TV Eye: Grand Designs' host should stick to buildings

Kevin McCloud on tour. Photo / Supplied

Grand Designs' Kevin McCloud is now on Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour, in which he fops about Europe in a nice suit, in "history's equivalent of a gap year".

Bit old for a gap year, isn't he? I suppose they have to make these things appealing to more than anyone who might have a passing interest in architecture and history.

So Kev goes to Italy, to a famous tailor's shop and gets fitted out in history's equivalent of what a "young, posh and loaded" lad of the 17th century might wear today on his equivalent of a gap year. This involved poncey boots, a poncier scarf and a pair of those idiotic, giant headphones young folk gad about in instead of, perhaps, a lovely wig.

This made some sort of sense: the grand tourists arrived and strode off in search of the top fop outfitter of the day in order to achieve a sort of metamorphosis so that they might blend in on their revels abroad.

Kev's metamorphosis meant that he woke up one day and found himself on the telly looking like a giant, poncey bug. He did venture outside the shop in this get up, but only briefly. He has some sort of tolerance for making a twerp of himself, but it is perhaps, and mercifully, limited.

He demonstrated how the Venetians created that marvellous illusion of a floating city with a bowl of chocolate blancmange and toothpicks - the sort of architectural demo he likes to do on Grand Designs. He ate frog's legs. "If anyone ever tells you they taste of chicken, they don't. They taste of frog."

In Genoa he interviewed a prostitute.

Only he could find a prostitute who looked like a professor, but this was still less than illuminating.

He went to Parma, and saw parmesan being made and left, staggering under the weight of a wheel of cheese. Why?

Well, apparently the toffs of yesteryear used to take cheese home. Samuel Pepys was so fond of his pricey bit of parmesan that he buried it in the garden to save it from the Great Fire of London.

All of which was mildly entertaining, but made for a bit of a well-worn grand tour in the travel show genre. Kev is a charming and enthusiastic host - "this is ... wow!" - but he's much better on making Palladian architecture interesting than he is on parmesan and prostitutes.

As light entertainment goes, his tour trots along easily enough but there's a whiff of compromise about the endeavour.

Maori Television's Tamariki Ora (which screened in two parts on Sunday and Monday but which will surely be given repeat screenings) was a resolutely uncompromising look at child abuse in New Zealand.

Was this worthy stuff? Yes, but in the best sense of the word. There were portraits of families who had been affected by child violence (and the documentary makes all too clear that withholding of love and smiles from kids affects their development, violently): "the abused and the abusers".

There were plenty of real stars like the grandmother who went to court to get custody of her grandchildren and was abused by some in her community for doing so. She said: "I don't know how people turn a blind eye. I did, but not any more." Her grandson said: "I don't like living with my dad. He hits me."

Also, the Greymouth woman who runs a parenting group who said "bullshit" when told that her programme might work in a small town, but would never work in big cities. "You do it street by street."

As television it was well-made, intimate and powerful. Who was it for? Anyone who lives in a street, anywhere, I suspect.