Manchan's European Railways (RTÉ One, Sunday 6.30pm) is part travelogue, part environmental citizenship rallying cry and the first stage of a journey of redemption. Presenter Manchan Magan, a writer and documentary maker, has been flying around the world since his early twenties, leaving a huge carbon footprint. Now he's trying to do something better – travelling around Europe by train, boat and bicycle.
He starts in Dublin and takes a ferry to Wales, where he visits a quarry and slides down a terrifying zipwire before catching a train to London and the Eurostar to Belgium. After breakfasting on waffles, he visits a museum themed around Tintin (who looks a bit like Tintin) and the Smurfs, then stops at a community centre in the Congo for some dancing.
Even back when he was racking up airline miles, Magan was a thoughtful travel journalist, not the kind of person you'd ask for recommendations for sun-soaked vacations, but someone who could talk about the restorative power of a month in Central Africa (he went there in his 20s, at a time when he needed to find himself and clear his head).
His on-screen characters are like quirky professors who like to hang out, the kind of tweed-clad academics who can recite Joyce off-the-cuff but turn up to deans' meetings in mismatched socks — a sort of Wes Anderson Alan Wicker Hector O'Chogwan remixed by the Coen brothers.
Magan is easy-going company and there's a unique calm to his on-screen presence. Crucially, he's never preachy or didactic, which is important when producing a TV show (and accompanying podcast) that tackles the climate crisis and its potential impact on viewers' lifestyles, many of whom may already feel taxed too heavily to give anything more (including, of course, their licence fee).
Magan is careful not to lecture his audience about how terrible it is to do what he's done for decades. “I'm not trying to campaign or tell other people to do anything,” he says, in one of his many thoughtful and charming asides to the camera. “I know I've carried more passengers than I should have.”
He's also likely to acknowledge that his vision of travel isn't for everyone. For each leg of the journey, for example, he compares the carbon emissions of the same trip by plane, which is obviously much more environmentally damaging, but the show makes no price comparisons. It's hard not to see Magan's holiday as one of those 19th-century Grand Tours: laid-back, cultured, rich-only.
For example, the time it will take will certainly be an issue for many: upon arriving in Amsterdam, Magan cheerfully declares that she can be home in around 18 hours. That's great if you have the time, but more daunting when you've got three kids in tow and a boss who expects you to be at your desk first thing on Monday morning.
Still, the series is aesthetically pleasing and gives a real sense of the places he passes through: in the Netherlands, he makes a random stop in a town called Breda, which seems like a Benelux version of Mullingar or Athlone, and is overjoyed to discover a cycle lane that runs through the station.
At St Pancras in London, he speaks enthusiastically of being blown away by the station, but I wonder if he has ever been to Dublin Connolly during rush hour, when all the trains are running 20 minutes late and the platforms suddenly disappear from the information boards, leaving him confused as to which platform he was supposed to catch.
Some versions of “Europe Railroad” go out of their way to make viewers feel guilty about their city trip to Reykjavik or their weekend getaway to Barcelona's Primavera music festival. Magan knows that yelling at people is counterproductive. Instead, he delivers an enjoyably watchable travelogue that makes the trans-European express seem like the most fun thing in the world, despite all its possible impracticalities.
