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There is ice. A bear lopes across a vast white tundra, weaving footprints in the snow. Closeup of a snow leopard. Crisp crunch of boots in thick snow. Heavy breathing … Running … Screaming … Is it the latest Paul Greengrass thriller? No. The words “51 Days Earlier” appear. Volare starts playing. And now we’re in sunny Palermo, Sicily: the southern Italian city conquered more than any other in Europe. Where else could we be but at the starting line of Race Across the World?

You know when a BBC series has gone stratospheric because the opening gets suitably hysterical and starts to think it’s a Bourne spin-off. And so it comes to pass with the sixth series of the BBC flagship show, now such a powerful harbinger of spring on these small isles that it has replaced daffodils. The premise, for the stubborn percent who haven’t succumbed, is simple and brilliant; a formula that, like the cometh of spring, will never get old.

Five intrepid (and increasingly knackered, and lovable) duos are deposited in one part of the world and ordered to make it to another unfathomably faraway destination with the cash equivalent of an air fare. They have to surrender their phones and bank cards. They get only a GPS tracker and comically unfoldable map to aid them. The money has to cover everything – bed, board, transport – and they can earn extra along the way by working shifts in restaurants, hotels, and the like. The winners get £20,000.

This series’ destination is Hatgal. No one has heard of it. Out come the enorma-maps, and it turns out it is on the northern edge of Mongolia, 12,000km away, via seven checkpoints. The route crosses eight countries and traces the Silk Road. The cost of flying it is £1,297, which means just £23.16 each per day. According to the youngest contestants, Jo and Kush, this is totally doable. According to everyone else? Total nightmare.

Jo and Kush are 19, from Liverpool, and hilarious. “Scousers are the perfect people for the job,” says Jo. “We’re not shy, like, to say hello to someone in the street.” If they need directions their plan is to just rock up to someone and say: “Babe, you alright there love?” The only quality the other teams have over them, they concede, is the small matter of … experience.

Next, two chalk-and-cheese duos. Katie, a fount of reality-TV-gold who says things like, “who needs a custard cream when you’ve got cannoli?”, and older brother Harrison, who’s always telling her to hurry up and is mad for custard creams. Basically, expect a lot of talk of custard creams from these two. At the end of a long first day, they blow 4% of their budget on a ferry to Naples, Katie despairs about a bite on her face the size of “Mount Edna” and they agree it’s a “peak cussie cream” situation.

Then there’s uptight retired architect Mark and clinical hynotherapist Margo, the endlessly bubbly type who’s game for anything, whether it’s joining a flashmob dance on a ferry deck or stopping to listen to an Italian busker singing Pink Floyd when they should be looking for a room for the night.

Turns out these two are in-laws who didn’t always get on. Margo: “If I’m being honest, for a lot of years I just thought he was boring.” They ended up joining forces to care for Mark’s wife – Margo’s sister – when she was dying. That was three years ago. I feared these two might fall out before they left Sicily. But by the end of the first episode they were clinking water cups in Alberobello – famed for its trulli: white-washed drystone huts with conical roofs – and he was quietly thanking her for her joie de vivre and unwavering commitment to his wife.

Which leaves Puja and Roshni – cousins from London determined to break free from the conservatism of their upbringings and unleash their wanderlust – and father and daughter duo, Andrew and Molly, from a small town in County Derry. He loves timetables and tectonic plates. She finds him a bit of a control freak. The perfect Race Across the World dynamic, then.

The first episode sees them all racing to get to the first checkpoint, Fiskardo, a Greek village on the northern tip of Kefalonia. It’s unbelievably close and, as always, fascinating to see the different routes, priorities and chances taken by each team.

Race Across the World is perfect telly for those of us who like our reality TV slow, kind, sincere and devoid of humiliation. The pleasures of this entertaining, gripping, and moving show are unexpectedly deep, and, curiously for a series about the vast diversity of this world, uniquely British. You get a spot of armchair travelling, some mild irritation at people’s quirks (the geography teacher’s dad-splaining, the uptight in-law’s penchant for a “modesty cocoon”), and an intense focus on the specifics of regional British characters, but with none of the stereotyping. As we race alongside these relatable folk on what genuinely turns, every single time, into the journey of a lifetime, we feel all their big feelings with them.

• Race Across the World aired on BBC One and is on iPlayer