The Americas with Simon Reeve - BBC2

Simon Reeve in Alaska — (Image credit: BBC/Jonathan Young)

In The Americas with Simon Reeve, the much-travelled explorer sets out to show that there's more to this continent than the USA

The Americas with Simon Reeve is the latest addition to Simon's increasingly impressive portfolio of travel programmes. And he starts his vast journey in North America, in Alaska and Canada.

When the word Canada is mentioned, most of us picture vast forests, green cities and stunning mountain ranges.

But Simon Reeve discovers a darker side to the country in the first episode of his latest adventure taking him down the entire length of the Americas.

Simon with caribou hunter Charlie Swaney

In Vancouver, he learns more about the drug addiction sweeping the city which claims hundreds of lives every year.

In Alberta, meanwhile, he visits a vast, toxic oil field large enough to be seen from space and which is said to be the largest and most destructive industrial project in human history.

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Perhaps scariest of all he learns that since the 1970s around 4,000 indigenous women and girls have gone missing, presumed murdered, something which a recent government inquiry referred to as a "race based genocide".

TV Times rating: ****