Paul Merton In India (Five)

Greatest Cities of the World with Griff Rhys Jones (ITV1)

Perhaps India and New York are simply too big. The only thing for Paul Merton (in India) and Griff Rhys Jones (in New York) to do was focus on the small things. In Merton’s case these were the withered willies of sect members worshipping at a religious festival as they attached rocks to their nether regions. For Rhys Jones, it was to hitch a lift on the back of a sanitation truck as it collected its share of the 50,000 tonnes of the rubbish New Yorkers throw away each day.

There’s nothing wrong with this light-hearted approach to somewhere big and ungraspable. Bite-sized pieces of eccentricity help us sofa-bound viewers (ooh look, crazy place that India; ooh look, crazy place that New York), but did we find out anything new about either place, or was it a bit of a colourful hop, with astonished proclamations thrown in? Both men were overcome by their locations – Merton said that India was big and noisy, so many people, amazing that there were cows on the street and also the place was a nuclear superpower; while Rhys Jones said New York was big, lots of people, rich and poor, dizzyingly multicultural and gosh, those skyscrapers are something.

If you really want to see India on screen – rich, poor and every clashing cymbal in between – see Danny Boyle’s fantastic new film Slumdog Millionaire when it comes out in January (or at the London Film Festival later this month). Merton, in khaki summer suit, really was the Englishman abroad and first went to an etiquette school where, under some fearsome tutelage, he was made to swallow marbles to improve his accent and eat a meaty breakfast with his fingers. He took all this quite well in his polite English way, but he didn’t look to be having much fun. He was almost knocked over a few times on the teeming streets.

A patient journalist channelled him to further eccentricity, such as a plane in somebody’s back garden which people paid to sit in and experience a simulated flight. He went to a temple where rats are deified and fed on milk. He went on patrol with some large monkeys that scared smaller monkeys from pestering neighbourhoods. Then, off to a big festival where the naked willy men gave him dope to smoke. Merton said in his blokey narration that he didn’t inhale, and it seemed that he didn’t although he did get up, as if to attach a rock to his penis. It felt like Indian culture was getting rather a dumbstruck, patronising pat on the head.

There is something about Rhys Jones’s narration which made his portrait of New York that bit more revelatory, whether it was listening to voices through vents (this wasn’t really explained properly) in Grand Central station or washing windows on a tall building. Rhys Jones’s instinct is off-road, so when he’s in a diner helping to serve a New Yorker breakfast he is genuinely amazed at the carb-mountain before him. He gazed over the great canyons of the city from the Empire State Building on, luckily for him, a clear day.

Beautifully shot and produced, you felt every puff of steam from the grilles of the pavement and, like Rhys Jones, the wonder that cities shouldn’t make as much sense as they do.

The Hills (MTV One)

If, like me, you are a longtime, slightly ashamed addict of The Hills, you will have long gotten over the fabulous reality show’s disclaimer that “some of these scenes have been created for entertainment purposes”. You don’t say. The show, now into its fourth season, focuses on the internecine feuding between a tiny group of young female friends and enemies in Los Angeles. It is shown on MTV where some days it is seemingly on all day: six hours of unbroken, slack-jawed caterwauling is not unknown.

Lauren is best friends with Audrina (but for how long?); they both live with Lo, but Lo has known Lauren all her life (we first met them in Laguna Beach – what? you missed that?) so Lo and Audrina hiss at each other and are now officially enemies. Lauren and Heidi – the central bitching dynamic – fell out after Heidi went out with the appropriately named Spencer Pratt (controlling boyfriend from hell). For some reason Heidi has got back together with Spencer: for entertainment purposes, presumably. Everyone speaks in that “like totally” LA argot.

Whitney is the least toxic character in this venom-fest. Lauren’s coworker from Teen Vogue – where they worked, Cinderella-like, in a cupboard before moving to the fashion company People’s Revolution – is not mean, so is not in many scenes. Oddly, MTV still sells these characters as having regular day jobs. They may well do (for entertainment purposes), but they have also become real stars with clothing lines and the like. Never mind the Cinders cupboard, they’ve now appeared on the cover of Teen Vogue. That bit of reality doesn’t make the final edit.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

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