Even a lion burger can’t bring Hollywood the pub bore to life
Never repeat a joke. if it doesn’t get a laugh first time, just pretend you didn’t say it — because it will only fall flatter a second time.
Paul Hollywood hasn’t grasped this. He’s one of those men who will keep repeating a remark when he thinks it’s funny, even when all the evidence says otherwise.
At a street cafe in Paul Hollywood Eats Mexico (C4), he was tucking in to a taco when the chef’s phone rang. Paul guffawed, and roared out a weary quip heard in pubs across Britain every evening: ‘If that’s my mum, tell her I’m not here.’
The taco-packer looked at him blankly. Undeterred, Paul urged his translator to repeat the joke in Spanish. Once again, it met with silence.
That sums Paul up. He’s not a Tv presenter, he’s a bar-room bore. After each adventure in Mexico City, he delivered a pre-written summary to camera. Without his script, he was helpless.
In a store selling pinatas, the papier mache decorations that spill sweets when hit with sticks, he kept blandly repeating, ‘These are brilliant. Amazing. Wow. Incredible.’
His eyes lit up, though, when he spotted one pinata shaped like a glamour model in a bondage costume. With Paul floundering for words, it was left to narrator rebecca Front to supply knowing remarks. She read the voiceover in the tone of a woman with one eye on her wristwatch.
Paul’s inability to improvise was most obvious when he stumbled on a meat stall in an indoor market that advertised tiger steaks and lion burgers.
‘I have a problem with that,’ mumbled Paul. ‘That shouldn’t be happening.’ He quickly convinced himself, though, that it was just a marketing gimmick: ‘I do hope so.’
To send a man with a camera crew halfway around the world for a food programme, and let him ignore a story like that, is worse than pointless. Here was a scandal that demanded investigation. Paul could have confronted the stallholder and demanded to know where the meat came from, whether it was illegally imported or farmed in Mexico.
Instead, he crossed his fingers and walked away. That’s an abject failure for any television show, and sums up why it’s useless to send a baking contest judge to make a travelogue.
When an investigative journalist is required, you can’t do better than a grizzled Scandinavian.
Trom (BBC4) introduced a prime example of the species, in Hannis Martinsson, a man whose bristling white beard gives him the look of a polar bear that has found a dead seal and strongly suspects a trap.
We met Hannis, played by Ulrich Thomsen, on his way back to his native Faroe Islands — a cluster of volcanic rocks in the North Atlantic, halfway between Iceland and Norway. He’d just been expelled from the U.S. for firing awkward questions about industrial pollution at the wrong people — ‘or the right people,’ he said with grim pride.
Before his plane touched down, an environmental activist got in touch by video message to warn him of a dangerous conspiracy on the islands — and to add that, by the way, she’s the daughter he never knew he had.
This is the sort of ominous political crime thriller that’s best in Danish with subtitles, where the female detectives don inchthick knitwear and minor characters career off the road after their cars are sabotaged.
Crashes aside, much of the Faroes scenery gives this six-part serial the look of an advert for high-performance family hatchbacks. It looks like a great place for a motoring holiday, except you’d probably end up as one more corpse in a case for Inspector Pullover.