It’s not as if there’s ever a shortage of travel programmes on our screens, but Madventures clearly has something different: the two hosts are Finnish, they backpack without a crew and they only go to the world’s most dangerous, bizarre and downright bone-chilling places.
With Riku Rantala in front of the camera and his old school friend Tunna Milonoff behind it, the pair’s ‘Madventures’ include locating a cannibalistic, cremation ground-dwelling cult in India, where they watch devotees drink urine and gulp the heads of live chickens, joining Filipino families who live and sleep in graveyards, tracking down former cannibal tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, dancing at West African Voodoo ceremonies where the faithful bite the heads off live puppies, and being vomited on by prostitutes in Japanese hotels.
The complete absence of a crew or voice-over gives the show a racy, immediate style a world away from the ‘looking back on your holiday video’ calmness of Michael Palin’s travel documentaries. It’s as if you’re there when the Madventurers duck from gunshots in Brazilian Favelas, take mind-altering drugs from Amazon shamans or bungee-jump off buildings in deadly radiation-filled areas of the Ukraine.
But the series is not all heart-stopping danger. There’s comedy too. The portly Riku allows women to eat sushi off his naked body in Japan as well as purchasing a Japanese ‘love robot’, and the pair play ‘paper, scissor, stone’ to decide who must eat a live fish, consume a human placenta or knock back a marijuana-based cocktail.
Equally, the fact that they are constantly speaking English even to each other gives the show a very quirky style. They revert into Finnish only when genuinely spooked or as a means of getting round being spied upon in some of the dictatorships they visit. The pair also ‘work’ nicely as a double act: Riku, bald and built like a barrel, is both temperamental and fearless; the lanky Tunna, with his flowing hair, is far more nervous. Interestingly, he was the first of the two to go backpacking, wittily deciding to go to India (Intia in Finnish) to avoid his INTI (Finnish military service). Upon his return, he persuaded Riku to join him on his next jaunt.
There are one or two gripes. Some bits have obviously been scripted, and the duo’s defence of Cultural Relativism becomes a bit preachy at times. The DVDs include various intiguing extras, mostly in Finnish and subtitled in English, which are certainly worth seeing. Watching Madventures, it’s no surprise that it was voted Finland’s best programme of 2009 and has been bought up worldwide.
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