‘Race Across The World changed my relationship with grief’

On her very last day before Julia died, she asked her husband to keep a promise. Could he become best friends with her sister, Margo?

It was a fairly tall order. For the entire time Mark and his wife were married, he’d never seen eye to eye with her sister. Margo is loud, vivacious, walks into every room and has swiftly spoken and befriended everyone in there. Mark is bashful, gentle and quiet – their polarising energies just never quite connected.

But Julia knew that without her, Mark would need Margo more than he knew.

Three years later, Mark and Margo find themselves taking extreme lengths to fulfil Julia’s wish, sprinting from the glorious streets of Palermo, Sicily, to a remote village in Mongolia without credit cards, phones or access to a plane. They have to rely on each other’s different strengths to carry them through and build a relationship they’ve never had before along the way.

They are, of course, competing on Race Across The World, the BBC reality competition where six teams of two are competing for £20,000.

I’m speaking to Margo after viewers have just seen them unexpectedly win their first leg of the race. Mark was due to be on the call, but no one could get hold of him. I’m assured by Margo: ‘This is what happens when you deal with older people. It’s probably slipped his mind – he’ll be so apologetic.’

Instead, Margo, dressed in a typically bold and vibrant kaftan, laughs on her own at her unconventional strategy, which paid off. When the pair arrived in Georgia, Mark became unwell, bedridden with a dodgy stomach, when every second of this show counts. Instead of panicking, Margo spent the afternoon necking back glasses of wine and munching on giant, juicy dumplings. A day later, they discovered they were in first place for the first time.

It’s a moment that couldn’t capture their peculiar dynamic more. They are, as Margo describes, ‘like chalk and cheese’.

Without Julia’s dying wish, she says: ‘We’d have got on with things, and maybe still see each other socially over time. But Julia knew it would be so good for Mark to be with me, she knew he could just get very set in his ways and thought, “He needs a giddy-up.”’

Race Across The World isn’t the first time Mark and Julia have worked as a team; together, they cared for Julia. Practically-minded Mark looked after his wife’s medication, took her to the appointments, and held her hand while Margo made sure she still felt alive when she was so close to death.

‘I don’t know if they’ll keep this in the show, but we cover it. Her last conversation was with me. She didn’t want to talk about deep things, and the last thing she did was laugh. Instead of being fearful – because she was very scared of dying and she didn’t want to talk about it – I went with whatever she wanted, and she wanted to laugh.

‘It was a deep, guttural, dirty laugh. She said, “Margo, they say go into the light, but I can’t see one.” I said, “You’re looking at the wrong light – see that neon light at the bar. Go in, order a drink and wait for me.” Then she just closed her eyes. She was alive for a few hours later but never spoke again.’

She likes to think Julia is at that bar, has asked the manager to put Race Across The World on the big screen while she sips on a cocktail, watching her promise come true on TV.

‘Julia would think this was hilarious,’ Margo laughs. ‘She’d think we would lose. She’d say, “Why are you doing this? I told you to be friends, but this is madness – good on you.”’

Throughout the series, the race breathes new life into Mark. His excitement builds each day, overcome with adventure and adrenaline. ‘He’s a new man,’ Margo says when we’re still waiting for him to join the call. ‘Probably for the first time in his life, he says no when he feels it, goes no to things. He’s not trying to please people, he’s making sure he makes choices [that are] right for him. He’s just so much his own person, so happy with it, and so free.’

Without him there, I ask what has been most surprising to Margo watching the show back.

Without hesitation, she says: ‘How patient I was with Mark. I just wanted to be loving and kind to him, give him the chance to be seen, heard and listened to, because he generally wouldn’t get the chance so much with my sister. But also the laughs, the good times.’

Margo was also taken aback watching Mark talking about her when she wasn’t there. He has nothing but total admiration for Margo, even though, as she says, ‘we’ve made no secret of the fact we didn’t get on for a lot of years’.

‘To hear him now very clearly say how much respect he has for me and how he’s enjoying the journey with me is really, it’s really moving,’ she says. ‘In 40 years, he’s never told me he admired me before.

‘Mark is very changed by the experience of Julia’s illness. It changed us both, it changed our experience of each other profoundly – you can’t go through that together and not be changed at the end of it, but in everyday life you don’t voice these things to each other.’

It’s been the most unique relationship Race Across The World has ever seen, and Margo says she ‘tears up’ thinking about the episodes still to come.

Next, the teams leave mainland Europe and start venturing into the Middle East. Some travel through Uzbekistan, but Mark and Margo took a 29-hour train ride through Kazakhstan, which she wouldn’t recommend. However, she did, of course, find a way to make it more bearable, which eventually led to a slight drama she doesn’t think will make it to screen.

‘I drank vodka with the locals on the train but one of the blokes who was drinking the vodka got thrown off the train. I don’t think they’ll show that either – he was so badly behaved,’ she says, with a not-so-subtle glint of mischief in her eye.

With dwindling budgets, teams often have to earn their keep and make money along the way. Coming up, Mark and Margo find themselves working on a horse meat farm. ‘I was nearly in tears,’ Margo says. ‘We were giving the horses their last supper.’

Essentially, Margo warns that from this episode forward, it gets a lot tougher.

‘But the most beautiful part is yet to come, the growth is still to come. It’s really amazing to think what happens, I tear up thinking about it.’

Race Across The World airs on Thursdays at 8pm on BBC One.

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