A funny thing happened on the way to the Pole

When I was young I used to read about the exploits of Scott of the Antarctic, David Livingstone and Ernest Shackleton. I liked the idea of travelling and exploring distant parts of the globe.

What training would I need, I wondered? A military career perhaps, or something using geography or cartography?

As it turns out today such skills are not nearly as useful as those of the stand-up comedian. Ask any BBC producer.

Last month there was Victoria Wood floating around the globe's former pink bits in "Victoria's Empire." Prior to that there were the travelogues featuring comedy actor Michael Palin. Even Billy Connolly has turned his touring in to a kind of travel epic. Now I see that Channel Five has hopped on the bandwagon with "Paul Merton in China."

I wonder if Scott told jokes about penguins or whether Mungo Park ever played the Glasgow Empire? Were Lewis and Clark role models for Laurel and Hardy? After all, Laurel and Hardy did make a film called Way out West.

The BBC has missed a trick or two in the past. Otherwise we might have seen Morcambe and Wise on the Eiger or Tommy Cooper of Khartoum. At least the Carry On team made Carry On Up The Jungle.

What does the future hold? Maybe we'll see Peter Kay in Amarillo The Hard Way or Jasper Carrot in Carrot Continental or Rowan Atkinson in the Thin Blue Planet. The possibilities are endless.

Accidental angling

I had a good chat with Charles Rangeley-Wilson this morning. If you saw any of his excellent TV series, The Accidental Angler, on BBC 2 earlier this year you will understand that his mission is to tell stories - or let the stories tell themselves - through fishing in different parts of the world.

He tells me he didn't feel comfortable with the BBC format for this kind of thing where everything has to be thoroughly researched and scripted with producers going out on "reccie" trips beforehand.

"I like the idea of turning up and seeing what happens, letting things unfold for themselves," he says.

A case in point was a record Mahseer, seen in the programme mounted on a museum wall in India. "Only the fish hadn't been on the wall until the researcher arrived. It was stuck down the back of a filing cabinet and only brought out when they knew we were making a programme. Wouldn't it have been so much better if the cameras had found it where it had been stored originally?"

Charles did well to get backing from the BBC for the original series. But plans for a second series have been dropped due to lack of funds. This seems ironic given his argument that a series could be made more cheaply with less time spent on the preparation work.

Anyway, now he has taught himself to use a film camera, learned the editing software and has set about making a one-off film about bone fishing in the Bahamas. It's deliberately raw. But then, that's real life. Real life is not about contrived meetings and well-worn anecdotes. It's certainly not about Victoria Wood - fine actor, writer and comedian that she is - wandering the globe on some pretty flimsy premise to make a series about the British Empire.

This is format TV of the worst kind. You can just imagine someone at the BBC saying: "It worked well with Michael Palin so let's get another comic to front up a travel series." They tried the same with Alan Titchmarsh believing, erroneously that they could transfer him from his gardening slot on to a much bigger landscape to present a nature series. It didn't work.

People are getting fed up with format TV, just as they are tiring with format journalism. Congratulations to Rangeley-Wilson for going his own way. I hope he succeeds.

NB. Have just finished my latest column for the FT and will be publishing it in the fishing section of my website on Saturday. It's about mayfly and museums.(Note added later: If you wondered where this column had gone so did I. Apparently coverage of the Chelsea bloody flower show pushed it out so it is the following Saturday. In the meantime will all mayfly please take note and delay their hatch).