Greg Dixon: Woodham leaves you travel-weary

COMMENT

Someone - a funny someone, certainly - once said that travel narrows the mind and broadens the prejudices.

I can report that staying home and watching television does the same. But what of staying home and watching travel shows on the box? Surely that's a double whammy.

Well, inevitably it does depend on what couch-travelling you do. Travel shows tend to fall - like travelling, I guess - into roughly two types of sightseeing: the shows which are more or less undiluted advertising for tourist destinations, and those that like to dress themselves in the safari suit of adventure.

Prime's Getaway is an example of the first, and Michael Palin's various series, built around contrived ideas such as travelling between the poles, are among the second.

Intrepid Journeys (7.30 pm TV One) is obviously of the second variety. We know from the first series that the idea is to take one better-known New Zealander each week and throw him or her in at the deep end, usually marked "The Third World". We get to watch them suffer a little for their free trip and, if we have the money and like what we see, add another country to the must-see list.

Mostly, the first series just made me jealous that these people had a trip gratis. This series the lucky devils include Kerre Woodham, Danielle Cormack, Ewen Gilmore, Hugh Sundae, Jon Gadsby and Katie Wolfe.

But it also made me realise that even virtual travelling depends not only on where you end up but also very much on the quality of your travelling companion.

Tonight's episode has Woodham journeying through Vietnam and Cambodia, two countries which are terribly popular these days with those who claim to want an authentic experience, man.

I'm not sure whether this is because both are dirt-poor and have tragic histories.

Both are certainly not the sort of place Woodham might have chosen because, as she tells us tonight, "I'm not really an intrepid sort of girl. I like my comforts."

She makes a good fist of being intrepid, however, at least trying some of the more interesting cuisine and, despite suffering from claustrophobia, going down a tunnel system built by the Vietcong during the Vietnam War.

The visual highlight of her brief tour is probably - as I'm sure it is for many tourists - the 1000-year-old Angkor Wat ruins in Cambodia. And both countries, in the show's rapid postcard shots, look interesting.

Unfortunately, much of what comes out of Woodham's mouth, as we travel along with her, is utterly banal.

"The people are what make this city," she says of Saigon. "They are so friendly and so warm and so open and so welcoming."

The only cliche missing is that it's a city of contrasts.

Then comes the hand-wringing about the past. Apparently she, a New Zealander, must take on the weight of the West's misadventures in the region.

"I came here with, I suppose, liberal guilt about what the West have [sic] done. But they [the Vietnamese] have no time for liberal guilt. They are too busy making the city rich again. They are getting on with their lives and haven't really got much time for liberal guilt."

And neither have I. But I do have one question: Who asked her to pack her liberal guilt?

Then there is her visit to the killing fields of Cambodia.

"I didn't like the sound of the place, but somehow it seems important to visit these mass graves, to acknowledge it and to hope to never see anything like it again." Woodham then goes on to say - with disappointment, apparently - that she thought she would be more emotional because "the spirits of the dead would still be lingering".

Finally, she donates blood. That's what you do in Cambodia to help, apparently. Sigh.

You can't condemn television travel shows just because they don't match up to books by Paul Theroux, Jonathan Raban, Eric Newby or Bill Bryson. But Intrepid Journeys would be a better trip if it narrowed the mindlessness and broadened the insight.