Not even Nadiya can save this duff programme
Last year Nadiya Hussain, the 2015 Great British Bake Off winner, took a DNA test. When the results came back she discovered that not only is she of Bangladeshi heritage, as she knew, but there’s a bit of Cambodian, Nepalese and Thai in the gene pool too. So she did what any right-thinking TV celebrity would do: she turned her discovery about her background in to a three-part travelogue. The result,
Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey (BBC One), began last night and while it confirmed that Hussain is as likeable a screen presence as they come, it also confirmed that even a likeable screen presence can’t save a duff programme.
At first, it seemed as if Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey was going to be Who Do You Think You Are? She said goodbye to her family, flew to Cambodia and within 10 minutes of the programme starting she was in tears as a woman in a shack spoke about her daily hardships. “This could have been my life,” said Hussain. “That could have been me struggling to feed my kids.”
Comparing Hussain’s experience in Britain to various roads not taken might have been interesting, but no sooner had it been suggested then this odyssey changed tack. Mere seconds after the blubbing, we were suddenly in a Cambodian bakery with Hussain demonstrating how to make a to-die-for peanut brittle. Then we were in a Thai noodle factory. Then an old man was climbing a tree. The programme veered from cookery to travel to genealogy like a drunk tuk-tuk driver. There were recipes, more tears, an attempt to make palm sugar (“tougher than I expected”) and even a diversion in to some parenting advice prompted by a call home to her family. “If they see that I’m comfortable away from them it will give them confidence to be independent.”
My suspicion is that some go-getting producer had got wind of Hussain’s DNA test results and booked the flights there and then, only stopping to ask what they were actually going to do in Asia once they got there. So they did a bit of everything. One thing that Hussain definitely shouldn’t have done is admit early on in the programme that her trip to Cambodia and Thailand lasted… two weeks. Is two weeks really classifiable as an “Odyssey?” No, two weeks is more of a jaunt, really, and unfortunately that was what Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey felt like.
The people who are most interested in babies tend to be the people who have babies. From personal experience, once your babies have grown up a bit then the “magic” of dribble, teething and puréed food ceases to be quite so magical. So the challenge for Babies:
Their Wonderful World (BBC Two), whose second episode went out last night, is to find an audience beyond cooing new parents. Its ploy, as with so much factual TV at the moment, is to mine psychology and sociology papers for toothsome nuggets. Through a series of experiments it connects baby behaviour with adult behaviour, suggesting that if you’re not that interested, you jolly well should be.
This week’s episode was about social interaction, and some of the experiments were more yawn-making than groundbreaking. A test to see what happens when babies stop getting attention revealed, shockingly, that they don’t like it. Similarly, an experiment that plugged a baby in to a brain scanner (it looked as bad as it sounds) showed that babies are more engaged by a human face than a picture of a toy. Although I bet if they’d have shown it an ipad the readings would have gone through the roof.
In a similar vein we learned that children laugh at peekaboo more than they laugh at Dad pretending to be a cat and that empathy is “innate and ubiquitous” (which makes you wonder how people lose it in adulthood).
The format here mimics Channel 4’s excellent The Secret Life of 4 and 5 Year Olds. Scientists pass judgment on children’s behaviour, citing studies and looking stunned when Baby does something that fits the hypothesis: “Look! We can hear her vocalising her frustration and her heart rate is going up. That looks like an emotional response.” They could be right. But to these eyes that emotional response looked like the poo face.
What babies lack, of course, are words, which means that this series can’t fall back on the “Kids Say the Funniest Things” moments that make Secret Life such a hit. Their World does look wonderful, but because they can’t tell us about it we have to rely on psychologists for interpretation – and the minute the adults get involved somehow the wonders cease.
Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey Babies: Their Wonderful World