Martin Clunes: Islands of America review: Clunes is a lovable travel companion

He's a poor man’s Michael Palin, and that's not meant as an insult

Clunes is an inspired choice to explore the United States (ITV)

The television celebrity travelogue is a well-established genre. Like any other holiday, you require three ingredients: pleasant company, interesting destinations and a manageable pace.

Rarely is the chemistry just right. Michael Palin meandering around the planet as if he’d never met a foreigner in his life would be one successful example; pottering around the British coast on Timothy Spall’s boat might be another; Hitler’s Holocaust Railways with Chris Tarrant was, no doubt, well-meaning on the part of Channel 5, but was perhaps not a well-starred combination. (For the avoidance of doubt, this was a real show, broadcast last year, and not some Alan Partridge-style satire).

Martin Clunes’ Islands of America could easily be a boreatahon, as dull as watching the neighbours’ holiday videos, but, to my surprise, it is not. Clunes is an inspired choice to explore the United States, territory that has, after all, been extremely well covered over the decades by everyone from Alan Whicker to Stephen Fry to Michael Portillo .

This time the producers, very sensibly, avoid the usual bogus “aren’t the Yanks wacky/fat/idiotic?” theme, and stuck instead to capturing majestic scenery, cute wildlife, stunning cityscapes and leaving Clunes to his usual guileless interactions with people he seems genuinely interested in.

Like the folks he meets, the viewer finds Clunes so likeable that you tend to forgive the often inane observations. When he arrives in New York, for example, doing the usual thing of dodging the yellow cabs, he remarks that it is a place of “big shops and bright lights”; hardly a revelation.

New York boasts 500 miles of coastline and some 40 islands, we do learn, and Clunes manages to get around a few of them, starting with Manhattan. Our guide is game for anything and suffers a nasty bout of vertigo clinging to the external rail on the top (103rd) floor of the Empire State Building – having a minor nervous breakdown in public purely for our entertainment, a bit like Theresa May doing a press conference.

Clunes also follows 62 previous Cluneses who once made their way through the famous immigration hall on Ellis Island over six decades after it opened as the grand reception centre for the huddled masses in 1892. Here he completes, in the allotted three minutes, an original mental agility test involving blocks of wood that was used to determine whether new potential US citizens were too “feeble-minded”, in the terminology of the time, to be allowed entry. Tactfully, Clunes doesn’t ask how Donald Trump’s granddad managed to get past the immigration officials. Just think, if Friedrich Trump had been packed off back to Bavaria, then Donald might be mayor of Munich now. Sorry, got carried away there.

The most fun we have is around Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod, where Jaws was filmed – familiar-looking locations, but with an intriguing contemporary tale to relate.

When the blockbuster was released, back in 1975, the great white shark was a relatively rare menace, and attacks on people even less common, contrary to the terrifying fiction in the movie. Now, though, there are loads of sharks around, and Clunes was, as ever, keen to put himself in the line of danger by going out on a boat looking for these 13ft-long murder machines. Each one looks the part of a horror movie star.

The reason there are so many sharks at large today is not that they are trying to cash in on movie merchandising opportunities (the Massachusetts locals, not the great whites), but because the local seal population has boomed since it was given protected species status, and it is the sharks’ favourite snack food. Hence them moving into the shallow waters off Edgartown (Amity island in Jaws). Our host made the statutory joke about needing a bigger boat, but, again, Clunes being Clunes, we forgive him.

If I didn’t think it might be taken as an insult – it’s really not meant to be – I’d call Clunes a poor man’s Michael Palin. Besides, this 10,000-mile journey around North America, from Hawaii to Maine via Alaska and California, didn’t look like it was made on a shoestring. Martin Clunes is a lovable travel companion, and I’m booking my seat on the next trip – to Martin Clunes’ Cliche Island.