THERE ARE TOO MANY CELEBRITY TRAVELOGUES ON TV
guardian.co.uk
October 15 2008 13.24 BST
UK
There are too many celebrity travelogues on TVWhy can’t one learn
about a place without a famous face? I blame Andrew MarrComments
(12) Tonight on ITV1 Griff Rhys Jones is your tour guide to London
in Greatest Cities of the World. (He’s already done New York,
and Paris is next.) While on the spurious side, the tour itself
is not an entirely wasted trip, if only because it’s packed with
facts and figures: number of buses, miles of road, amount of bread
consumed using the capacity of the Royal Festival Hall as a unit of
measurement. You know, really useful stuff. My favourite fact is the
number of construction sites in London (88) as I often wonder if the
city will ever be finished. Apparently, it won’t.
At the same time as Griff goes crazy with his Oyster card, Paul Merton
is continuing his jaunt around India on Five. Last week, he got stoned
and watched men do odd things with their penises. (Why he had to go
to India for this and not simply pop to Soho, I don’t know.) Tonight,
he meets blind cricketers, eunuch racketeers and dancing policemen.
Add to these series Stephen Fry’s whistlestop tour of America ("There
goes Delaware …") and news that Jon Snow is driving from San Diego to
Seattle for Dispatches in search of "the new America" (and surely some
nice breakfasts) and you have a boom time for celebrity travelogues.
The Snow show will undoubtedly have journalistic merit – and
should surely be the first in a series called Snow Globe – but the
others? Fry’s is thoroughly unsatisfying, a dumbed-down-for-BBC1
piece of fluff that’s neither use nor ornament. Greatest Cities is
just random, from the choice of metropolises to the presence of Jones
himself. Merton’s show is the most interesting, but there’s still a
sense that its raison d’etre is to demonstrate that foreigners are
funny. Especially the brown ones.
All are part of the television trend that’s seen Joanna Lumley pop
to the Arctic and Robbie Coltrane take a tour of B-road Britain. Such
places simply aren’t interesting enough without a celebrity guide to
show us round. Regardless of whether they have any knowledge beyond
what the researchers have found out for them, and irrespective of
any connection to the place, a celebrity tour guide is now de rigueur.
Of course, it isn’t just travel. Increasingly, it seems difficult
for a documentary to be made without A Name attached. For this, blame
Andrew Marr and the success of his History of Britain. That opened a
floodgate for commissioners who decided that sticking a name in the
title would attract audiences as surely as Kate Moss covers shift
Grazias. Even those in factual TV aren’t immune to the glimmering
allure of celebrity or, rather, imagine that their audience can’t
cope with a canter through history (or whatever) without a well-known
face to accompany them. Now, when it’s someone who knows their stuff
– a Marr or Simon Schama or Bethany Hughes – that’s great. But some
random celeb with no investment in the subject? It’s an insult to the
audience and to the subject and, more often than not, the result is
a half-baked, half-hearted mess.
So, who would you like to send where next? Does the thought of
Jennifer Saunders in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh get you giddy? How
about Jodie Marsh in Iran? (That’s one for Virgin1, methinks.) Danny
Dyer in Somalia? Or how about my personal favourite – James Corden
in Siberia? (Only kidding: I love him after seeing his and Mathew
Horne’s performance for the Secret Policeman’s Ball.)