Jewish comedian Helen Lederer is one of seven celebrity ‘pilgrims’ to star in upcoming BBC reality show promoting interfaith dialogue
April 15, 2025 15:45
A Jew, a Catholic, an agnostic and a Muslim embark on a two-week hike in the Alps, armed with nothing but backpacks and a hunger for spiritual connection.
This is not the set up for an indecorous joke but the premise of BBC’s latest season of Pilgrimage, the reality show that sends a gaggle of celebrities from different religious backgrounds on an interfaith trek along a historic pilgrimage route.
In the show’s seventh season coming to BBC Two and iPlayer later this month, seven celebrities journey 300km across the breathtaking Austrian and Swiss Alps, following a revived medieval Catholic passage beginning just outside Innsbruck on the Austrian Camino and finishing at the Einsiedeln Abbey near Lake Zurich in Switzerland, a destination that attracts almost a million pilgrims and visitors every year.
Taking part in the pilgrimage are actor-comedian Helen Lederer, 70, who comes from a mixed Jewish-Protestant background; The Traitors season two winner Harry Clark, 24, who is a practising Catholic; singer from boy band The Wanted Jay McGuiness, 34, who is agnostic; stand-up comedian Daliso Chaponda, 45, who grew up in a Christian family but is exploring the Baha’i faith; presenter Jeff Brazier, 45, who was raised Catholic but now identifies as spiritual; retired Paralympian and practising Christian Stef Reid, 40; and journalist Nelufar Hedayat, 37, who identifies as a modern Muslim.
“It’s very rare to see people who might be known in other guises actually sit round and talk about their faith, this very intimate thing,” said Lederer, whose Czech-Jewish father’s side of the family was largely decimated by the Holocaust.
Lederer said her Protestant mother had her christened as a child and, though she felt a cultural connection to her Jewish background, her father and paternal grandparents never talked about faith.
“Being a mix means that you have respect for both things and there is a particular quality I'm learning and feeling more as I get even older, that you can't shed your background,” Lederer said. “So, with my mixed background, with all the pain of my family that isn't mine, but theirs, I want to be able to turn it into something that will give me a bit of peace.”
Over the course of the 12-day mission, the seven pilgrims hike rugged terrain against a stunning mountain backdrop, staying in local guest houses and convents, all the while getting to know one another and discussing their unique approaches to faith.
For Hedayat, who went on the trip to reconcile her “strained” relationship to the faith into which she was born, the journey provided an opportunity to learn from her fellow pilgrims, especially during a period of intense strife between Jews and Muslims.
“The time when we were on the pilgrimage was a time when our faiths [Jewish and Muslim] were killing one another, and so I came to this with that knowledge and the fear of, what if we don’t get on, what if I say something that upsets my Jewish friend or my Baha’i friend or my Catholic friend?” Hedayat said.
But over the course of the pilgrimage, she came to see that the group members’ similarities override their differences.
“The Islam seeps into the Christianity that seeps into the Judaism, and I got to see the point of it all: we are the Abrahamic faiths, and in a way by the end of this pilgrimage I felt closer to my Abrahamic kin, my cousins and my family.”
The first episode of Pilgrimage: The Road Through the Alps will be available on BBC Two and iPlayer on Sunday, 20 April at 9pm, followed by two more episodes on 21 and 22 April at 9pm