A trip to cliché country
I’M WONDERING if the biggest miss about THE MISADVENTURES OF ROMESH RANGANATHAN (Sunday, BBC2) is the countries he’s decided to visit. Admittedly, it will be a long time before the name of last week’s choice, Haiti, is bandied about at cocktail parties as the next unspoilt gem. Ethiopia though?
Land of green hills, rock churches, centuries of civilisation and great coffee? How many people seriously, as Romesh claimed at the start of last night’s journey, think it’s just a place where a war happened and a famine raged?
It looks, from the opening titles, as if they’re pulling a similar stunt in the next instalment with Albania, a country which according to Romesh’s voiceover, he suspects to be “bleak and communist”. He’d only need to google it to find out that the communists quit the place 26 years ago and google it a couple of seconds further to find out that it’s a country of forests, mountains, dazzling lakes and wild coasts.
It’s not so much that Romesh is pretending to be thick, as that he’s pretending something about the countries he’s visiting. Last night, after jolly nights in a jazz bar and charming but baffling conversations with an intoxicated representative of the Rastafarian faith, it was clear that Romesh was having a ball.
Even when he went to the natural spa in the hills to be plastered in hot volcanic mud and wrapped in leaves, he was milking the discomfort for maximum comedy value, something you don’t do if you’re actually, genuinely unhappy where you are.
The more joking about he did with his laconic local guide Mike, the more odd it was when suddenly, out of the blue (and as if, I don’t know, suggested quietly in his ear by a TV producer) Romesh said that the place felt tense.
There were police everywhere, he said, as the camera pointed to one or two doing not very much at all on a street corner. I’ve seen Cotswolds villages with more tension in them and I’ve seen things on the cable shopping channels that came across as more truthful.
The real truth, of course, is that the BBC won’t insure Romesh to go and have his misadventures in the world’s current calamity zones and ruined countries. If you have to take other countries and pretend then maybe there’s a strong case for leaving your suitcases under the bed and staying at home.
An hour of CHUCKLE TIME WITH THE CHUCKLE BROTHERS (Sunday, Channel 5) made me realise there are worse jobs than presenting a show of funny clips. Someone, somewhere, in some basement hell, must be employed as a clip grader, sorting out the mediocre “nans falling off chairs” and “babies falling asleep in their dinner” from the A-class “gym posers dropping weights on their feet” and “freaky speaking cats”.
Just like diamonds, rice, flour and plastic, video pratfalls fall into certain bands of value. From the selection on offer last night (dolphins nicking iPads, a cat standing at a window, a wedding ring delivered by a drone) it looks as if Barry and Paul Elliott, aka the Chuckle Brothers, have been given the C-grade clips which on a scale of A to H isn’t really that bad.
I’m not sure the Chuckles would agree though. Obviously no one really wants the background banter but the brothers might as well not bother at all if they’re going to do it like they’re reading out a shopping list.