TV Preview: A pleasant waste of time

Barging Round Britain with John Sergeant Friday 22 April 2016 , 8pm ITV; I Want My Wife Back Monday 18 April 9.30pm BBC1

Grant (Kenneth Collard) and Murray (Ben Miller) in I Want My Wife Back. It has a pleasingly unpredictable quality about the action that belies the promise of the series title (BBC)

It sounds like one of those now notorious programme ideas that a desperate Alan Partridge once pitched over lunch to the (fictional) Controller of BBC Television, Tony Hayers. Before Alan lost it, thrust a whole stilton in Hayers’ face and yelled, “Smell my cheese.” You remember: monkey tennis; youth hostelling with Chris Eubank; inner-city sumo…

Exploring Britain’s inland waterways with John Sergeant almost makes it into that quite absurd category, except, of course, that this Friday you can see it for yourself. And a very pleasant – almost partidgeesque – exercise in futility it certainly is. In this first of his canal journeys, John takes himself for a trip from Buxworth to Aston under Lyne on the Peak Forest navigation, which once had the serious task of moving lime from quarry to the biggest mortar works in the land thus, literally, cementing itself into our industrial heritage. Nowadays it has the rather less vital task of moving a late-middle-aged TV celebrity with nothing much better to do around the north midlands so that he can meet random people and do random things.

Thus did we find “Sargie” (as he was affectionately known to those of us who had the pleasure of knowing him in his days at the BBC) play-boxing with Ricky Hatton, losing his fedora on a blustery day, and putting a shift in at the Swizzles sweet factory, though none of the ladies there saw fit to offer flirtatious Love Heart to the old boy.

I wondered three things as John meandered slowly around some admittedly very pretty landscape. First, how charming he remains after all these years, and still as game for a laugh as he was during the fall of Mrs Thatcher and the first Gulf War. Second, how pleasant it would be just to mess about on a boat with him for a wee while. And, third, that he seems to be morphing into fellow radical feminist comedian Jo Brand. Maybe he’ll bump into her on a barge down on the Grand Union. Anyway, like I say, a pleasant waste of time.

• As Herman Goering almost said, when I hear the words “romantic comedy” I reach for my revolver. So it was with “I Want My Wife Back”, starring Ben Miller as the time-poor, emotion-rich Murray and Caroline Katz as the neglected-to-the-point-of-jacking-it-in wife Bex. It could easily have been gruesomely saccharine with canned laughter (unfathomably back in fashion) dubbed over to make up for lame dialogue and weak acting. But it really isn’t as bad as that. Indeed it has a pleasingly unpredictable quality about the action that belies the promise of the series title.

Tellingly, I found myself ending the first episode with some faint interest in what happens next to the two protagonists. I know that’s not such a ringing endorsement, but like Murray and Bex’s marriage, the show shouldn’t be written off just yet. Smell my cheese.