Hairy Biker Dave’s back . . . with a taste for life, laughs and haggis!
Sci-fi fans put a lot of effort into imagining what a time machine looks like. There’s the Doctor’s blue police box, the H.G. Wells armchair with its spinning chronometer, and Doc Brown’s DeLorean in Back To The future.
for foodies, it’s simpler. Dave Myers and Si King needed two wheels and a ferry, on The Hairy Bikers Go West (BBC2).
After Dave’s return to our screens in a christmas special, following his gruelling cancer ordeal, the pals were taking it nice and easy in the first of a new series. Recalling how they met on the west coast of Scotland 30 years ago, they took their motorbikes across the firth of clyde to the island of Bute.
‘With the bikes stowed, the sun shining, it doesn’t just feel like a ferry ride,’ Si chuntered contentedly, ‘more like a trip in a time machine.’
The whole episode turned back the clock to their road trips of the past. The distances were small, pootling around the town of Rothesay and out to the surrounding countryside, where they discovered a truffle farm and a community market garden.
At a family butcher’s, they learned the recipe for making traditional haggis, with a stern warning to
PET HATE OF THE NIGHT: Office life made free spirit Naveen physically ill, he told Ben Fogle on New Lives In The Wild (Ch5). What he loathed most was doing up his top shirt button . . . so he and wife Anke fled to Sri Lanka. Why not just ‘work from home’ in jim-jams?
simmer and not boil the stuffed intestines — or they’ll burst, ‘and you’ll get haggis soup’.
Along the street, they visited an award-winning patisserie run by a family who fled war in Syria to make a new life. They showed Dave and Si how to bake a flatbread called sfiha, a sort of Middle Eastern pizza, which the boys duly tried out in the kitchen.
Dave was bravely open about his cancer treatment during December’s show, and there was no need this time for footage from his hospital bedside. But he seemed understandably shell-shocked, and earnestly glad to be alive.
He spoke frankly about the ravages of chemotherapy, and how he lost his appetite so completely that his doctor diagnosed cancer-related anorexia. ‘ can you believe it,’ he asked with a rueful smile, ‘after all the dieting that we’ve done to keep under weight?’
His sense of humour is still in full working order.
former Wimbledon tennis champion Boris Becker appears to have no sense of humour at all — or perhaps that’s just his lawyers.
A caption appeared on screen at the end of Boris Becker: The Rise And Fall (ITV1), the first of a twopart documentary about his romantic and financial catastrophes. it announced that he, ‘denies not paying taxes due on horses at his Mallorcan home and hiding them in the bedroom as a result’.
That claim was made by one of several ex-girlfriends, fiances and wives who queued up to reveal how shocked they were that the party-mad sportsman turned out to be a cad, after vowing his eternal devotion to them.
foremost among these was Dutch model Sharlely Kerssenberg, mother of their son Amadeus, who gave an unselfconscious account of falling in love with the tennis star after meeting him in a Miami bar.
Her description of his emotional manipulations and the thoughtless way he switched off his attention whenever something more interesting was happening (a camera! another girl!) was scarily vivid — and much more absorbing than the cursory account of his tennis career.
But the programme suffered from its inability to follow one narrative. We heard about Becker’s first Grand Slam victory, then his sexual shenanigans when his career ended, then his childhood in the German town of Leimen, then his wooing of Sharlely, until the story was a confused blur.
The Boris Becker time machine is clearly a bit erratic.