Ever wondered why factual TV has such boring, on-the-nose titles? It’s because programme-makers need to snare the scrolling channel-hopper, and they’ve got a split second to do it. Hence Mel Giedroyc and Martin Clunes Explore Britain by the Book (ITV1). That title tells you everything: celebrities, travelogue, literature. It’s only the show itself that says almost nothing.
The concept, which feels like a pilot for a series, is to visit places that inspired popular works of literature, in this case in Dorset. Giedroyc and Clunes – cast as pals despite having not met for 25 years – execute one part of the job professionally well: wonderful company, they guffawed, they gossiped, they trousered the cheque.
A difficulty arose when they had to talk about books, or Dorset (looking a picture under blue skies). Giedroyc, notionally presenting, seemed disinclined to take the brief too seriously. Opening in Lyme Regis, she described the titular heroine of The French Lieutenant’s Woman as “one of the most intriguing characters in literature”, then gave no further indication that she’s actually read John Fowles’s novel.
Worse, Thomas Hardy felt undervalued too. One of the suitors in Far From the Madding Crowd was identified as “old blooming what’s-his-face” while Tess of the D’Urbervilles was briefly summarised, in the study where it was written, as “quite a depressing book”. Up on Eggardon Hill, Giedroyc tried to pretend she couldn’t remember the name Hardy gave it. Perhaps it would have been too elitist to know for sure, or to mention The Trumpet-Major, which it appears in.
Giedroyc seemed greatly more intrigued by the wedding plans of a cider provider they entertainingly visited on the flimsiest of pretexts. But she sounded like a Regius Professor of English Literature next to Clunes, who hadn’t read any of the set texts at all. His bottom-of-the-class incuriosity, as Giedroyc essayed a pre-watershed description of the sexual trauma at the heart of Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, was absolute. “It’s devastating actually,” she explained. “Oh is it?” he deadpanned, arms folded in defence. “Oh golly.” He cheerfully admitted to knowing nothing about Dorset either. Still, he tells a good codpiece gag.
A clifftop encounter with Raynor Winn, reading from a mystical section of The Salt Path, briefly stilled the merry flow of laughter and didn’t quite belong. Seemingly commissioned by algorithm, this was cynical, indolent TV. “From Lyme Regis we’re heading west across the county,” Giedroyc’s voiceover confidently explained as a line on a map graphic travelled due east.
