What is Clive Myrie's Caribbean Adventure?
Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure is a new BBC Two travel series from newsreader Clive Myrie, following on from last year’s Clive Myrie’s Italian Road Trip. The series will follow Clive as he travels through the Caribbean, including to Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica.
When is Clive Myrie's Caribbean Adventure on TV?
The first episode of Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure will be broadcast on BBC Two at 6.30pm on Monday 27 May 2024. There will be 15 episodes altogether. All episodes will also be available to watch on BBC iPlayer from Monday 27 May.
Who is Clive Myrie?
Clive Myrie was born on 25 August 1964 in Farnworth, near Bolton in Lancashire, and is 59 years old. He is famous for presenting BBC News and Mastermind.
Read an interview with Clive Myrie about Clive Myrie's Caribbean Adventure and his family history:
When the BBC gave Clive Myrie the green light for Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure, he was surprised. Having been asked to come up with ideas for another travel series, he put forward a number of suggestions. The Caribbean was “pretty near the bottom of the list”, if only because of the unavoidable expense.
Instead, he reveals, “The BBC said, ‘We want you to go the Caribbean, there is no question about it, but we’ll give you the same budget as you had for Italy.’ ” At which point Myrie, speaking from his home in North London, starts laughing. While he got to visit some idyllic places, the costs meant his filming schedule was demanding.
Nevertheless, you can understand Auntie’s enthusiasm for the project. Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure reflects his professional skills as a senior news journalist and foreign correspondent. It offers a mix of travelogue and reportage, while also rooting the programme in Myrie’s more personal reflections about his own family history and what it means to be a black Briton.
Although he was born and raised in Bolton, Greater Manchester, Myrie’s life has been profoundly shaped by familial connections stretching across the Atlantic. His mother and father Lynne and Norris, people he vividly sketches in his recent book Everything Is Everything: A Memoir of Love, Hate and Hope, were from Westmoreland, Jamaica’s westernmost parish.
Like so many countless other members of the Windrush Generation, Lynne and Norris left Jamaica in the early 1960s in search of work opportunities. Norris was encouraged to move to the UK by his brother Cecil, who had already settled here after finishing military service with the RAF in the Second World War – one of a number of Caribbean men who followed this path. Going further back, Myrie’s great uncle William Runners served on the Western Front in the First World War.
“[Cecil] fell in love and moved to Bolton,” explains Myrie, “and that’s why my mum and dad ended up there. After the war, of course, you had the 1948 British Nationality Act that made everyone in the British Empire citizens on an equal footing. So my mum and dad flying from Jamaica to Britain was the equivalent of someone going from Edinburgh to London, or Leeds to Manchester.”
"My mum and dad flying from Jamaica to Britain was the equivalent of someone going from Edinburgh to London, or Leeds to Manchester"
The fact that so many travelled with the right to reside in the UK, but later got caught up in the hostile environment policy introduced by Conservative home secretary Theresa May in 2012, and were denied access to healthcare and benefits and even deported, goes a long way to explaining the fury over the Windrush scandal. Myrie’s elder half-brothers Lionel and Peter were among those affected.
In the UK, Norris found work in a factory, while Lynne worked as a seamstress; although she had been a teacher in Jamaica, she lacked the necessary qualifications to work in British classrooms. Both encountered racism, but persevered. For all that, according to Myrie’s fascinating memoir, his father never quite settled in the UK.
In contrast, as a child, Myrie junior didn’t much like visiting Jamaica. “The first time I went I hated it – it was too bloody hot. The mosquitos had a field day, man. It was summertime because, of course, that’s when the family travelled. I missed my friends from school, and playing football on the streets with my mates. I had to go to this place that was miles away on a plane. I was not impressed.”
Fast-forward 50 years or so and Myrie’s attitudes have softened. In Clive Myrie’s Caribbean Adventure, he meets up with members of his extended family and visits his elder sister Judith [pictured above]. She was a ‘barrel child’, one of the kids who stayed behind in the Caribbean while their parents worked to set up a new home abroad. Only later did Judith move to the UK.
“She was born in Jamaica, and so she was desperate to move back at some point,” Myrie explains. “She’s now done that, and we reflect on that in the programme. Interestingly I found while making the programme that I have a closer affinity with Jamaica now, perhaps because my sister’s there.”
Visiting Judith in Portland, a parish in the north-east of the island, Myrie felt for the first time that he could actually live in Jamaica – and found himself wondering about, in poet Robert Frost’s phrase, the road not taken.
“I had all these ideas about what would have happened if my parents hadn’t emigrated. If I had grown up in the Caribbean, what would my life have been like?”
If Myrie’s reflections on being a child of the Windrush Generation illuminate much about the black British experience, another family tale explored in the series takes Myrie further back in time. When he was growing up, his parents told him that his surname was Cuban. Without giving away too many spoilers, there is certainly a family connection to Cuba via his paternal grandfather Eugene, who travelled to the island from Jamaica. Initially, Myrie says, Eugene would likely have worked in the American Zone around Guantánamo Bay, created by a 1903 lease agreement between the two countries, because he couldn’t speak Spanish.
Most of the stories in the series aren’t as directly personal as these. It’s more that Myrie’s own life and family tree provide jumping-off points for discussing Caribbean history, a way to contextualise the experiences that he’s sharing with the viewers at home.
Plus Myrie has fun. In the episode about Cuba’s capital Havana, for example, he drives around in one of the vintage US cars so associated with the island, and braves the ring in one of the city’s most famous boxing gyms. Like the late broadcaster Alan Whicker, a fellow globe-trotter and one of Myrie’s TV heroes, he has a real knack of genuinely paying attention to those he meets, better to tease out their stories.
But to return to his own deeper family story, and here is one of the bleakest facets of Caribbean history, it would have at one point involved ancestors who were trafficked on the Middle Passage from Africa. A DNA test, Myrie says, shows him to be 30 per cent Nigerian. It also revealed Irish roots, possibly because of Jamaica’s history of landowners using indentured workers as well as slaves. “To be honest, I don’t feel any pressing need to explore that side of my history.” It’s enough, perhaps, to know that it happened.
Besides, Myrie is already thinking about another family story, which has helped to provide the inspiration for a novel he’s been researching and writing.
One of Myrie’s maternal great grandfathers worked on the construction of the Panama Canal, the waterway that links the Atlantic and Pacific, which opened in 1914. It’s an engineering epic most often told as a tale of US ingenuity and derring-do. But there’s another narrative too, focused on the Caribbean labourers who did so much of the work, despite harsh treatment resulting from racism rooted in attitudes imported from the Deep South of the USA.
“If you didn’t have the workers – if you didn’t have people who were willing to die, and tens of thousands did in the building of that canal, and if they hadn’t been willing to leave everything they knew in order to go and create this wonder of the world, then it wouldn’t have been built,” he says. “And it’s only really in the last decade or so that the contribution by ordinary Caribbean people has been fully appreciated.”
It sounds like this veteran storyteller has another tale to tell – and we can’t wait for him to share all the details.