I worry Romesh Ranganathan might not have enough work

Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ At first I assumed it was someone having sex – but I later found out that the next-door room was occupied by Romesh Ranganathan’s agent.

This year’s Comic Relief featured a W1A sketch where one of the gags was about how Ranganathan now presents everything on television. But the truth is, apart from that sketch, his only TV gigs so far this year have been presenting The Weakest Link, presenting the Baftas, co-presenting Rob & Romesh Vs…, co-writing and starring in the sitcom Avoidance as well as guest appearances on QI and Would I Lie to You?. (Then again, he has been preparing for his stand-up arena tour, which started last week.)

It was therefore high time for the return of his travel-series-with-a-difference, The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan, in which he goes to countries not generally thought of as tourist paradises to see if the scepticism about them – including his own – is justified.

Or at least, that’s the pitch, because the shows themselves are a lot more artful than that, thanks to their frank embrace of cakeism. On the face of it, Ranganathan’s scepticism extends to the whole notion of celebrity travelogues. The programme, for instance, began with a knowing pastiche of their usual introductions, especially the sort of ringing questions whose answers are unlikely to surprise us: ‘Is Uganda all about Idi Amin? Is Madagascar full of animated talking lions?’ Yet, once he was in Uganda for the first episode proper, the scepticism became much more sporadic.

Granted, he was understandably amused to find that the source of the Nile is now sponsored by a beer company.