Anita Rani on Race Across the World: ‘My dad thought nothing exciting would ever happen to him’

There have only been two (non-celebrity) RATW father-daughter pairings to date, one of the reasons Rani thinks they bagged the gig. “We were really lucky to get it, it’s the most oversubscribed TV show there is,” she explained. Often, family duos reverberate with unresolved tensions, but this pairing, with a shared, dry Yorkshire sense of humour, clearly relished each other’s company. “Our issue was simply we’d never spent so long together,” Anita says.

She was thrilled to have the opportunity for Bal to “experience some magic”. His Hindu family moved to Yorkshire when he was four. At school, he dreamed of joining the RAF but, in accordance with parental wishes, he instead went into the family firm at 15. “We met one 19-year-old lad from Sheffield backpacking,” he says. “That’s the age I was getting married. I’d have loved to have done something like that.”

He and Anita had never even holidayed together as he was always busy running the business. She inherited his drive, while the slog she witnessed gave her a sense of perspective. “Getting up at 5am to film Countryfile is not hard work compared to what my parents did.”

In her frank memoir, The Right Sort of Girl, she documented her loving but restrictive upbringing in a Punjabi community, where girls were considered second-best and she felt under constant pressure to marry and to become a lawyer or doctor rather than pursue a media career.

“I couldn’t wait to get away from home,” she says. “We didn’t hold you back there!” Bal jokes. He was a strict father (“I’d never let the children come downstairs in their pyjamas”) but always supportive of Anita, taking her to the pub for her first pint when she was 14 and teaching her pool. Now, the business having folded, he and Lucky live near Anita in east London, where he works as a kitchen designer in Ikea. Does he feel protective of his daughter being in the public eye? “No, she can handle herself.”