The first dedicated travel show on BBC radio for more than a decade was welcomed by Patricia Nicol in her column for this week’s Culture section of The Sunday Times. Your Place or Mine with Shaun Keaveny (BBC Sounds) sells itself as “the travel show that’s going nowhere”. In each episode, a guest sets out to sell a favourite place to Keaveny and his fellow presenter, Iszi Lawrence, trying to persuade them to give up the comforts of home to try out an unfamiliar destination — or, as Keaveny puts it, to talk them into “swapping Gogglebox for the Gatwick Express”. The first series of 10 episodes includes Sarah Kendall, the stand-up comedian, on her home town of Newcastle, Australia; Ching He Huang, the food writer, on her birthplace of Taipei; Aatif Nawaz, the comedian and cricket commentator, on his parents’ birthplace, Lahore; and Guy Garvey, lead singer and lyricist of Elbow (born in Bury, Greater Manchester), on New York.
While largely appreciative of the new show, Nicol laments the scrapping in 2012 of Excess Baggage, presented by John McCarthy, which “informed a wanderlust but also grappled with the ethics of tourism”.
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