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Celebrity Race Across the World is back on our screens with a new line-up of stars hoping to smash out a route that spans from Borneo, across Southeast Asia, to Australia.
Among the racers for 2026 are Princess and Junior Andre, Sam Ryder, Ella Eyre and Jeff Stelling, who are now embarking on a mammoth 7,500 km journey.
Except they aren’t quite racing right now, because the expedition across two continents and five checkpoints was filmed some months ago, involving a huge crew on the ground.
The episodes are produced by Studio Lambert, which is also the production company behind another megahit on the BBC, The Traitors and Celebrity Traitors.
The team have lifted the lid on the entire production process, including how exactly the camera team manage to follow around the pairs each step of the way.
Stephen Redding, who competed in the 2024 civilian series of the show alongside his wife Viv, previously said his expectations for how the show is filmed were way off base.
‘I thought at the start of the race that we just race and the camera people run around us and film what we do,’ he told Televisual. ‘But the teams of people and the background stuff that makes television is huge.’
Each pair on the show has their own team along for the ride, which includes two camera people, a sound person, a medic and a vehicle to follow along all the action.
It goes without saying, but at no point does the crew give competitors a guiding hand or intervene when they make a mammoth mistake. Instead, they have to go along with the duo’s decisions on the hoof.
‘I did feel for our crew on a number of occasions,’ Viv said after competing on the show. ‘We would suddenly book tickets for a 30-hour ride and they’d somehow have to get the logistics of getting the follow vehicle to the destination where we were going.
‘Half the crew had to come with us on the train. The other half were dashing in a car to get ahead of us coming off of the train. We just decided on the spur of the moment that we would buy these tickets and all hell would break loose.’
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Studio Lambert’s Kezia Walker has described filming the show as a 24-hour operation, saying in an interview in 2025 that it requires a team of 65-70 people in separate sections, including those trailing the teams.
‘The embedded teams, who are racing with the contributors, are an incredible set of humans,’ she told Sony. ‘Whatever the contributors are doing, they are doing.
‘If they’re on an overnight bus, so are they. So that’s a producer who shoots on a Sony FX3, like a small handheld camera, so they’re very nimble, with an assistant producer who is logging everything that’s going on, monitoring the sound, telling us about all the stories.
‘Then a medic who’s travelling with that team and then we have a researcher who are wrangling all of the rushes, who, if they’re jumping on a train, they’re filming that train leaving and following behind them in a support vehicle.’
In addition to those crew members on the ground with the contributors, there is a team at the checkpoints who are planning the race and managing the welfare of everyone involved. They’re also on hand to shoot those epic drone shots and any B-roll that might be needed to plug gaps along the way.
Lucy Curtis from Studio Lambert explained: ‘There needs to be 24-hour coverage, which is one of the reasons we have the London team and the location team operating at all hours of the day and night.’
The crew also does a recce of the entire Race Across The World route beforehand, which will feed into the approach when filming the real thing, since they will have a rough idea of the route celebs/civilians will take.
Celebrity Race Across The World airs on BBC One on Wednesdays from 8pm.
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