A question I never dared to ask: what if The Trip didn’t have all the bits that makes The Trip “The Trip”? Because, at surface level, The Trip is just two people going to a continental city and eating an exquisite meal. The Trip becomes complex when you add in all the sheer Trip-ness of it – the impressions, the wine-in-hand ponderings on the nature of sapping masculinity, the repeatedly having sex with the same photographer, the not quite knowing how to talk to your own son – so what if you just took all that out? And had Fred Sirieix do it? Well …
Remarkable Places to Eat (Thursday, 8pm, BBC Two) is the second series of arguably the peak of Fred Sirieix’s scam on the British public, where he went from mystic First Dates whisperer to the very top of your mum’s all-time shag list to his final form: gold-dipped food TV royalty. Fred is a fascinating TV character because we, as a society, simply would not allow him to exist if he were one of ours: he is constantly earnest, twinklingly flirtatious, he adores life and all it has to offer him, he simpers over a well-cooked shoulder of lamb. British people hate all that. But put it in a va-va-voom accent and a cheerfully handsome beard and suddenly it makes sense. The qualities we revile in ourselves look great when draped over the French.
Here he is in Marrakech, anyway, with Andi Oliver. It is simply a delightful hour of television. Remarkable Places is a thin format, really: go to a global city with a top-class chef, find a couple of hidden gem restaurants, eat in them, firmly shake the hands of the maître d’ and say how nice the chicken was – done. But here, what should be quite a repetitive programme sings with colour and life: oftentimes, it’s a bit like stumbling into a gallery opening when everyone there is four wines deep, glamorously agreeing with each other, no horror on the horizon, only food and glory and the joy of being alive.
This is basically all it is. And any deviations from that actually start to drag: between an opulent breakfast and an afternoon spent learning to cook a lamb shoulder in a restaurant, Fred goes out to a farm and actually sees some lambs grazing under trees, and has a tedious translated conversation with the shepherd. There’s a too-long bit where he learns to pour mint tea from a great height while repeatedly asking the waiter to rate his efforts out of 10 (Waiter: [Extremely long pause] “Seven?”). Like, there are clunks. This could have been a tight 30 minutes of happy people eating. It’s an hour of happy people eating, but also learning. It’s fine. I’m not going to lose sleep over a sloppy edit. It’s not what Fred would do.
But in a time of lockdown, Remarkable Places… is like medicine. We close on Fred and Andi, in the bustling Jemaa el-Fnaa square, eating syrupy pastries from a box as the sky bruises purple behind them. They purr about how “balanced” the flavour sensations are. They touch each other on the forearms lovingly. Will you ever eat baklava in front of the Moroccan sunset again? What will the world look like when all this is over? Shh, shh. Watch Fred Sirieix eating couscous in a roadside cafe. None of this really matters.
