How many Gregg Wallaces does it take to bore viewers to tears?
WAH HeY HeY! oi oi! Woah! Gregg Wallace is back and, boy, has he got some statistics for us! Gregg loves numbers. Better still, he loves telling us how the numbers compare to other numbers. Confronted with a lorry delivering rolls of cotton on Inside The Factory (BBC2), he demanded to know how much each one weighed.
The answer: 160kg. Woah! ‘That’s about two Gregg Wallaces,’ he bellowed, his shiny head already reeling. And there was more incredible information to come. Unrolled, the bale would stretch 500 metres.
‘That’s a phenomenal amount of cloth,’ gasped Gregg, so staggered that for a moment he was unable to conceive of a suitable analogy. There’s the problem with these lowbudget shows packed with numbers: your brain becomes overloaded.
Gregg was in South Shields to see waxed jackets being made, the type worn by country types of all classes — equally practical for standing in the pouring rain at a point-to-point or stuffing snaffled pheasants into the capacious inside pockets.
Some of his stats seemed dodgier than the village poacher, mind you. The presenter watched the rolls of cotton being run under a jet of orange flame to sear off any stray threads. ‘The singeing machine is
shooting out gas-fuelled flames at 2,000 degrees Celsius,’ he told us.
Are you sure, Gregg? i ask only because i seem to remember from long-ago chemistry lessons that flame burns orange at around 2,000 Fahrenheit, not Celsius.
At 1,500c flames turn white and cut through metal. To create heat of 2,000c would require experimental lasers, and even then it might cause the surrounding air molecules to dissolve into plasma.
They’re only making waterproof jackets at this factory, not splitting the atom.
Poor old Gregg dashed away to the next spectacle, getting ever more confused. Told that the jacket pockets were lined with moleskin (a heavy felt-like cotton), he wondered how a mole’s skin would feel.
kerry, the lady on the sewing machine, regarded him with pity. ‘ i’ve held a hamster. They’re furrier,’ she said helpfully.
Alan Titchmarsh’s jaunt around the stately home of the Marquess of Anglesey in Secrets Of The
National Trust (C5) was both more reliable and more entertaining because it gave us stories instead of numbers. This pile belonged 200 years ago to Henry William Paget, the suicidally brave officer at Waterloo who lost a limb to a cannonball, riding at Wellington’s side. All he said was: ‘By God, sir, i’ve lost my leg’ — to which the Duke replied calmly: ‘By God, sir, so you have.’
Alan was delighted to see the Marquess’s wooden leg, hinged at the knee to help him when dancing. He was more delighted still to see an immense mural created by his favourite artist, the dashing Rex Whistler.
Rex was besotted with the Pagets’ eldest daughter when he painted it. (And here’s a fact Alan didn’t mention: Rex was the inspiration for Charles Ryder, the Jeremy irons character in Brideshead Revisited.)
We learned too of the black sheep, the fifth Marquess, who blew the family fortune on parties and theatrical extravaganzas. ‘if there was an edwardian equivalent of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, he lived it,’ remarked one historian.
Marquess no 5 married his cousin and loved to shower her naked body with jewels before gazing at her curves fervently.
Three years later, his lovemaking had gone no further than that. The marriage was never consummated, and they separated.
That’s the sort of stuff that makes for memorable telly — not botched statistics.