Serial thriller

For keen students of China, this week’s television provided yet more proof that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to open the country to the West has had consequences that he’s unlikely to have foreseen. He probably couldn’t have predicted, for example, that one day a former Bond girl would travel the country finding almost everything ‘thrilling’. Or that a bloke who made his name in a British makeover show would proudly explain to a group of Chinese journalists that ‘I’ve got the sunglasses, I’ve got the big hair — all [sic] of these things are what you’d expect from a celebrity.’

The Bond girl in question was Joanna Lumley, who began Joanna Lumley’s Trans-Siberian Adventure (ITV) in Hong Kong reminiscing about her early childhood there when she had two guinea pigs called Sammy and Michael. (‘Mummy taught them how to whistle.’) But despite being ‘thrilled to be back’, she was soon ‘thrilled’ to be buying a ticket to Beijing where she picked up the train that in Sunday’s first episode took her as far as Mongolia, with regular stops to visit the sites — and to give the slightly bewildered-looking locals a full blast of her breathy charm.

‘I love poetry,’ she told a young poet whose chosen profession meant he was too poor to have a girlfriend. ‘May I wear your hat?’ she coquettishly asked a train conductor as they posed for a photograph together. Sadly, the pupils at a girls’ school weren’t enormously impressed when she revealed that she comes from ‘the country of Shakespeare’. But they perked up considerably once they realised that she also comes from the country of Harry Potter.