Forget Glasto, real excitement is a canal trip with Tim and Pru
Young people lack the imagination to have fun. Look at them at glastonbury this weekend (BBC2 and BBC4), crammed into a cluster of fields — drink and drugs and toilet queues, and a speech by Jeremy Corbyn for extra excitement.
Many of these festival- goers probably work in office cubicles at call centres. Why do they want to recreate that experience with halfa-million tents off the M5?
If you want fun and adventure, ask an octogenarian . . . or a pair of them, in the case of husband-andwife travellers Timothy West and Prunella Scales.
Aged 83 and 85, they were exploring the Brahmaputra river and its backwaters in Great Canal Journeys: India (C4).
Last week they were at the southern tip of the sub-continent, investigating the old commercial waterways. now they were north of Bangladesh at the other end of the country, gadding about on elephants and learning traditional dance steps with silk weavers.
When Tim and Pru started this series three years ago, they didn’t expect to do more than visit a few of their favourite holiday haunts on a narrow-boat. Their idea of farflung voyaging was the other end of the Kennet and Avon canal.
But audiences loved their affectionate flirting and laid-back
joie de vivre, and especially the matter-of-fact way they dealt with the infirmities of age.
Pru suffers from Alzheimer’s, though you’d hardly guess it from her lively exchanges with her husband. It’s clear that travel doesn’t only broaden the mind, it helps keep it sharp.
She makes no secret of her difficulties. ‘It’s true,’ she says, ‘some days I don’t know if it’s Monday or Lewisham.’
no wonder the country has fallen in love with this couple, and cheered as their wanderlust took them all over England, then to Ireland, Scandinavia and now Asia.
nothing could make them quail. After spending the night on a tea trader, listening to the splash of river dolphins outside their cabin, they pulled up by the bank and saw there was no landing jetty. ‘Bloody hell!’ snorted Pru, preparing to take a flying leap.
Where next? Don’t be surprised to see them pootling up the Amazon in search of El Dorado, or donning space helmets to navigate the canals of Mars. Let’s hope their future travels are granted a full series, instead of being compressed too tightly into a couple of episodes as these were.
Cap’n Ross was away on his adventures too in Poldark (BBC1), on a mission to rescue his old friend Doctor Enys (Luke norris) from the French Revolution and Madame guillotine.
He was so intent on teaching Frenchie a lesson that he dived fully dressed from his ship into the Bay of Biscay (which was abnormally calm, like a duckpond), swam ashore in coat and boots, and emerged as dry as a Cornish cracker.
If that seemed unbelievable, it was nothing compared to new sidekick Tholly Tregirls (Sean gilder), whose accent ricochets around the British Isles like a rubber bullet in a pinball machine. Twang! He’s Irish. Boing! That’s Manchester. Peow! Down to Devon. Whoosh! up to Scotland.
Tholly is a part-time pirate, which might explain why he wears a hook over his hand. It isn’t a genuine prosthetic — his fingers are visibly stuffed inside, which makes the hook hang down below his knee.
All this is so surreal that I’m beginning to wonder whether this series of Poldark will turn out to be a dream sequence.
If so, it’s probably because Elizabeth (Heida Reed) is now a laudanum junkie. Someone snap the girl out of it!