The pandemic has meant many of us have been taking holidays which don’t involve overseas air travel.
So too have telly’s globetrotting travel presenters been hanging around the British Isles, trying to find a sense of the majestic and surprising at home.
Simon Reeve is one case in point, his output having become increasingly gentle since he wrote the first ever book on al-Qaeda in 1998, then spent the 2000s presenting BBC travel programmes from war-torn danger zones.
Recent years have continued in similar fashion, with the enthusiastic Reeve – who is to travel what Brian Cox is to stargazing – never short of a boyish “brilliant!”, whether he’s meeting a shepherd or an arms dealer on one disputed border or other.
An underwhelming start
Since Covid, however, he’s had to constrain his wanderlust to the UK, first with last year’s show on Cornwall, and this week with the first episode of The Lakes with Simon Reeve (BBC Two).
It began in underwhelming fashion, as he introduced us to red squirrel lover Julie and her efforts to keep the rare but beloved animal alive in the face of grey squirrel domination.
An important conservation story, to be sure, but one which is familiar to many.
Until keen shooter Julie opens her box of grey squirrel pelts.
Not something you’d expect
“There’s about 30 pelts in here, which will be enough to make a waistcoat at some point,” she says.
“There’s no point wasting them, is there?”
She cooks the meat and serves it with porcini mushrooms; her husband prefers squirrel madras.
Culling a pest like the grey squirrel is legal, of course, but even on home turf, Reeve finds an angle which makes the viewer sit up and take notice.
There’s more to come, with looks at the Lake District’s forestry, farming and nuclear submarine industries, and most evocatively with pieces on community projects tackling poverty and youth unemployment in the area.
Angus, a resourceful 18-year-old running his family’s large farm after the death of both parents, has one of those touching and unique stories viewers expect from Reeve’s work, the kind which set it above the norm.
Miriam and Alan in Scotland
Elsewhere, the actors Miriam Margolyes and Alan Cumming are newcomers to this game.
Although Miriam and Alan: Lost in Scotland (Channel 4) takes them around a country they’re more than familiar with.
Alighting at Glasgow’s Central Station and picking up a camper van in the SEC’s car park, the first part of their three-week tour took them to the Gorbals home of Margolyes’ late father, and to the Panmure Estate near Carnoustie, where the Aberfeldy-born Cumming was frank about his unhappy upbringing.
the tone was relaxed and down-to-earth, rather than actorly.
Even when the pair met up with the great Scottish actor Bill Paterson in Fordyce to discuss Margolyes’ happy filming memories with him there in The Lost Tribe 40 years ago.
Warm reminiscing and matey double entendres came together with quirky locations, lovely scenery and a general sense of respect for the 80-year-old and still-vocal Margolyes’ fortitude in getting about the place.
