One of the distinct pleasures of the streaming TV era is renewed every time old friends Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman mount up for another epic motorcycling trek in their “Long Way” series.
The latest, “Long Way Home,” plays up their easygoing rapport and personal charm as they travel from Scotland through the Netherlands, into Scandinavia, above the Arctic Circle, and back down via the Baltic states — 17 countries “in our own backyard.”
McGregor, who just turned 54, and Boorman (59 in August) started doing these shows twenty years ago. They’re older and give themselves less of an exploring “challenge” than they did on the arduous and epic “Long Way Round,” in which they motorcycled around the world, through Europe, Siberia and Mongolia and North America, “Long Way Down,” where they ventured south through the Middle East and Africa to South Africa, or “Long Way Up,” where they rode electric motorcycles up to LA from Tierra del Fuego at the bottom of the Americas.
Boorman, an actor and the son of the famous filmmaker John Boorman (“Excalibur,” “Deliverance”), is the more avid biker and the one with many more awful crashes under his belt, and the stitches and metal reinforcements in his busted bones to prove it.
McGregor’s film and series TV career has made him a familiar face around the world squeezes in these jaunts between bigs. You have to wonder what sort of insurance he carries.
Here, the idea is that the two fiftysomethings will ride “tempermental” 50 year-old bikes — McGregor’s vintage Moto Guzzi Eldorado California Highway Patrol cruiser, and Boorman’s more practical (lighter, higher ground clearance) BMW R75/5.
The “Long Way” series is more of a travelogue than any of the similiar “Top Gear/Grand Tour” treks as these two actually meet people, tap into local customs, brush off fame — “You’re in movies, no?” — and cheerfully camp and bike over some of the most striking scenery on Earth.
“Long Way Home” has them camping beside a Dutch windmill, visiting a 900 year-old Viking church, ax-throwing, stripping for a seriously “traditional” Swedish sauna, freezing their bums off in June snow-flurries in “awe” inspiring Norway, flying up to Svalbard Island, motoring through Finland into Estonia before making their way to France and “home.”
They crack up and crack each other up along the way — “Tick check!” — roughing it and falling over and poking fun like the two old mates that they must be.
“What a strange couple of guys we are,” they say. But not really. They’re just blokes, pals, mates — actors, one more privileged than the other, more “collectors” and “enthusiasts” than guys who can do all their own repairs.
But a few bent frame parts is how they get help from Malmo, Sweden’s “Odd Luck Garage” bikers’ club. Checking out Scandinavian seaweed cuisine is how they meet a couple of traveling musicians busking and gigging around Europe, with McGregor breaking out the ukulele for a little song himself.
They make sure to stop in Copenhagen to visit the world’s largest nonprofit NGO warehouse, a gigantic UNICEF facility (McGregor and Boorman are both celebrity ambassadors for UNICEF), a little righteous plug of the sort you won’t see on those other road trip series.
They pause to chat up Hugo, a Swedish lad of 17 with a low-rider Volvo wagon that’s “learner’s permit” limited to 30km per hour, try a little “day drinking” with jolly German shooting club members, take dips in the Baltic and see the best scenery in Denmark and many of the other places they visit, driving hairpin-turn roads through all sorts of weather.
Every now and then, we get to be impressed by the Rivian electric trucks (barely mentioned in this series, perhaps there was no endorsement deal) that they’ve used as support vehicles since “Long Way Up.” Much of the world learned about Rivians through their “Long Way” exploits.
The production values on these shows has grown more polished over the years, with lots of drone shots peppering this one as they roll up on some guys filming a flight-suit stunt off the walls of a fjord or head farthest north to Spitzbergen, island of “Ice, Snow and Bears.”
There’s little drama — no hint of McGregor’s messy personal life as the shows rattled through a messy divorce — and no “staged” crises juice up the narrative. There’s a sense of leisure in these programs, allowing more immersion in this experience.
And there’s a sentimentality about how these two have stayed close and stayed on bikes as they did. The last couple of series have shared a sort of finality, as if the unspoken “We’re getting too old for this” is a big reason for take off a couple of months for one more (less grueling) 7500 mile ride.
Snippets of their earlier adventures are edited in as Boorman and McGregor reminisce over this magical or comical moment or that past test of man and machine.
“Long Way Home” may let us hope they haven’t read the end of their “road” together. But it may be coming on the time when one or both is ready to switch to from two wheels to three.
Rating: TV-PG, a touch of nudity
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Charley Boorman, David Alexanian, Russ Malkin and Mary Elizabeth Winstead
Credits: Directed by David Alexanian and Russ Malkin. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 10 episodes, @:37-:50 minutes each
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