To call Chris McCausland a reluctant traveller is a little like suggesting, these days, that Russell Brand is a divisive figure. As the stand-up comedian will tell you himself, there are few people you could encounter less willing to go on holiday than him.
Odd, then, that Channel 4 has given the 45-year-old his own travel show, The Wonders of the World I Can’t See.
“I’m not a big traveller, no,” he concedes. “There’s just so much that I don’t like about it. I’m a terrible flyer, I’m not good in the heat, and I can’t help but think: what’s the point? What’s the point going all that way to stand in front of the thing that everyone is looking at, but that I can’t see?”
McCausland is blind. He lost his sight completely by the age of 22, due to a hereditary condition called retinitis pigmentosa. “My grandmother had it, and my mum,” he says. “Basically, I’d been going blind very slowly since I was born, and so didn’t even really notice it happening – like,” he adds, “the frog in the pan of boiling water.”
There are many blind people who do choose to travel, of course, and who rely upon their other senses to fill in the blanks. Not McCausland.
“They say that when you lose your sight, your hearing gets better. It doesn’t. But you do pay more attention to it. So when you’re sat at a beach resort, and you’re hot, and you can’t see what’s around you, then you just end up concentrating on how hot you actually are. I suffer more for it.
“What’s the point,” he says, “of going to somewhere like the ancient city of Petra in Jordan, and have someone describe it to you, when you can just stay at home and have them describe it from a postcard?”
It’s perhaps for this reason, then – McCausland’s deep reluctance – that makes The Wonders of the World I Can’t See such oddly compelling viewing. Television has done wanderlust to death, and Channel 4 has already had its own grumpy man travel show, Travel Man with Richard Ayoade. But McCausland takes that up a notch by being the ultimate reluctant holidaymaker. He goes to Rome, to Athens, Niagara Falls and Jordan, and on each trip takes with him a comedy foil – Liza Tarbuck, Guz Kahn, Tom Allen and Harry Hill – not merely for the company, but also to ensure that he doesn’t trip over any Greek pillars or Italian cobblestones. There’s a thorough method to McCausland’s crankiness – he looks tired a lot of the time, and turns bright pink in the sun – and so what comes over loud and clear is how any potential for adventure is consumed within his frustration.
Talking on the phone from his home in south-west London, he says that he hopes the show is at least funny. It is. “But it’s not all roses, either,” he points out. “There’s episodes where the wonders we visit are actually the most underwhelming part of the trip.”
It’s his frustration, however, that rises mostly to the top. In Greece with Harry Hill, he shrugs at the Acropolis, and then eats a bad fish stew cooked by two Greek fishermen who, he notes, “were very unimpressed by me”. At one point in Niagara, Liza Tarbuck calls him a “grumpy Scouse git”.
He does concede that the overall experience was an interesting one, “and I do love making TV shows”, but it hasn’t left him any better disposed towards the prospects of summer holidays with his wife and nine-year-old daughter. “I get very bored in my own mind when I don’t have much to do, and so they tend to go off on holiday together, or with friends,” he says. “I stay at home, and work. I like to work.”
Chris McCausland has been hard at work, as a stand-up comic, for two decades now. A native of Liverpool, he travelled south to London at the turn of the 21st-century to study software engineering at university, and never went back. “My eyesight was starting to get very bad at uni, and the technology back then wasn’t what it is now, so I had to get off that particular career path.”
For the newly blind, there were not many realistic Plan Bs. “I did apply to become a spy, though.” This is presumably the start of an oft-repeated joke, but no. By all accounts it’s true. “It is! I applied to MI5, and got down to the final 30 out of 3000 applicants. They were really excited at first, and said that this was new territory for them, but in the end they turned me down purely because of my eyesight.” He laughs. “Fair enough, I suppose.”
A fan of Jack Dee, Lee Evans and Eddie Izzard, he decided to give comedy a go, “because I had nothing to lose”. McCausland was funny, and his not being able to see was something he could turn – at least notionally – to his advantage. Google suggests he might be the world’s only professional blind comedian.
“But I did want to challenge perceptions,” he insists. “I was never going to go on stage and do 20 minutes of blind jokes.” Like most comedians of his age who aren’t Frankie Boyle – and prone, as Boyle is, instinctively to shock and forever push at polite boundaries – he’s far more likely to joke about being a middle-aged parent, and being easily tired. “I think that, back when I started, I was quite uncomfortable with who I was, embarrassed even. I wanted to be cool, you know? And I wasn’t.”
But he was immensely likeable, and quick-witted, and has since become a mainstay on comedy panel shows like Would I Lie to You? and Have I Got News for You? He recently took part in the Channel 4 show Scared of the Dark, in which celebrities were plunged into darkness in order to better appreciate the daily challenges faced by those that can’t see. In this situation, McCausland was at a distinct advantage.
The new travel show, meanwhile, focuses on his secondary strength: curmudgeon. The trip he admits to enjoying most is Niagara Falls, the only Wonder you don’t need to see to experience. But even here there’s a caveat.
“With that one, I was the saddest, I think, because I wasn’t able to see it. Don’t get me wrong,” he adds quickly, “I’m much more accepting of who I am these days – I’ve stopped having tantrums every time I spill drinks or bang my head on the door frame – and if someone said they could insert a chip into my retina that would give me back 10 per cent of my sight I’d just think, what’s the point? But a miracle to cure my blindness completely?”
There’s a pause on the phone line, as he mulls this over. “Yeah, I’d consider that,” he says.
The Wonders of the World I Can’t See is on Channel 4 now. McCausland is touring the UK in early 2024
