Tonight on ITV1 Griff Rhys Jones is your tour guide to London in Greatest Cities of the World. (He's already done New York, and Paris is next.) While on the spurious side, the tour itself is not an entirely wasted trip, if only because it's packed with facts and figures: number of buses, miles of road, amount of bread consumed using the capacity of the Royal Festival Hall as a unit of measurement. You know, really useful stuff. My favourite fact is the number of construction sites in London (88) as I often wonder if the city will ever be finished. Apparently, it won't.
At the same time as Griff goes crazy with his Oyster card, Paul Merton is continuing his jaunt around India on Five. Last week, he got stoned and watched men do odd things with their penises. (Why he had to go to India for this and not simply pop to Soho, I don't know.) Tonight, he meets blind cricketers, eunuch racketeers and dancing policemen.
Add to these series Stephen Fry's whistlestop tour of America ("There goes Delaware …") and news that Jon Snow is driving from San Diego to Seattle for Dispatches in search of "the new America" (and surely some nice breakfasts) and you have a boom time for celebrity travelogues.
The Snow show will undoubtedly have journalistic merit – and should surely be the first in a series called Snow Globe – but the others? Fry's is thoroughly unsatisfying, a dumbed-down-for-BBC1 piece of fluff that's neither use nor ornament. Greatest Cities is just random, from the choice of metropolises to the presence of Jones himself. Merton's show is the most interesting, but there's still a sense that its raison d'etre is to demonstrate that foreigners are funny. Especially the brown ones.
All are part of the television trend that's seen Joanna Lumley pop to the Arctic and Robbie Coltrane take a tour of B-road Britain. Such places simply aren't interesting enough without a celebrity guide to show us round. Regardless of whether they have any knowledge beyond what the researchers have found out for them, and irrespective of any connection to the place, a celebrity tour guide is now de rigueur.
Of course, it isn't just travel. Increasingly, it seems difficult for a documentary to be made without A Name attached. For this, blame Andrew Marr and the success of his History of Britain. That opened a floodgate for commissioners who decided that sticking a name in the title would attract audiences as surely as Kate Moss covers shift Grazias. Even those in factual TV aren't immune to the glimmering allure of celebrity or, rather, imagine that their audience can't cope with a canter through history (or whatever) without a well-known face to accompany them. Now, when it's someone who knows their stuff – a Marr or Simon Schama or Bethany Hughes – that's great. But some random celeb with no investment in the subject? It's an insult to the audience and to the subject and, more often than not, the result is a half-baked, half-hearted mess.
So, who would you like to send where next? Does the thought of Jennifer Saunders in the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh get you giddy? How about Jodie Marsh in Iran? (That's one for Virgin1, methinks.) Danny Dyer in Somalia? Or how about my personal favourite – James Corden in Siberia? (Only kidding: I love him after seeing his and Mathew Horne's performance for the Secret Policeman's Ball.)
