Sir Trev looked as bemused as a minor royal opening a Morrisons
Some people don’t cope well with holidays. It seems Sir Trevor mcDonald is one of them. Riding the maharaja’s express from mumbai to Delhi on his Indian Train Adventure (ITV), the former ITN newsreader was itching to abandon the luxury and get stuck in to some real reporting.
The 23 resplendent carriages were dripping in an opulence that made Hercule Poirot’s orient express look like the Cardiff-toPortsmouth Sprinter train. At every stop, Sir Trevor walked on carpets of rose petals, with an honour guard of bowing attendants.
No one can deny the 79-year-old newsman deserves a break. He’s spent the past few years interviewing reformed mafia hitmen and touring U.S. maximum security prisons.
But after days of constant cosseting, Sir Trev was plainly bored witless. At a fabrics factory in Jaipur, where he had a go at handprinting silks, he looked like the world’s worst Blue Peter presenter.
on the border with Pakistan, as he tucked dolefully into a barbecue in the dunes, he was visibly pining for the era when the two nations were lobbing missiles at each other and he was an intrepid war reporter.
Throughout his visit to a temple in Bikaner where the locals worship 20,000 holy rats, he wore the
bemused and faintly disgusted expression of a minor royal who has been booked by mistake — like Princess michael of Kent being handed a pair of scissors and asked to cut the ribbon on a new morrisons supermarket.
He was obviously yearning, as the train chuffed gracefully past miles of slums outside Delhi, to get out there and find the real stories.
This was the second of a twopart documentary: last week, before beginning his rail journey, he investigated a warren of hovels in mumbai where men crouched all day in stifling heat, stripping metal and plastic waste into piles for £2 a week.
He had been in his element, filing a report that mattered. Those foetid backstreet sweatshops made a deep impression: I’ll never moan about doing the recycling again.
Poverty and harsh realism weren’t what ITV bosses wanted, of course. Sir Trevor’s jaunt was intended as a starter for the main course, the empire- and- elephants romp Beecham House, so there had to be much more emphasis on the fabulous wealth of the long-gone princes. The train, we discovered, once belonged to the maharaja of Bhupinder, who had five wives and 350 mistresses. No wonder he felt the need for an occasional away day.
The scandalous private life of John mcenroe was left unexplored in Sue Barker’s adulatory profile, Still Rockin’ At 60 (BBC1). As they strolled together through Central Park and visited his childhood home in Queens, you could be forgiven for supposing the original New York brat had lived a life of saintly abstinence.
The veil of discretion slipped only once, when Pretenders singer Chrissie Hynde remarked in passing that mcenroe always called her when in London because she knew where to find drugs. He was ‘a big pot-head’, she said.
Sue wasn’t interested in hearing about that. In fairness, interviewing Supermac wasn’t easy, because once the man launched into his store of anecdotes he was unstoppable.
Stories came like tennis balls fired from a serving machine, boom-boom-boom.
He only shut up when he plugged in his guitar. of all the things you never want to hear an ex- athlete say, the worst is: ‘Here’s a tune I wrote about 20 years ago . . .’