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Romesh Ranganathan seems a likeable guy. A funny one too. Okay, not Stewart Lee funny, not Doug Stanhope funny, not break the mould funny, but certainly a lot better than most of the Live at the Apollo/Mock the Week lot he graduated with.
Like many likeable television celebrities he's been assigned a cushy travel show gig (always guaranteed to irk those that like to complain about the BBC license fee and how it's spent) and like many of those shows I found myself watching it, enjoying it, and writing about it. I've seen Sue Perkins travel the length of the Ganges, Reginald D Hunter drive round the deep south, and Babita Sharma and Adnan Sarwar survey the India/Pakistan border. Then there's those who specialize in travel shows. Your Simon Reeves, your Levison Woods, and, of course, your Michael Palins. Perhaps they should send someone totally loathsome on a future jaunt. Who wouldn't want to see Michael Gove on the frontline in Yemen or Piers Morgan having a long look at the inside of the North Korean prison system?
The schtick for BBC2's three part The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan is that Rom gets to visit places usually far off the tourist trail with just a camera crew and a selection of guides and translators for company. He's off to discover if Haiti is more than just poverty, if Ethiopia is more than just famine, and if Albania is more than just corruption. If the results won't come as a surprise, and they won't, it's still a pleasure to see how the sweet natured, self-deprecating, Romesh copes with these trips and what he has to say about the countries he's visiting. It's a fairly lightweight show and it's more likely to make you smile than split your sides laughing but in our current climate of cruelty and victim blaming that's enough.
Ranganathan kicks off his travels in Haiti, a country Donald Trump has dismissed as a 'shithole'. Leaving aside Trump's complete lack of tact, diplomacy, or even basic human manners, Haiti certainly has its problems. Cite Soleil, a Port-au-Prince commune, is a 'red flag' zone without any available drinking water that's seen murder, rape, and kidnappings in recent years.
Rom is met off the plane by his first guide Jeremy and soon gets the feel that in Haiti voodoo (or vodou) and cocks are big. I'm not saying they have bigger cocks. Just that they're big on cocks in Haiti. There are models of them everywhere, some with nails and spikes shoved through the end. Ouch!
In Cite Soleil some people live, or get by, on less than $1 a day. The streets are strewn with the litter and exposed drains don't add a lot to the air quality but there are beautifully decorated tuk-tuks buzzing by blasting out great hip-hop inspired music. Rom and Jeremy meet up with a local musician who invites them to have a go. Jeremy is absolute shite but Romesh carries himself pretty well.
Not being fluent in Haitian Creole I couldn't begin to tell you what the themes of the local music are but with five million Haitians (nearly half the total population) being believers in vodou it's quite possible that that syncretic religion gets a shout out.
Vodouists believe that with vodou you can cure, and curse, everything and anything. In preparation for a vodou ceremony Rom visits the rebuilt (following the 2010 earthquake that claimed somewhere between 100,000 and 320,000 lives) Iron Market for supplies. Flags, dolls, rum, scarves, shampoo, black fish, 'golden dream Cologne', and 'leave me alone powder'. That kind of stuff.
Cite Soleil is a bit different to Romesh's native Crawley and not just because Yvonne appears to be a man's name there. But, in truth, Cite Soleil seems far more poor than it does dangerous. Romesh clearly feels uncomfortable with this episode of poverty tourism and, in one of those earnest straight to camera monologues that all travel journalists find themselves obliged to do after an 'emotional' experience, dispenses the truism that if Port-au-Prince isn't even set up for the people who live there then why the hell would it be set up for visitors?
It's probably no surprise in such penurious circumstances that people look for a better life and that people look for a short cut to a better life. The lottery is massive in Haiti and generates nearly 20% of the nation's GDP and because the lottery is all about luck then why not chuck a bit of superstition and magical thinking in. If you dream about coconuts pick number twenty for your lotto ticket, if an ambulance crops up go for thirty.
It's uncertain if the money generated by the lottery will help in rebuilding the city. During the earthquake nearly half the buildings in Port-au-Prince were destroyed and it's said that every Port-au-Princien(ne) knows somebody that lost their life in the tragedy. It seems a long way from the rather pleasant Hotel Oloffson, described amusingly as a 'gingerbread mansion', where Romesh is staying and where Graham Greene set, and wrote much of, his 1966 novel The Comedians.
The beaches of Jacmel present a very different face of Haiti to Port-au-Prince. With their white sand and cheap lager you could imagine, one day, the tourist hordes descending upon them and proclaiming them an 'unspoiled paradise' but before Romesh can enjoy them he's got the not inconsiderable matter of a vodou ceremony to attend. Chanting, chickens, drums, symbols, and a neckerchief of some sort all play a part but it's not clear, to us non-believers, what the fuck is actually going on.
It seems as much spectacle as it is ritual but having gone through that Rom has one last thing to do before he leaves Haiti, jump off the 30ft high Bassin Bleu waterfall into the tranquil, azure, waters below. To be fair to Romesh Ranganathan he does that with just as much gusto, and a bit of mock-complaining for the sake of cameras, as he does everything else.
For the second installment he's rocked up in Ethiopia where not only are they over the famine of the 1980s (think Live Aid, think We Are The World) but most Ethiopians weren't even born when the combination of war and drought combined to cause nearly half a million of the country's citizens to starve to death. A staggering 71% of Ethiopia's population is under thirty and it is now, behind Nigeria, the second most populous country in Africa.
Having hooked up with his guide, an anthropologist named Mike, Rom's first impression is that the country, and Addis Ababa in particular, is a lot more modern looking than he'd expected. There's plenty of vegan food in the market (Ranganathan is a vegan) and in the local bars a selection of Ethiopian comedians insult his beard.
To the strains of Ethio-jazz, Romesh and Mike head out past the camels for a road trip. First stop is to meet a local Rastafarian who's clearly stoned when they arrive and continues to puff on the sacramental weed as he gives his guests an enthusiastic, but obviously laid back, history lesson on the life and times of Haile Selassie from his multicoloured 'museum' home.
Next up is a 'sand spa' in which Romesh complains about the heat being generated around his nether regions. But it's not just his sweaty balls that are making our narrator uncomfortable but the roadblocks and the constant police presence that's accompanying him on this trip. Ethiopia is in a state of emergency but that's clearly not the message they want getting out to visitors.
Below sea level, the Danakil Desert, near the Eritrean border, is a contender for the hottest place on Earth. When Romesh and Mike visit one estimate of the temperature is 50c and the average is 34.4 but still there are salt miners struggling to make a living in this inferno. The Danakil Depression looks like the surface of another planet. The yellow is sulphur and the red tint is iron oxide. There's even a geyser squirting out water estimated to be 112 degrees centigrade. It's not just an area of interest to those who like a warm shower but also to scientists. If bacteria can live there, and it does, then it could live on Mars.
Tigray would be of equal interest to both architectural historians and theologists. It's seen as the cradle of civilisation and is dotted with numerous rock churches. To access these you may need to scramble up a sheer rock face, cross a stone bridge with 250 metre drops either side, and walk in through a hole in the side of the rocks. Yet inside we find a church, fully functioning, and adorned with frescoes.
It's astonishing. Romesh Ranganathan tries to subvert the genre by taking the piss (and regularly breaking the fourth wall to talk, and banter, with his guides and his crew) but at the same time he's obviously loving this, he's clearly impressed. There's a knowing, quietly confident, duality in his presentation that brings a humanity, and a warmth, to this series.
The fact it's warm, hot, in both Haiti and Ethiopia doesn't hinder things from our perspective either. When Romesh arrives in Albania he, and we, are not so fortunate. It's pissing down and, despite his swanky hotel in Tirana, it's clear that Romesh is uneasy about seeing no other brown faces whatsoever in the city.
He somehow contrives, 'thanks' to his guide Erjona, to end up on the Albanian equivalent of The One Show where they seem to think he's a rapper and ask him to spit a few bars. Unlike in Haiti, Romesh declines and then proceeds to sulk all through the show. The Albanians don't seem to get his British humour and he doesn't seem to get them either.
Enver Hoxha ruled Albania from 1941 until his death in 1985 as a kind of isolated, authoritarian, and Communist European version of present day North Korea and, following his death, the country suffered a painful, still ongoing, transition that's ended up with nearly one third of Albanians moving abroad where many of them are typecast as gang members and some actually are gang members. A popular Albanian joke is that the country is free of crime as all their criminals now live in the UK.
Romesh and Erjona eat in a fairly grim, and somewhat bizarre, restaurant where the waiter delivers their food horseback before lying on the floor with said horse and allowing his equine colleague to rub his hoof under his chin. If Rom struggles with this he has further problems dealing with both the strength and the spiciness of the local raki and the ice cold sea dip that leaves his bollocks as cold in Albania as they were hot in the desert of Ethiopia. It's probably just as well he's already got three kids because forcing these extremes of temperature on one's nuts can't be good for them, surely!?
Further challenges, and yet more raki, appear when he stays the night in a remote village (population:approx 100) with some shepherds, a load of sheep shit, and a shotgun he's been presented with to shoot any wolves that may be after the sheep. A vegan'n'all.
The family of shepherds are, like most Albanians, hospitable in the extreme and if it seems there's likely to be a contrast between them and the flash suit wearing, flash car driving, Tirana playboy who dates models, flies around in private jets, and takes Romesh for a spin around the capital then it's only surface level. Sure their lives are almost polar opposites but both shepherd and playboy are attentive, friendly, and as eager to listen and learn as they are to talk. We, like Romesh, can't help warming to them.
No private jet or top of the range sports car will get you to the Albanian Alps. For that you need an off-road vehicle and even then it's a total bastard of a journey. They even get stuck in the snow meaning the eventual journey time is a full seven hours. But once they reach the mountain top there's a bar full of people drinking, playing music, and, next morning, lobbing snowballs at each other.
Romesh tries on a supposed traditional Albanian outfit but doesn't feel comfortable with it so, instead, he gets a tattoo to commemorate his visit. A tattoo of the two headed eagle, earlier dismissed by Romesh as looking "like two griffins fucking", that adorns the Albanian flag and almost everywhere else in the country.
Albania, like Haiti and Ethiopia, has won Romesh over and he, and the three countries he's visited, have won us over too. The surface lightness of these shows was just what was needed for these countries. Countries that normally only attract the attention of earnest documentary makers or stern faced news reporters. It was a series that warmed my heart nearly as much as the hot sand spas of Ethiopia warmed Romesh Ranganathan's ballbag.
It turns out neither Haiti, Ethiopia, or Albania were shit so Romesh Ranganathan didn't need to tell us they were shit. There was never any doubt, really.
grt
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