Paul Merton in India
Channel 5
Great Cities of the World with Griff Rhys Jones
ITV 1
Stephen Fry in America
BBC 1
WHAT is it with comedians and travel? At the moment, we can take our pick from Paul Merton (Far East correspondent), Stephen Fry (United States) and Griff Rhys Jones (just about everywhere). You can understand harassed television executives being desperate to inject new life into the tired old travel show format. But it gets a bit embarrassing when they all come up with the same idea at once: send an underused old comic off somewhere to file a report on Johnny Foreigner “with a bit of a twist”. Now showing on (nearly) all terrestrial channels.
Of course, some comedians are better at it than others. Paul Merton surprised everyone a year back with his bemused and vaguely anarchic take on China. So now he has got India to work with – a place with more surreal surprises than even he can accommodate. In Paul Merton in India, he’s already marvelled at holy men hanging weights from their penises, teams of gangster eunuchs and dancing policemen. But there have been moments where the sheer volume of human suffering has suspended the gigglathon, when orphaned street children or grim diseases have inevitably brought the mood back to documentary realism. Let’s hope he can keep up the innocent abroad approach without finally succumbing to the bland clichés of conventional travelogue.
Merton is a more offbeat traveller than Griff Rhys Jones, at any rate. Zipping through a handful of the world’s great cities, Rhys Jones’ version of TV travel is watchable without being startlingly original. Great Cities of the World with Griff Rhys Jones has ticked off New York, London and Paris (where he does display some jittery enthusiasm) without ever overtaxing the viewer. As in all these new style travel shows, Rhys Jones feels obliged to roll up his sleeves and “take part” in the various activities he encounters. In Stephen Fry in America, the pattern is repeated: Fry motoring around every state in the US in a London black cab, taking on fares to interview (he had that Sting in the back of his cab once) or mucking in with the natives in their natural habitat.
So far, Fry has been down a coalmine, forced himself to inspect a grisly “body farm” and fished for lobsters. Inevitably for a six-part series, no state is permitted more than a flying visit, with time allotted depending strictly on amusement value.
Most entertaining of all, perhaps, was his Kentucky bourbon-tasting session in which all the stress and repressed emotion of foreign travel (especially with a camera crew in tow) finally bubbled to the surface. Clearly the worse for wear, he took another sip and started babbling away about how it reminded him of “an autumnal walk in the countryside about seven miles from Aldershot.” His American host smiled politely while Fry slowly realised it was high time for “a little lie-down.” Well, that’s what too much travel does to you: it boggles the mind.
Helen Chappell
