The Hairy Bikers are back ... as elegantly coiffed motorcyclists

Born To Be Wild, wailed Sixties hard rockers Steppenwolf, as they got their motors running and headed out on the highway. They were hirsute, they were shaggy, they were unkempt and matted — worthy of the name Hairy Bikers.

That’s how celebrity chefs dave Myers and Si King like to be known, too. But these days the boys are washed and blow-waved, with more than a hint of hair colourant.

When they take off their crash helmets and shake their luxuriant locks, they look like they’ve just stepped out of a salon ... not so much Hairy Bikers as elegantly coiffured motorcyclists, and Born To Be Mild.

dave’s brown ringlets don’t have a hint of grey, though he’s pushing 60. And the tips of his moustache are waxed and twirled, like Salvador dali’s.

nine years younger, Si has let his goatee turn white but he’s still a burnished blond on top. Maybe their motto was once: ‘ride to live and live to ride.’ But these days it’s more: ‘Because i’m worth it.’

The duo were riding out in search of adventure together, on The Hairy

Bikers’ Northern Exposure (BBC2), for the first time since Si suffered a brain aneurysm last year. While his pal was recovering, dave got on with his career as best he could, doing the round of panel games.

But he’s much happier as part of a double act, and Si was plainly delighted to be astride his two-

BIG BANG OF THE NIGHT: Navvies blasting through the Pennines 200 years ago used bags of gunpowder, revealed historian Liz McIvor in her fascinating new series Canals: The Making Of A Nation (BBC4). And for fuses, they burned goose feathers. No one worried about elf ’n’ safety.

wheeler again: ‘Just being back on me bike with me best mate is epic.’

They were in Poland, touring Gdansk and Warsaw before heading to the primeval Bialowieza forest. That meant lots of traditional Polish sausages and hotpots, followed by cheesecake soaked in vodka.

dave and Si don’t visit foreign lands to sample other people’s cooking. They like to do it themselves, having a go at traditional recipes to the bemusement of locals who cluster round their makeshift outdoor kitchens.

You get the feeling they learned their culinary skills by copying fancy foreign food they had tried on their holidays, coming back from Mediterranean package tours in the eighties determined to master paella and pizza at home.

But they didn’t dare enter into the local spirit too far, and who could blame them? You’d need an indestructible liver to keep up with the Poles.

The elderly sausage chef who taught them Polish charcuterie tested his banger mix by eating the ground pork raw. And when the boys stopped at a village wedding to ask directions, the bride herself rushed out to press a litre of vodka on them.

it seems it was the natives, not the tourists, who were born to be wild. A couple of wild ’uns were causing havoc at Willows High in Educating

Cardiff (C4). new boy Aaron was rolling up late to lessons whenever he felt like it, oblivious to the pleading of his teachers.

Aaron wasn’t naughty, just wandering in a world of his own — chatting to the pigeons rather than fellow pupils, and constantly smiling at private jokes. His classmate Assad, also aged 11, was much more of a handful. ‘i just like being naughty, it’s really funny,’ he announced, ‘and i can’t actually control it.’

if he couldn’t keep a lid on his mischief, no one else stood a chance. The head, Joy Ballard, tried bargaining, threatening, cajoling and punishing: Assad shrugged it all off with a cheeky grin.

There’s not much to be done with lads like that except wait for their classmates to grow up. Troublemakers usually start behaving when their friends stop finding them funny.

The futile efforts of the teachers to discipline Assad quickly ceased to be interesting, yet the whole episode centred on these two boys. With 68 cameras and more than 100 microphones stationed around the school for a year, the producers should have collected far more stories than this.

last week’s leisurely opener set the series off to a slow start, and it’s getting slower. School documentaries should be lively, boisterous and fast-moving: this one is so ponderous, it might as well be filmed in slow-motion. no wonder Aaron and Assad got bored so easily.