Weaver's Week 2025-08-10

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Why is Tom Scott pulling a funny face this time?

Monday 6 January. 6.30 in the morning. Victoria Station. Tom Scott (who you'll know because you're on The Internet) and three other blokes (Sam Denby, Adam Chase, and Ben Doyle) are about to set off on a journey around the continent.

Rules of Schengen Showdown are pleasingly simple. The playing board is all of the territories and areas in the Schengen area, the area of Europe that allows free movement of people and goods. Areas to the east and south are excluded, as is a backwards archipelago in the north-west corner of the continent. The game is played in two pairs – Tom and Sam versus Adam and Ben.

The playing board is "countries", and by "country" they mean – ah, no they don't. The Vatican City also counts as a country for the purposes of this game, Richard Osman can zip it. To claim a country, the team simply has to be in contact with the ground in it – take a train, or a taxi, or a coach, or walk in. Flying over the country doesn't count, landing at an airport does. After claiming the country, the team can lock it by completing a challenge. First team to lock a country keeps it for the remainder of the game; if neither team locks a nation then whoever claimed it first gets the point.

Jet Lag has traditionally preferred land travel, and flights come at a price. Each team is allowed € 2687 in expenses, a curiously precise figure represented on screen as "$4000". Travel on trains, buses, and ferries is covered by the show's budget, as is overnight accommodation (the pairs play 11 hours, rest 13 hours, European working time directives are honoured – and we don't suffer too much filming in the dark).

Both teams start at Victoria station in London, which doesn't score for either team. After a little shadow boxing, Tom and Sam head for the Eurostar to Brussels, while Ben and Adam make their way to Heathrow. Where are they headed?

On the journey, Tom and Sam claim France, by virtue of being on the ground first; they subsequently add Belgium. Ben and Adam land in Zürich, allowing them to claim Switzerland. A sneaky train route gives Ben and Adam the claim on Germany – although their train doesn't stop in Germany, it does pass through between two Swiss stations.

Ben and Adam also try to lock Germany, and are challenged to eat a food in the place named after it. They don't know of any food named after Waldshut (reasonable) or anything named after Baden-Württemberg (perhaps they might have been able to find Brägele). Instead, the team head off to the Black Forest, seeking some Black Forest Gateau – a task made more difficult by the fact that it's Epiphany and many shops are closed. Still, they find some cake, walk the few minutes to the Black Forest itself, and scoff.

Each team tells the other when they've claimed and locked a country, so Tom and Sam were able to bail from their plan to go to Aachen. They lock Belgium by throwing tiny sweets into the holes in a waffle, and then try to lock the Netherlands by making a particular bouquet. It turns out that the bouquet requires certain Christmas flowers that are already out of season, so is basically impossible. (Turns out that the original plan was to film this series in December, but logistics fell through.)

Psychology comes into play: Tom and Sam have to tell Ben and Adam that they've failed their task. Yes, it leaves the door open for the other team to come in and do the impossible – but Ben and Adam don't know how the task is impossible, and they'd just be wasting time and money by trying to complete it.

From this first episode, we can see that Jet Lag has its lighter moments – Tom Scott thrills members of The Tom Scott Fan Club (Maastricht chapter), and there's a recurring joke about Deutsche Bahn trains being slow and unreliable and often cancelled. Episode one ends with Tom and Sam planning to go to Brussels to pick up a flight at the airport tomorrow; Ben and Adam seem to be making tracks for Basel with designs on France.

For day two, Ben and Adam are trying to claim France by opening an Unpopular Museum. Recreate three exhibits from an existing museum, and get five people to look at it in ten minutes, but nobody can stay there for too long – five seconds means the museum is far too interesting to be boring. By putting the museum in the doorway of a station, they can get the people easily.

But – oh no! D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R-F-O-R-B-E-N-A-N-D-A-D-A-M! And that could spell disaster for Ben and Adam! One person spends – sorry, players – 5.2 seconds in the museum, and that is an interesting time, and the claim is lost. The perils of putting video evidence on the internet is that the rest of us can fact-check their claim. However, there is no DRS in this game, Ben and Adam assert their claim to France, and it's shown as such on screen. Even when it is wrong, the umpire's decision is final. (And – spoilers! – this does not alter the result of the series.)

The next showdown is who will be in Austria first. Ben and Adam have found a connection in Zürich, which should let them reach a station just over the river from Austria at 11.45. Tom and Sam are on a plane to Vienna, which should touch down at 11.40. Under the rules, Tom and Sam won't be allowed to start their Lock challenge until they're three miles from the airport – Ben and Adam could begin as soon as they hit the border.

The challenge is to play sixteen bars of "Ode to joy" on non-classical instruments. Both teams think about using bottles, Adam and Ben have glass bottles, something Tom and Sam haven't yet found. After about twenty minutes of rehearsing, Adam and Ben's bottle orchestra proves to be the winning combination – and the cliffhanger for the next episode.

Episode three sees Tom and Sam head to Hungary, where their challenge is to do exercises, multiplication sums, and drink wine. Ben and Adam make a quick trip to see all the sight of Liechtenstein, it takes them about ten minutes before they're on the bus back.

Their challenge to lock Switzerland is to re-create a scene from a previous Jet Lag at the same location, and to be completely word-perfect in thirty seconds' of dialogue. Rather than work on a terribly verbose scene in Zürich, they head to a bench at Zug station where there's slightly less witter to memorise. Adam can repeat his own lines, but the role of Sam has to be played by Ben.

Tom and Sam start day three heading towards Czechia, although the train they want onwards to Bratislava is not running today. Ben and Adam are still sitting on their bench in Zug and rehearsing their lines. Jet Lag has been running for twelve series now, and has began to create some lore of its own. Not just that Deutsche Bahn is about as useful as a chocolate teapot, but that airport security is unpredictable, tourists tend to be unable to pronounce simple places like "Zug" and "Saint-Gallen", and the whole thing has a slight whiff of American college students trying to mark places off a checklist and not really getting acquainted with the culture. Tom will later point out that it's a very stressful game, and he's right.

Eventually, finally, Ben and Adam complete the challenge. Word-perfect, and Switzerland is locked. Tom and Sam are asked to kill time: watch something dry, name 100 real women, and complete ten rounds of 20 Questions, and work out how much time it's taken. In another call-back to a past episode: Tom Scott does the human metronome, walking at a pace to keep track of time. Ben and Adam make it to Zürich airport in time for their flight to Rome, where there are travelators that go up and down.

The episode ends with Ben and Adam in the airport, and Tom and Sam finding that their "cancelled" train has magically been uncancelled, and they get seat reservations for it. But is the train actually going to appear? (Spoiler: Yes.)

The game goes on. In Bratislava, Tom and Sam need to make a royal decree from just outside two castles or palaces, while wearing a pointy hat. Ben and Adam fly to Rome, and discuss the quality (or otherwise) of in-flight catering. While in Rome, they lock the Vatican City by re-drawing The Creation of Adam, and try to get a word with then-Pope Jorge Bergoglio, but he's busy talking to his faithful.

Ben and Adam also lock Italy, after they limbo under a bar of random height ("five feet" high, about 1,50 metres, which even by this column's non-athletic standards is not taxing). It means Sam and Tom have no need to visit Rome, both options are lost. Instead, their flight to Malmo International Airport In Copenhagen allows them to claim both Sweden and Denmark.

This fourth episode is only 45 minutes long – the others were about an hour – and it really feels like they're padding things out to get to even this half-decent length. It's also worth noting that the four episodes have only covered three days of the challenge, which is meant to last for six days – looks like one of the days might be very short indeed.

Jet Lag has a budget – they can afford first-class Interrail passes (£407 / € 490 each), hotels on the night, that € 2700 per team for flights, expensive lavalier microphones). It's an artistic decision to shoot all of the film on phones, perhaps with tripods and selfie sticks, certainly with passers-by in close proximity. And, let's be fair, simple phones are more than capable of shooting professional-grade footage these days.

The show is carefully and fairly edited, with plenty of music and helpful graphics. The action cuts from one team to the other so as to drive the story on; although the result is known to the editors before they start work, us viewers cannot safely predict the outcome in advance. Sure, it feels like Tom and Sam are in the lead right now, but will they flunk the challenge and leave Sweden wide open? Or will Ben and Adam take the final day train from Tallinn down to Vilnius and nab Poland in the final minutes?

Day four (episode five) begins with Tom and Sam being asked to get a cuddly toy from Ikea. But they're opening the envelope at 7.30am, and Ikea doesn't open till 10am. Rather than waste half their day, the team throw the challenge, and give Ben and Adam some misinformation. (And the worst part: Tom knows Ikea so well that he knows the Dunkelskog is a plush toy bear.) Sam rather hopes that they can lock Denmark and make Sweden less attractive.

Over the bridge, the task is to build a Lego set of 200 pieces in less than 45 minutes – but do it while blindfolded. Special difficulty: no shops in the station sell Lego sets, and the Lego store doesn't open until 10am. But they can make their own mosaic, and perhaps that might be an all-black mosaic – naah, that's over 2000 pieces. They try to build a 200-piece truck, but it's another failed challenge – and what does feel like another Very Hard But Not Impossible challenge. And if Ben and Adam try it and fail, that's two hours they've lost and they've won nothing and there's only two-and-a-half days left in the challenge.

Ben and Adam are in the Netherlands, going to Amsterdam Centraal where there's at least four florists and a Flower Market within easy reach, and absolutely none of them require you to walk along the fietspad. Niet lopen op fietspad, je plonker! Don't walk on the cycle path, you cyclepath!

Does anyone have Christmas roses on Thursday 9 January? Any mimosa? "Nearest flower shop is closed until Monday", which is somewhat beyond their 20 minute time limit. Time runs out, and the Netherlands is going to be resolutely unstolen. It's still 7-7, and absolutely nobody has troubled the main scoreboard since yesterday. Both teams have lost the morning, Ben and Adam have lost a chunk of their flight budget.

Tom and Sam are on the plane to Helsinki, they'll claim Finland when they land. They wonder: is there a strategy to use the budget to blast through as many countries as possible? Then on to Estonia, or Norway, or shoot down to Warsaw? For Ben and Adam to claim any one of those countries, they'll have to follow Tom and Sam, and get three miles from the airport, and do the time-consuming challenges, and succeed in the time-consuming challenges. All while Tom and Sam are on the next flight to Lisbon or Monaco or Ljubliana.

Why is the tunnel at Helsinki Airport so deep? They've already seen the answer: it's Helsinki, it gets cold in the winter. Seriously cold. Like, you think the freezer section at Bejam is chilly, that's like a sauna compared to the Finnish winters. By burying the tube so far underground, it doesn't get quite so cold – the rock acts as natural insulation. The task is to reconstruct a level of Angry Birds using physical objects, and win at it.

Ben and Adam decide to go to Malmö first of all, presuming that it's a quick and easy task. We viewers know it's quick and easy, if you can find an open Ikea store. And they have (checks clock) less than an hour in the day. Which train do they need? That train. You know, the one at the far end of the platform. No, the other end. Will they catch it? [credits]

Yes, we did watch the final episode. No, we're not going to spoil the result. Go watch it for yourself.

Recently, we discussed the differences between 99 to Beat on ITV and its parent show De Alleskunner on SBS6; we concluded that De Alleskunner was a challenge show played by people, 99 to Beat was a people show where they played challenges. Jet Lag is a challenge show, and it is a logistics-travelling show, and it is a people show. And all three elements are done to a very high standard.

The challenges are interesting – all of them appear to be possible, but it is perfectly possible to fail any challenge. The logistics form an undercurrent to all the travelling: flights cost real money, ground transport is free, you've got to think about where you want to be in about nine hours' time and react to the opposition's moves. And time is something the players have to budget carefully: is it advantageous to follow the leaders, or strike out on your own?

The show's mood is lifted by the way everyone has lots of downtime. Players are well rested, well-fed, while it is a stressful pastime there are limits. Perhaps they've remembered the key lesson from Channel 4's completely non-stop show Wanted, where players and chasers might get absolutely no sleep.

And there are characters: this column came in knowing Tom Scott, and knowing that we liked Tom Scott, and we're pleased not to change our opinion. Sam is a pleasantly laid-back companion, the Caramel Bunny to Tom's Energiser Bunny. While we still cannot tell Adam and Ben apart, they seem to be nice enough people, and compliment each other well.

What we don't really get is any particular sense of the culture: Denmark is reduced to Lego, Belgium to waffles, Sweden to a furniture store. This might be an artefact of this particular challenge (they had to come up with challenges that could be done anywhere in the country), but we might have preferred to rely less on basic stereotypes.

The interplay between the teams is the fierce rivalry you get between friends. Everyone knows where the others are through trackers on their phones, there are SMS messages to claim a country, video calls when you've tried to lock it. We viewers are privy to the reactions, and we can be sure that all the players will meet up afterwards to share tales and knock back some delicious local bevvies. What, they met up in London? Weak, milky tea it is.

A lot of people have recommended Jet Lag to us over the years. We're glad they did, it's a pleasant experience, and we were sufficiently invested in the competition to see it to the conclusion. This is the state of the art, it's the yardstick by which we will measure other travelling programmes. XOXO.

A highlights brochure from ITV came thudding onto our desk this week. The Former Favourite Button will offer another series of I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!, and if we're not mistaken this will be series 25 and surely that's going to be marked in some small way. Big Brother has also been recommissioned, and they've managed to pull the wool over the eyes of more Bad Boyfriends.

Stephen Mulhern has been run out of more towns than he's had hot dinners, You Bet! On Tour sees the grinning host watch people take on remarkable feats and try to impress a panel of celebrities. Mulhern's also being pushed out of his comfort zone and sent to the far east in The Accidental Tourist; he'll be challenged to do silly things in spectacular places by Ant and Dec.

Win Win is hosted by Mel and Sue, with contestants trying to predict the views of the Grate British Public™ on matters of taste. The show's gimmick is that it's "fully interactive", people at home will also be playing and could take the show's jackpot of £1 MILLION.

Celebrity Sabotage sees a group of people trying to appear on ITV's latest series, except there are hidden cameras and pranks and jokes being pulled. Think Gladiators Epic Pranks without all the shiny lycra (though seeing as how Joel Dommett's involved, even that cannot be ruled out). Judi Love, Sam Thompson, and GK Barry the other regulars, with a host of ITV faces and prizes for all the civilian stooges.

ITV also tell us about The 1% Club Rollover, which we discussed recently. Bullseye and Parents' Evening have gone to full series, and ad-funded shows Cooking With the Stars and Dress the Nation will be with us faster than shoppers going to the sales racks on Boxing Day.

One show that ITV won't feature in a coming brochure is 99 to Beat, because they've decided not to make a second series. It's their loss: the format has been proven to work, the specific implementation had problems, but nothing that couldn't be fixed by a longer run (fewer mass eliminations, actually speaking to the winner before the semi-final).

Elis Matthews won the first Mastermind. We rather think that justice was done, as the contender took Piero della Francesca which led to lots of long and intricate answers; in his general knowledge round, he missed a couple of answers by slips of the tongue. Kumaran Sivathillainathan finished one point adrift with the short stories of Roald Dahl, and Eulalie Burrows (Dr Who Jodie Whittaker) one more point back.

The second edition of Mastermind was won by the BCCI First XI, who beat the Theoval Invincibles by a gnat's crotchet, and the series ends in a 2-2 draw. Replay at Villa Park next Tuesday, we expect.

It's pantomime season on Only Connect, and Oh No They Didn't beat the Pear Trees by half a pantomime horse, 24-21. They weren't confused by Only Fools and Horses episodes called "Big Brother" and "Who Wants to be a Millionaire"; the Pear Trees didn't recognise matriarchs on Coronation Street.

Metrophiles won the second episode, defeating Grapevines by a cancellation at Harrow-on-the-Hill, 23-19. Metrophiles might have ridden their luck, getting a couple of questions their opponents knew, and leaving a couple of points on the table. Loved the picture clues to Robbie Williams songs, simple rebuses to identify but did anyone get it before "Rock DJ". And of course we enjoyed the Bad Pun Interlude. More shows should have a Bad Pun Interlude, yes Mr. Rajan that means you.

On University Challenge, Southampton delivered the traditional drubbing to Bath, 255-70. Very strong performance from the south coast side, 66% on their bonuses and 64% overall are well above average. We're pleased that every member of the winning side got a starter, and nobody was an absolute standout on the buzzers.

Edinburgh eliminated Newcastle by 200-105. Not the prettiest of matches, Edinburgh's bonus rate a lax 55%, which was behind Newcastle's 67%. Five incorrect interruptions spoiled the flow, neither picture starter was answered correctly. On the positive side, Rayhanna Amjad proved useful on the buzzers and in the bonuses, and Edinburgh showed great promise on geography and leisure questions.

What's new this week? Tumbleweed, some has just blown in from next door. Destination X and The Fortune Hotel continue their battle midweek, there's a full Quizzy Mondays, Masterchef Goes Large and Catsdown all continue.

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