Griff Rhys Jones Crosses the Alps by Train in New Six-Part Channel 4 Series

Griff Rhys Jones is taking the train through the Alps. The Welsh comedian and presenter’s new six-part series, “Griff Across the Alps,” premieres on Saturday, October 31, at 8:00 PM on Channel 4, according to the MemorableTV listing published on October 25, with the slot also confirmed in the Channel 4 TV guide. Across the run, Rhys Jones travels the mountain range by rail, exploring how the Alps shaped the history of the continent around them.

The journey’s subject matter, as set out by the series’ distributor, Sphere Abacus, is the range as a stage for European history: Hannibal’s elephant crossing, Napoleon’s Alpine campaigns, the escape routes of the Second World War, hidden war tunnels, cheese caves and via ferrata climbing routes. MemorableTV’s episode guide makes the same argument in its own summary — that the mountains shaped Europe as much as any river or capital city, a stage on which empires marched, medieval merchants travelled and refugees fled.

The first episode, per MemorableTV’s guide, is set in France. Rhys Jones joins a mountain helicopter delivery service for a close look at Mont Blanc — at 4,810 metres, the highest peak in the Alps — then drops to the valley and the Thermes de Saint-Gervais, a thermal spa whose waters have been in use for more than 200 years. The episode also includes a search for ibex, the Alpine goat hunted close to extinction in the 19th century and since reintroduced across Haute-Savoie, along with white-water rafting, abseiling, a bike ride and a cook-up with a local chef.

One detail of the trip is in dispute between the two published accounts, and both versions are printed here. Sphere Abacus’ synopsis runs the journey from Slovenia to France, from Lake Bled to Nice. MemorableTV’s episode guide runs it the other way, from France to Slovenia, with the first episode in France around Mont Blanc and Saint-Gervais. Which end of the range the television audience starts from will be settled on screen on Saturday night; the listings and the distributor do not agree, and neither account has been corrected by the other.

The format is a familiar one for its presenter. MemorableTV describes Rhys Jones as the Welsh comedian and serial adventurer who has already taken Channel 4 audiences across Canada and Australia in the same travelogue format, boarding trains to look at each country from its railways. The Alps series applies that approach to Europe’s most historically loaded mountain range, trading the long continental rail journeys of the earlier programmes for a single range crossed in six episodes.

Channel 4’s own programme pages carry the earlier entries in the run: “Griff’s Great Australian Rail Trip,” in which he boards Australia’s trains from coast to coast, and “Griff’s Canadian Adventure,” in which he discovers what makes each of Canada’s provinces distinct. The Alps series is the format’s first European subject, and the first built around a single mountain range rather than a whole country.

“Griff Across the Alps” begins Saturday, October 31, at 8:00 PM on Channel 4. The sourcing on the series is, for now, listings and distributor material — the MemorableTV guide published October 25, the Channel 4 TV guide and Sphere Abacus’ synopsis — and the reported details above rest on those named sources.

Sources: MemorableTV; Channel 4; Sphere Abacus.