Article

Character

Culture

Film & TV

9 September 2025

5 min read

Deceit is integral to success in Destination X

Travel and trickery make for a miserable journey

Cameron Wiltshire-Plant

Cameron is training to be a vicar in the city of Leicester.

A composite images show a map of Europe with Destination X contestants pictures above.

BBC.

Like me, you may have recently been watching Destination X, where 13 contestants compete to win £100,000 by guessing where the coach they are travelling on has stopped. Blocked from seeing out of the windows and given just a few clues to their locations, the contestants have to work out where they are. Similar to Traitors, it tries to give reality TV a respectability while also providing the gossipy drama that underpins the format.

Opportunities for extra clues are possible, with contestants competing against each other to receive them. Only some of the competitors are allowed to view the extra clues. This secret knowledge quickly causes thirteen pretty nice contestants to mistrust, lie, suspect, accuse, and keep secrets. After three new players are added in, there is a clear divide between the ‘OGs’ and the rest. It reminded me of Lord of the Flies, with alliances, rivalries, and judgements of player’s usefulness taking scarily little time to flourish.

The breaking of societal expectations to be truthful, reliable, and work for the common good is perhaps the appeal of these shows. The Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments still underpin the Western world, and lying, greed, and selfishness are all still denounced as wrong by mainstream ethics. There is an enormous amount of talk in Destination X, as there is in the Traitors, about ‘playing the game;’ legitimising breaking normal behaviour in order to win the competition. We watch on, enjoying the chance to wonder how we would manage in a world where lying, cheating, and manipulating is expected and encouraged by the rules of the game.

The thing is, breaking these rules seems to make everybody so miserable. In the first episode, Deborah won a big clue, chose only to share it with one teammate, and was so burdened by the guilty secret that she lost the first location test and left the game immediately. In another episode, some OGs win a challenge and choose to deliberately misinform the others, including the rest of their gang. When the disinformation is revealed, and directly causes the exit of another OG, the sense of guilt as others realise the deception is plain to the viewer. Time after time, players begrudge ‘the game’ for the lies they are telling- but it is their own decision to keep the secrets to themselves.

Perhaps the most striking thing is how quickly people lose track of the artifice of the game, and how integral to their reality their deceit has become. Towards the end of the series, as the money gets closer, the contestants harden further towards each other, and deception seems to come more easily. Perhaps this is why the guilt makes them miserable- with a little encouragement, their sense of right or wrong has disintegrated into instinct for survival.

The people that seem to be having the best time on Destination X are Daren and Claire, perhaps the two players who are happy to trust their colleagues the most, and lie to them the least. Both of them do better in the competition than other contestants who embrace a selfish and cynical approach.

Obviously these shows are games, and the contestants exit to their normal lives and resume being nice people. But they reveal a deeper truth that living cynically does not make a person happy. Although lying, cheating, and making the most of advantages might bring wealth, success, power, fame, and so on, living selfishly only makes a person miserable.

People who lie or cheat may seem to get ahead, but it only poisons their heart.

This reveals our design as humans to be communal, selfless beings. Describing the state of humanity before evil entered the world, the first verses of the book of Genesis describe a generous care between the first humans and their world. The very first books of the law in the Old Testament continually exhort God’s people to show love to their neighbour and compassion upon foreigners and the poor.

Jesus used to have this great phrase for those who would follow his teaching for a selfless life. He said that they would inherit ‘life to the full,’ or ‘life that is truly living.’ It was his conviction that simple acts like telling the truth, desiring others to prosper, and being generous were the way to a content and satisfied life.

But the kicker in Jesus’ teaching was not just that the person would receive a more satisfied life, but that each act would make the person more Godly. These acts stack together- to make a life of generosity rather than selfishness that nourishes our humanity- but also to form us towards being a better human. It creates a virtuous circle. A good act leads to a purer heart which leads to another good act. St Paul terms this ‘going from glory to glory’ in one of his letters encouraging a congregation to do just so. This circle deepens the contentment in the ‘life that is truly living’ that Jesus promises- living as God created humans to do reaps the relational, communal satisfaction that God intended the human experience to contain.

It works the other way too. People who lie or cheat may seem to get ahead, but it only poisons their heart. Becoming de-sensitised to their acts, further selfishness follows. Each act separates them further from the human experience they were designed to enjoy, and dissatisfaction follows. Often this is exacerbated by more attempts to cover the feeling with selfish ambition.

People who treat the real world like competitors treat Destination X, as a game to be won, with prizes that come at the cost of disinheriting others, may find wealth or power. But they will not find the contentment of life to the full that the way of Jesus offers and their humanity craves.

Whilst we sit at home enjoying players’ ability to break cultural taboos and suffer the emotional consequences, we might reflect that it is better to be content than victorious- and miserable.

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Column

Books

Character

Culture

Time

19 June 2025

4 min read

The true myths we tell about how we got here

Memoirs are the stories that make us who we are

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

Jon Tyson on Unsplash.

I’ve been asked to write a memoir. It’s because I’ve been an Anglican priest for 20 years and it’s been quite a ride – deployed to a tube station when the terrorist bombs went off on 7 July 2005, served the Archbishop of Canterbury as the child-abuse catastrophe unfolded, been the religion editor of a national newspaper and helped countless people to die and to marry as a rural parish rector.

So, I suppose it meets the minimum criterion that a memoir shouldn’t be about me so much as the events through which I passed. But it also raises questions about what a memoir is for, as well as what it’s about. I wonder about its purpose and that leads to choices of style.

I had in mind a hybrid fiction model, in which the only made-up character was me, heightening the drama of it all by being maybe bisexual and a cokehead (neither of which I have been) who encounters all the real and interesting people that I have. That might at least make it a bigger challenge for libel lawyers.

A publisher at lunch this week persuaded me that this is a very bad idea. Commercial fiction is where the action is and literary fiction (even if I could do it) is dead. It has to fit in one of the silos that people will buy – crime, romance, fantasy and so on. And I’m an old, white man, to boot.

But memoir is a good stable, she said, and it didn’t need to be a dull, linear narrative. In fact it mustn’t be that. I’m beginning to think it must be a drama and, as such, as creative an act as fiction.

So, not history. Or maybe, like history, it depends on how you look at it and how we remember. As someone quite famous remarked recently, recollections may vary. And we all have an agenda in relating them. Memoir is not a record, it’s about experience, emotion, interpretation and score-settling (I’m looking forward to that last bit).

The most obvious exemplar of this is the political memoir, which lately has ticked towards being written by the spouses of politicians. Salacious revelation seems to be the currency here, all the better if a former prime minister is alleged to have said he’d like to drag you into the undergrowth and give you one.

Memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub.

One rather hopes, for reasons of aesthetics as much as decorum, that this indicates that memoir is as much about what times were like as about being a simple record of them. This makes sense as I face the prospect, for example, of relating being with a 26-year-old mother of two as she died.

If it’s such an essentially subjective exercise, then memoir is a poor country cousin of history. Some have made it consciously so in their titles – Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs and Python Graham Chapman’s A Liar’s Autobiography come to mind.

Incidentally, memoir is also the embarrassing uncle of autobiography. It amounts only to what we remember, as we wave a glass about in the pub, rather than the marshalling of peer-approved facts. This is what makes it so sensationally subjective. I remember standing alone in a boorish institution, heroically speaking truth to power. You remember a blithering idiot. The difference is I’ve got a publisher.

In this sense, memoirs are the stories that make us who we are. Or, naturally, who we’d like to be, or like to be seen as. In ancient Greek terms, we deploy our mythos rather than our logos, our allegory rather than our empirical reality.

But, again, these stories make us who we are. And not just the stories we tell. The stories of our nations are similarly formative. The stories that the world’s major faiths tell also define us, whether we believe them or not.

The Christian gospels are memoirs. The first three of them attempt to describe what happened. The fourth, John, is rather more allegorical. But they all, in the Jewish tradition of storytelling, in one way or another seek to describe what it was like to be in the insurgent Nazarene movement, as much as what actually happened.

Matthew, the tax-collector, writes for his audience of Jews. Luke is concerned with what it all means for the poor – and not just those economically so. Mark, first out of the trap, wants to consider what it all means for non-Jews. Their recollections may vary. But it’s reckless to suggest that this invalidates their testimony.

My memoir will contain no gospel truth. But there’s no point in embarking on an exercise that is only about what happened over 20 years of priesthood. It has to be about what it was like too.

I think that its epigraph may read: “Nothing in this book happened. Everything in it is true.”