Hooked on the gentle joys of these tales from the riverbank
Someone at new Broadcasting House must have bought a job lot of mongolian yurts. Perhaps they fell off the back of a yak and were going cheap, but like inflatable Big Tops they’re popping up on every outdoor show.
First a trio of these middle-class marquees, canvas roundhouses with electric lights glowing warmly behind their picture windows, appeared in a Snowdonia field on The Family Farm.
now they’re home to a pair of ageing comedians in Mortimer And Whitehouse: Gone Fishing (BBC2). Bob and Paul have one each, naturally — there’s no shortage of yurts at the Beeb.
The duo deserve their creature comforts because they haven’t been well. Bob mortimer, best known as Vic Reeves’ sidekick, pulled up his shirt proudly to reveal a scar like a railway track, from his triple heart bypass. He called it his ‘zipper’.
Paul Whitehouse (Harry enfield’s chum) happily imitated the sound of a surgeon’s saw slicing through bone, and chatted about the stents fitted in his own chest.
It was all enough to put you off your fish supper. The rest of their conversation, though, was blissfully inconsequential and frequently surreal. As they angled for tench beside a norfolk lake, Paul stared
TELEPHONE OF THE NIGHT: Justice crusader Louise Shorter follows up every clue, on Conviction: Murder In Suburbia (BBC2), using a battered push-button landline handset, held together with tape. No self-respecting gumshoe should be without one.
up at a flight of geese and wondered where they were headed. ‘off to the pictures,’ said Bob.
The pair plan to take their rods and nets all over the country. next week it’s barbel fishing on the Wye. Frankly, they could be catching sticklebacks in a jam-jar and this show would still be a gentle joy, as long as they keep up a stream of burble and badinage.
They talked about favourite foods of their boyhood — soft-boiled eggs, tomatoes on toast, and corned beef with a pastry lid (has any young Briton born this century even tasted that?)
Both men enjoyed fishing as lads. But it is Paul who really loves sitting in meditative silence beside the water: ‘When that float goes under, it’s a magical moment and it takes me back to my childhood.’
He sometimes struggled to contain his irritation at his mate’s flightiness. Bob has the attention span of a toddler on junk food, constantly diverted and bumbling off to investigate something else.
Lured by beer, he dragged Paul away to inspect a local brewery. As he supped a pale ale, Bob declared: ‘I like to have six pints a night, that’s what I was brought up on.’ either this is a joke, or the surgeon may have to unzip him again to check his liver.
At least they were cooking healthy stews round their campfire, and not ordering fast food. The sight of American ‘video bloggers’ munching down on oily cheeseburgers and fries, on Secrets Of McDonald’s: 50 Years Of The Big Mac (C5), really did turn the stomach.
Two chubby, earnest men with their baseball caps on backwards peeled back the greaseproof paper and described the flavours through mouthfuls of processed pap. The documentary returned to them repeatedly, gobbling mcDonald’s Chicken mcnuggets and Filet- o- Fish, between segments on how the franchise grew from one restaurant in 1948 to feeding 69 million people every day around the world.
There were interesting moments. We saw the first drivein meals served to customers in their cars, on trays that hooked over the steering wheel. And it’s amusing to know that in 1974 ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart opened the first mcDonald’s in Britain, while the first actor to play Ronald mcDonald the clown was sacked for becoming obese.
mostly, though, this was assembly line television . . . the TV equivalent of fast food.