Can you imagine Ranulph Fiennes watching a two-hour canal trip on the box?

He ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Can you even name seven continents?

The British adventurer Sir Ranulph Fiennes had to use his bare hands in temperatures as low as -30C to fix a ski binding after a training mishap (PA)

Two intriguing news items appeared in the newspapers this week, expressing two completely contradictory tendencies in the British spirit. One was about slowing everything down. The BBC announced that the first of their “Four Goes Slow” television series had been an unexpected hit with viewers, even though it showed nothing more exciting that some boats on some water.

The show was called All Aboard! The Canal Trip and the only exciting thing about it was that exclamation mark. Filmed in real time, it showed a leisurely two-hour boat trip on the Kennet and Avon Canal, gliding past painted barges, ancient buildings, shaggy foliage and muddy mudflats. The only noises were the dreamy honking of geese and the gurgles of the outflow. Revelations were few. Nobody exposed their buttocks on the towpath, no irate lock-keeper yelled at them for filming on Lammas-tide, nothing much happened at all. And 600,000 people watched it.

It’s surely an extreme form of British indolence and passivity, not just to enjoy travelling by the slowest, least adventurous mode of transport in the world, but to watch someone else doing it while dozing in your armchair for two hours.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world of travel, Sir Ranulph Fiennes was presenting the Scientific Exploration Society Explorer Awards, a tautologous but impressive set of prizes designed to encourage “pioneers with purpose”. Sir Ranulph got in the papers by opining that the golden age of exploration is over and all you can do these days is revisit already-mapped places with new equipment.

There was a quiet satisfaction in the way he effectively told would-be explorers, Sorry guys, you just can’t do what I’ve done. Because Sir Ranulph represents the complete antipode of the canal-trip-watching tendency. He is not about Slowing Things Down. He is all about Getting Things Done, especially if this involves Going Bloody Miles Away to do so. Just to read a paragraph about his deranged globe-trotting makes me feel weary and old.

He’s led expeditions to the extreme edges of the galaxy for more than 40 years. He spent three years traversing the globe from South Pole to North Pole and down the other side (or possibly vice versa.) He led a contingent of explorers to discover lost or we-didn’t-even-know-they-existed cities in the Yemen. When, five years ago, he reached the sobering age of 66, instead of putting his feet up, he climbed Mount Everest. If you asked him why, he probably wouldn’t bother saying, “Because it was there.” He’d be more likely to say, “Because I had a spare Tuesday afternoon.” He’s so heroic, it’s no wonder he was considered for the role of James Bond in Doctor No (but lost out to Sean Connery because Cubby Broccoli decided he had “a face like a farmer”.)

He’s always done batshit-crazy stuff. In the Arctic, his hands became so frostbitten, he was obliged to cut off several fingertips. In 2003, pushing 60, and after major heart-bypass surgery, he ran seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. Can you imagine snipping off your own fingertips? Can you even name seven continents? Can you imagine what went through his head on Day Six of his marathon marathonising? Did he ask: “Why in the name of arse am I doing this? What was the point again?” Of course he didn’t.

I don’t believe Sir Ran (as he’s aptly known) has any idea why he does it. In this respect he’s the successor of the British explorers a century ago – Scott, Shackleton, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Alistair Mackay – who simply had to reach the North or South Pole before anyone else. Or to David Livingstone who badly needed to find the source of the Nile, as if it actually mattered. Or Dervla Murphy, who set off alone on a bicycle in 1963 to explore India because she conceived a childish whim to do so after being given a second-hand bicycle and a second-hand atlas on her 10th birthday.

Sir Ranulph shares their gutsy bloodline. But does anyone else? Does that pioneering spirit exist today? It would be hard for it to flourish in a world where every halfway-marketable destination, from the Okavango Delta in Botswana to the Jiuzhaigou Valley in China, has been seized in the tight but loving grip of the hospitality/eco-tourism industry; where no sooner does a former dictatorship, whether it’s Burma or Cuba, relax its hostility to capitalist incursion than the tourist crowds instantly come piling in; where increasing numbers of travellers spend their money on cruises in gigantic luxury liners and visit its beautiful destinations for only a brief afternoon, if they bother to leave the ship at all.

Even the figure of the travel writer – that attractive blend of adventurer, scholar, and incurable Nosy Parker – seems to have changed. Stanfords, the venerable London bookshop that specialises in maps and travel books, has just announced the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for evocative prose in the spirit of Robert Byron, Paul Theroux, Jan Morris and Colin Thubron. But the kind of travel writing that wins prizes these days – the Robert MacFarlane kind – tends not to stray very far from Britain’s venerable pathways.

Perhaps it’s time to re-embrace the essential pointlessness of great expeditions. I’m heartened to hear about one of the winners of Sir Ranulph’s awards, supposedly given to “pioneers with purpose”. He’s Bertie Gregory, a young Dorset photographer, who is off to Vancouver Island in August as part of an expedition “to track and film wild coastal wolves”. Why? Because, Gregory explained, “no one knows what the wolves do outside of the summer”. Or, indeed, cares apart from Bertie. That’s the spirit, old boy.

Howard Jacobson is away