No one goes anywhere on television these days without first taking the precaution of becoming a celebrity. As the box goes nutty over the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, Victoria Wood and Diana Rigg have already made sentimental journeys to the subcontinent. On Monday on BBC Two Sanjeev Bhaskar began the first of his four-part series on modern India. Last night the same channel presented Saira Khan’s Pakistan Adventure. Soon it will be Michael Wood’s turn, although, at least, he is a celebrity historian. I wonder if they ran into one another out there, had a jolly good curry and squabbled over whose expenses tab would take the strain.

Khan, should the name eludes you, was the woman who didn’t quite win the first Apprentice. She was a sharp suited, uppity, Asian version of Ruth Badger. To see her wandering round in head scarves was the first shock and, as if to remind us she was still a hardheaded business-type, we were later shown her haggling with a market trader. The second shock was to realise that although her Kashmiri parents spoke Urdu as she grew up in the Midlands, she had not much more clue about Pakistan than, well, me.

She was determined – and good for her – to judge the country by best Western standards: how it treated women, how it tolerated minorities, how much free-expression it permitted and what provision there was for its poor. She wanted, she said, to find out if Pakistan could ever be “her” country. The evidence was contradictory, but Khan, clearly a fiercely intelligent woman, looked on the bright side where she could.

Soon after her arrival in Karachi she found herself talking to a racy late-night talk show host, Nawazish Ali, a vamp who went heavy on the make-up, heavy on her guests and was, actually, a man. TV transvestism was not what Khan had expected from repressed Pakistan. Nevertheless, she cottoned on that Ali was an unthreatening cross-dresser who kept his bedroom preferences obscure. In Pakistan, she concluded, homosexuals had the freedom to do what they liked only if what they liked stayed hidden. Ali was, in a sense, no more than the well-paid, well-lit face of the hijra, a group of transvestites, transsexuals and hermaphrodites allowed out for birth and marriage ceremonies as dancers and elfin good-luck charms but who otherwise resided in Karachi’s grubbiest shadows.

Soon the country’s treatment of women had become her litmus test. The paper turned the wrong colour when she plonked it in the water fished by the picturesque Manchar fishermen. They were secretive about their women for a reason: they were kept so poor that they had to catch fish with their hands. Islam, on the other hand, was scoring more highly than expected. At the awesome Shah Jahan Mosque in Thatta, she found women and families praying and playing together in vast squares that suggested “there was once openness about the way Islam was celebrated”. Further up the road, in Sehwan Sharif, she came upon a Sufist cult that celebrated nightly a 13th-century saint by whipping itself, man and woman, into a hair-flailing mass trance. The noise, she said, was so great that she could not think straight, perhaps excusing her conclusion: “If that is Sufism, count me in.”

If India with Sanjeev Bhaskar makes it to Sehwan Sharif next week in its Pakistani detour, I trust that Khan’s witty rival will count himself out. If Khan’s strength/weakness is to allow herself to be sucked into the subcontinent, Bhaskar’s is the reverse: a lack of empathy. Monday’s programme centred on booming, sky-scraped Bombay, where he found himself more at ease among the city’s insanely wealthy than its teeming poor. The Goldfinger theme played as he boarded a clothing millionaire’s playboy yacht. Unimpressed, conversely, by the efforts of two junk collectors – one disabled and forced to shift his haul by cab rather than cart – he mused: “It is one of those classic hunchback versus cart-guy stories.” I thought that was taking detachment a little too far. He’d have done better to talk to the “hunchback” rather than cling to the attractive middle-class lawyer showing him off.

But, as Bhaskar said, his was, at least, a BBC series about India with a difference: it was presented by an Indian. Watch the two programmes back to back, however, and you spot the difference: Bhaskar’s is a travelogue, Khan’s an investigation.

Out of the box

Hurrah! The BBC iPlayer, the new way to watch BBC programmes you missed on your computer, is at last up and running. Although launched last week, the BBC is hiding it away as yet. I eventually found it on the link www.bbc. co.uk/iplayer (I guess I could have worked that out). You have, however, to be invited to join, so you’ll have to await a formal e-mail telling you how to get started. Downloading the application took about ten minutes. Downloading my first show is proving a longer process. I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, a kind reader, Martin Avons, explains the problem I may be having with my Net-gear Digital Entertainer, the gadget that will allegedly transfer my PC downloads wirelessly to my TV: I need an application called – wait for it – Twonkyvision. I tell you, you’ll soon need a degree in computer science to switch on the telly.

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