Kevin McCloud's Escape To The Wild, C4, 9pm
Stuck in a traffic jam on the motorway or standing on a busy platform waiting for a train, who hasn’t thought about escaping the daily grind?
But only a brave few of us have actually quit the rat race to live a simpler existence.
“All of us harbour some dream to escape,” says Kevin McCloud. “So I’m travelling to some of the most extraordinary places on Earth to live with British families who have decided to get as far away from it all as possible.
“These people don’t just move to Gloucestershire – they go to the other side of the planet.”
In this first episode, Kevin visits Karyn, Boris and their three sons, who moved from a village near Bath eight years ago to a tiny desert island in the archipelago of Tonga in the south Pacific.
It takes him five flights, a bus journey and a boat ride to reach them.
So they are not exactly used to having guests.
The island is thousands of miles from any major land mass or civilisation, let alone a restaurant or a Tesco Express.
You know you must be truly in the middle of nowhere if you can’t even see a Starbucks.
“I realised that most of my life had been spent travelling down the M4,” says Karyn.
“I thought there had to be more to life than that. We wanted to get away from the Western world and give our boys a freer childhood,” says Boris, who built their home from whatever he could find on the island.
But the island has no fresh water, no electricity, debilitating tropical heat, and faces regular threats from hurricanes and tsunamis.
Survival is tough and it’s a very lonely existence.
“It’s like paradise,” says Kevin. “But are they any happier?”