'AN IDIOT ABROAD' 1.1 - "China"

An Idiot Abroad, Sky1's brand new comedy travelogue starring Karl Pilkington (cult hero and sidekick of Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant on their successful podcasts), debuted with a whopping 820,000 viewers last Thurday night. That makes it Sky1's highest-rated premiere for a homegrown show since May's adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, tripling what they expect for that timeslot.

I don't have the time or inclination to post an in-depth review of the show, suffice to say that I quite enjoyed it. It wasn't hilarious, but it was consistently amusing. I know there's still some debate about how much Karl Pilkington is "playing a character", as his idiocy often feels too scripted to be genuinely impromptu. I guess the debate will rumble on, although I just don't see how Karl could still be pulling the wool over our eyes after so many years, if he were a fraud. My guess is he has a sharp comic mind that was starved of education as a boy, pure and simple.

Anyway, this series finds Karl being sent around the world by Gervais and Merchant to report on "The Seven Wonders Of The World". First stop was China and its Great Wall, where we were treated to such scenes as Karl eating from a bag of Monster Munch as he watched a local man eat an egg containing a fetus, an old woman killing toads by whacking them on the ground to prepare Karl's dinner, the absence of doors and loo paper in Chinese public toilets, and Karl being taught Kung Fu at four in the morning.

It's not a hugely educational series (although we learned that the Great Wall was heavily restored in the '60s and '80s), but that's not really the point. It's an excuse to see a simpleton grapple with a different culture, showing us peculiar things you never get to see in serious documentaries and tourist shows. And, whether it was sometimes scripted or not, Karl's a witty person with a child's grasp of the world he inhabits, although the joke began to feel stretched after 30 minutes.

23 September 2010
Sky1/HD, 9PM

Read more...

Dom Joly & The Black Island

Dom Joly, a journalist and travel writer best-known for shouting into a giant mobile phone and crawling across a zebra crossing dressed as a snail (as part of hidden camera show Trigger Happy TV), is also a closet "Tintinophile". This, we learned during Dom Joly & The Black Island, is a term used to describe fans of Belgian illustrator Hergé's seminal creation: Tintin, a quiffed teenage reporter whose globetrotting exploits Joly claims were responsible for his love of travel. This one-off documentary, prematurely commissioned in light of the fact a Steven Spielberg/Peter Jackson Tintin movie is a few years off yet, could have been a wonderfully informative and amusing piece of work... but, it really wasn't. Joly's boyish enthusiasm came across as a little insincere, or at the very least embellished because this is the only TV project he's got off the ground since the flop of World Shut Your Mouth in 2005.

The premise was decent enough as a trivial piece of whimsy: Joly wanted to retrace the step of Tintin's seventh adventure in "The Black Island", starting in the character's birthplace of Belgium for some back-story on his creation, before travelling up through England into the Scottish highlands. There's certainly a great documentary to be made on Hergé and his intrepid comic-book hero, but this wasn't it. Joly's jokey persona filtered through him dressing up as Tintin (ginger hair, sky blue top, long socks) and attempting to steal a dog that resembled canine companion "Snowy", which felt like a leftover Trigger Happy TV stunt that went wrong, and wasn't funny in the first place.

Comedy pretty much extinguished with, Joly's "adventure" involved crossing the English Channel on a ferry from Ostend to Dover, catching a train at Bishop's Stortford station (which was allegedly the inspiration for a setting in "The Black Island", but which now looks nothing like its drawing), before arriving in Scotland to locate the cover's black island castle, which again didn't really look much like the drawing.

A few nuggets of information was gleamed: Hergé based all of his drawings on photos sent to him of faraway lands, as he wasn't much of a traveller; and the Japanese are massive Tintin anoraks (despite the fact their country was badly represented in one book.) Most of this trivia was dispensed by "Tintinologist" Mr. Farr during a train journey with Joly somewhere in the middle of this mercifully short half-hour.

I can imagine a fantastic documentary on Tintin being made some day, and we'll probably get one when the Spielberg/Jackson marketing muscle is in full flex, but this pre-emptive Channel 4 effort felt lacklustre, pointless, not particularly enlightening, and tragically unfunny. Joly just didn't convince me he was a genuine fan of Tintin, while the idea to follow in Tintin's footsteps just didn't work as I think it was intended. At no point did I care about Joly's trip, I'd rather have listened to Mr. Farr's insights into Hergé's oeuvre.

19 MARCH 2010: CHANNEL 4 (HD), 7.30PM

Read more...

Box-Eyed: Lost Land Of The Volcano, Harper's Island & Derren Brown's The Events

This week's Box-Eyed column features capsule reviews for Lost Land Of The Volcano, Harper's Island and Derren Brown's The Events. Head over to Newslite.tv now for a look-see!

"The joy of LOST LAND OF THE VOLCANO is how it cultivates a pioneering sense of discovery and adventure. You half expect the team to stumble upon a tribe sacrificing a blonde showgirl to a giant gorilla, or for a T-Rex to explode out of the foliage and chomp the head off one of the bearded eggheads." Continue reading...

Read more...