It was the “across the world” element of the BBC’s popular race series that motivated Andrew Clifford, 54, and his daughter Molly, 23, to apply for the show rather than the race itself. Season six’s feel-good family contestants come from the town of Maghera, Mid-Ulster; the trip embodied “the total opposite of what we’d done previously as a family”, explains Molly.
The Clifford’s holidays had been “very standard, very traditional”, she tells The i Paper. Her father’s job as a teacher meant that summer holidays were long. “We went to France a couple of times when I was really tiny. Otherwise, we had a caravan in Donegal that we would have been in all summer, playing on the beach all day. We have family all over Ireland, so we would go down to places like Sligo and Dundalk. We had the best time.”
For Andrew, it was also about life-stage. “Jo and Kush [their 19-year-old rival contestants] have time on their hands, but at my age, it’s more about the opportunities than the outcome”, he says. “It has taken a long personal journey to realise that.” He emphasises that the pair was particularly open to meeting people. “Every opportunity that we had, it was [the desire] to stay in people’s homes.”
They applied while Molly was studying for her final exams as a junior doctor. “I found out the day before my graduation that we were going on the show. It was the weirdest ceremony”, she laughs.
They had only been able to tell a very small group of close family members. For everyone else, the cover story was that they were going to Peru. That included the adventure outfitting shop in which they had to politely but firmly decline recommendations for kit suitable for Patagonia, knowing that they’d be on another continent altogether.
The eldest of three siblings, there was no question that it would be Molly who’d join her father for the trip. “There’s a joke in the family about all the reasons my wife wouldn’t do it”, says Andrew. “As a friend, Molly’s a close number two to my wife.” He explains that their relationship is one with a tacit acknowledgment of when to move on from arguments, something that would be invaluable during the more testing moments of the journey.
At a stage in life when you begin to reflect on your legacy, Andrew also has a profound sentimentality about the journey, both literally and metaphorically. He says that when Molly, his oldest daughter was born, he promised her “the sun, the moon and the stars. [Race Across the World] was me trying to fulfil that promise.”
They had never been anywhere like the places on their 12,000 kilometre race route from Palermo in Italy to Hatgal in Mongolia, which included Mount Nemrut in Turkey and the Kazakh port city of Aktau on the Caspian Sea. “Daddy’s a geography teacher, but I didn’t even know how to spell a lot of the places”, says Molly.
So far, they have maintained a steady third and fourth place at each of the five checkpoints, but Molly is keen to correct the assumption that they’re easy going. “We’re uber competitive. That was the fun element of the trip. We knew we only had to win one leg.”
Andrew adds that they would “race when we had to” while ensuring that they didn’t miss the invaluable opportunities of each destination.
This is evident when they hike to the summit of 2,134 metre Mount Nemrut, where they drink in the sunrise that glows on the colossal limestone statues of Greco-Roman and Persian deities around them. Andrew stands in awe, clearly moved by the ancient wonder and natural phenomenon, while a frustrated Molly wants to keep moving, keen to meet people rather than linger at the summit of the ancient mountain sanctuary.
They also learnt from one another, Molly acknowledging that she would never have hiked up the mountain without her father’s encouragement. “I would have probably followed Harrison and Katie’s path, sticking to cities. He [Andrew] dragged me out of my comfort zone.”
When they are set back by a missed train departure in Khiva, Uzbekistan, Molly is frustrated to tears. “I was in one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and I was just so deflated. The only thing I was thinking about was that it had been a nightmare to get there, and a nightmare to get out. Isn’t that such a sad way to travel, thinking about how you’re going to leave when you get there? But daddy very quickly pulled me out. And then a random guy came up to me and gave me a hug.”
Despite plenty of alien environments, such as crossing the Uzbek steppe by train from the 2,500 year-old oasis city of Khiva, with its tiled mosques and minarets, to the monumental Silk Road city of Bukhara, it was Italy that captured Molly’s imagination. “Maratea was amazing. It was the tiniest village, and so like home. We stayed with a sailor and the whole place came to life when he was there. We were high as kites when we left.”
Andrew adds that there were places in Kazakhstan that he’d happily go back to, and even live in. “Old women would get up on the underground and offer us their seat, just because we were visitors.”
The most profound sentiments he has taken away from the experience are that “the world is a lovely place. People are kind and helpful”, but also the journey of watching his daughter going into adulthood and becoming a friend. Watching her barter a taxi fare down from $100 among a sizeable group of men in Uzbekistan, he says that “it proved to me what I’ve known all along, that she’s a very capable young woman. I was busting to get home to my wife and tell her what a good job we’ve done with her.
“She’s got the skills, the abilities. She’s also got away with an awful lot because she’s as tight as a duck’s arse with money! Poor Harrison has been getting in the neck [about being shrewd with money]. But Molly was fastidious with the budget. She created a book with every receipt of every bit of money we spent.” Molly adds: “I think me and Harrison would have got to Mongolia with 90 per cent of the budget remaining if we’d been in control together.”
Similarly, Molly has seen her father in a different light: “He’s not my daddy, he’s also my friend. Those moments when I thought, ‘Okay we can do this, and work this out together.’”
However, since returning from filming last September and taking time out before her degree this autumn, Molly’s next adventure will be solo. “I’m going to Peru! The lie that I told everyone, I am actually going to live out. After filming, friends would ask me things like what the national dish was, and I’d have to Google it.” Now she’ll be able to tell them the truth.
Andrew is going back to teaching and then taking his wife on a “compensation gift” holiday as Molly calls it, to see the fjords in Norway in the summer. And after that? More of those precious journeys together, they hope.
Race Across the World is on BBC One at 8pm and also on BBC iPlayer
