Sweary Gordon Ramsay’s star vehicle is a complete car crash
Gordon ramsay only knows one swear word but, boy, he makes it work hard. Take out all the effin’ Fs in Gordon, Gino And Fred: Road Trip (ITV) and you would be left with five minutes of footage.
And that wouldn’t be worth watching, either.
This highly publicised star vehicle was a laboured attempt to combine Top Gear with culinary travel, as Gordon joined Fred Sirieix from First dates and This Morning’s Ginger d’Acampo. Sorry, Gino d’Acampo.
Careering round Italy’s Amalfi coast, the men were striving for that matey chemistry. But from the outset it was just torrents of foul language from Gordon, while Fred and Ginger threw their arms around and giggled in highpitched shrieks.
The only way this resembled Top Gear was its heavy- handed scripting. Clarkson and co always knew better than to repeat a gag, but one running joke on road Trip was ploughed into the ground: Ginger keeps crashing the boys’ camper van, while Gordon keeps swearing at him.
next week they’re in France, and Fred keeps crashing the boys’ camper van, while Gordon keeps swearing at him. Hilarious.
oh, and Ginger, who is famous for cooking naked on daytime telly, lost his swimming trunks every time he went swimming. What larks.
According to the plot, they were heading for Sardinia, to cook at a wedding. There were plenty of chaotic kitchen shots, but no recipes, which was a good thing since no one but a psychopath in a really nasty mood would want to prepare that menu.
The main course was whole baby piglets, with their heads cut off and presented on a lump of wood. If someone served me that in Italy, I’d assume it was meant to be an offer I couldn’t refuse.
The only half-interesting segment in the entire hour was a visit to Ginger’s villa in the countryside, a chance to see how celebs spend their telly cheques. In the grounds were a gigantic pool and a vineyard.
The house itself looked like a red barn in a tutu. At least the place is in the middle of nowhere, so no one has to see Ginger’s bare bum when he’s swimming.
Much more entertaining was a glimpse into the home life of a nobel prize-winning scientist, in Body Clock: What Makes Us Tick? ( BBC2). Presenter Ella AlShamahi visited U.S. biologist Jeffrey Hall at his rural home in Cambridge, Maine, where he lives surrounded by a pack of doolally Jack russells.
With his straggly hair and beard, in a baseball cap advertising an energy drink called ‘ Brawndo, the thirst mutilator’, Jeffrey looked like he might have been evicted from a Mexican trailer park for bringing down the tone. But when he talked, he was lucid and concise, explaining how genes in our bodies manufacture proteins that wake us up, then send us back to sleep. All creatures have these genes, even fruit flies — especially fruit flies, in fact. Apparently they’re really good sleepers. You’ll never see a fruit fly with insomnia.
Ex- commandos find regular kip more difficult, as adventurer Aldo Kane discovered when Ella locked him in a nuclear bunker for ten days and switched the lights off. With only an infra-red camera for company, Aldo tried to stick to a 24-hour schedule. He did well not to lose his mind.
It was a tough experiment, one that prompted an unspoken question: ‘How would I cope?’ Within two days, I reckon I’d be as bonkers as one of Jeffrey’s dogs.