That’s how Jimmy rolls

JIMMY Doherty is in Thailand tonight – although obviously not literally tonight – on a quest to solve a noodlebased mystery. As part of a report for FOOD UNWRAPPED DOES TAKEAWAYS (C4, 8pm),

Jimmy buys himself a spring roll from a smiley lady at a Bangkok street food stall.

“The noodles inside, what are they made of?” Jimmy asks her.

To which the lady replies: “Tokyo.”

Now, the obvious assumption here is that Jimmy’s question has been mistranslated. I’m sure this sort of thing happens all the time.

Off-screen, the Channel 4 duty interpreter has heard Jimmy ask “what do you call those?” and translated this to the stallholder as: “Which famous city has insisted it will go ahead and host the Olympic Games this summer, even though that’s blatant madness?”

But actually, no, it turns out this isn’t what’s happened.As Jimmy then discovers when he takes his investigation further afield, to a farm in a province two hours north, what the smiley stallholder was really saying was “Thaw Kheiw” – which sounds a lot like Tokyo but is actually their name for mung beans.

Why he didn’t just ask her to write it down, God alone knows.

Elsewhere on the show,Amanda Byram has an equally important question she’d like answering, in this case about coffee.

“Some coffees seem to make us super-buzzed,” she says, “while some barely touch the sides. So, why is that?”

Why indeed? In an attempt to find out,Amanda ventures all the way to Huntingdon to meet Rob someone-or-other, a nutritionist who’s carried out studies into the effects of caffeine on our bodies.

Rob lines up a selection of takeaway coffees from various high street outlets and reveals how massively their caffeine content varies.

There’s more then three-and-ahalf times as much caffeine in one brand than another. Golly.

“Why is there so much of a disparity between the caffeine amounts?” Amanda asks.

To which Rob replies: “Peking.” All right, he doesn’t really.What he actually does is explain the significance of the bean itself, some kinds essentially being more buzzy than others.

Even so,Amanda wants to know why the same amount of caffeine can have widely differing effects, depending on who’s drinking it.

Rob tells her it’s to do with our CYP102 gene. Bet she wishes she hadn’t asked.

Also tonight, the last in the current run of THE GADGET SHOW (Channel 5, 7pm) includes a look at barbecues. Is a barbecue really a gadget though?

I wouldn’t have thought so, other than in the sense it’s best to buy the kind that doesn’t give off too much smoke.