Comics’ trip

Who says British television lacks imagination? You might have thought, for example, that every possible combination of comedian and travel programme had been exhausted long ago. After all, it’s now 26 years since Michael Palin set the trend by following in Phileas Fogg’s footsteps (sort of). In more recent times, we’ve had Stephen Fry going round America in a London taxi, Billy Connolly going round Australia on a Harley-Davidson trike and — perhaps drawing the short straw — Ade Edmondson going round Britain in a caravan. There’s also been Paul Merton in India, Sue Perkins in China, Sean Lock and Jon Richardson in the Deep South and… well, you get the idea.

And yet after all this time, these programmes just keep on coming, with three on offer in the last, by no means untypical week. Of course, by now the conventions are so rigidly established that to depart even slightly from any of them — by, say, not wearing a Panama hat — feels like quite a bold statement. Reassuringly, though, most of the presenters do stick firmly to the old ways, especially when it comes to such staples as haggling in markets, tasting the funny foreign food and doing some local activities badly.

Of this week’s three, the most conventional was probably Dara and Ed’s Great Big Adventure (BBC2, Tuesday), in which Dara O Briain and Ed Byrne have been driving through Central America on the Pan-American Highway. With impressive attention to detail, they’ve even found some footsteps to follow in — if possibly from somewhere towards the bottom of the barrel. In the early 1940s, three Americans apparently drove along the same route when it was still a muddy cart-track, as part of their campaign for a proper road.