of some extreme travelogues, nor the sense of peril", it "succeeded in recreating the combination of unexpected highlights, soul-destroying lows and crucial budget decisions which characterised old-school seat of the pants travel".