A real Indian takeaway
AT last, Michael Portillo visits a country where his outfits don’t stop the traffic. Nothing stops the traffic in India, of course, although it won’t be long, I’m sure, before one of Mr Portillo’s GREAT INDIAN RAILWAY JOURNEYS (BBC2) is interrupted by a cow on the line.
From sacred bullocks to the Taj Mahal, urban mayhem to Bollywood, everyone has a view of India even if they haven’t been there. It’s the task of travel programmes, good ones anyway, to take us beyond, while delivering a little of what we’d hoped for.
On first samplings this new series from the gaudily-trousered sovereign of train-travel-telly seems pukka. His first stop, Amritsar, might have been a must-see on the tourist trail but Michael made a point of saying something different about the place. Rather than being struck by the shininess of the Sikhs’ Golden Temple, he pointed out its quiet elegance.
Despite being a sacred site, it was deliberately lower than all other buildings around it. Visitors have to step down to enter the temple itself, another reminder of the humility at the core of the Sikh religion. As his journey continued, Michael took in the wheat fields of the Punjab and a college training female doctors since the end of the 19th century.
Wheat fields, visually, aren’t on a par with rice. The college, founded in industrial Ludhiana in 1894 by missionary Edith Brown, was no Taj Mahal to look at either. Both stop-offs told us something we didn’t expect but gave us a real India as opposed to the postcard.
This was even more true of Chandigarh, a city designed in the Fifties to be the capital of the Indian Punjab. Nehru commissioned the French architect Le Corbusier to design the place and the end result was, and still is, orderly and futuristic.
You could say it wasn’t very Indian but the Indians Michael met strolling at sunset by the manmade lake were very happy with it.
In mountain-top Shimla the point was not the view, but how isolated the place was before the railway got there. The summertime seat of power of the British Raj, Shimla officials ruled over one-fifth of the human race from a tiny village accessible only by donkey track before 1903.
You didn’t know whether to marvel at the brilliance of the achievement, or the sheer arrogance.
THE WORLD’S UGLIEST PETS (ITV) didn’t offer that much to marvel at, unless it was the food bills at Caroline Quentin’s house. The actress, presenting last night’s show, owns five dogs, six cats and seven chickens. She also, on a more casual basis, looks after pigs, sheep and turkeys. In my view, no one who keeps turkeys has any right to call someone else’s animals ugly, but that didn’t stop Caroline.
She went to visit a lady who owned several hairless rodents, and who seemed quite insulted by the time Caroline left.
What came after had less to do with the world’s ugliest pets and more to do with taking a dog from South Wales to a dog show in the States. Most of the entrants at this ugliest pooch competition were of the Tibetan crested breed, which has no fur but plenty of weird straggly hair coming out of its body at random intervals.
Chase, the dog from South Wales, was a Tibetan crested, and didn’t win the title, although there wasn’t a lot in it. You could say the same about the whole programme.