I worry Romesh Ranganathan might not have enough work

Let’s say, for the purposes of this joke, that I was recently staying in a hotel and kept hearing through the wall a voice shouting, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ At first I assumed it was someone having sex – but I later found out that the next-door room was occupied by Romesh Ranganathan’s agent.

This year’s Comic Relief featured a W1A sketch where one of the gags was about how Ranganathan now presents everything on television. But the truth is, apart from that sketch, his only TV gigs so far this year have been presenting The Weakest Link, presenting the Baftas, co-presenting Rob & Romesh Vs…, co-writing and starring in the sitcom Avoidance as well as guest appearances on QI and Would I Lie to You?. (Then again, he has been preparing for his stand-up arena tour, which started last week.)

It was therefore high time for the return of his travel-series-with-a-difference, The Misadventures of Romesh Ranganathan, in which he goes to countries not generally thought of as tourist paradises to see if the scepticism about them – including his own – is justified.

Or at least, that’s the pitch, because the shows themselves are a lot more artful than that, thanks to their frank embrace of cakeism. On the face of it, Ranganathan’s scepticism extends to the whole notion of celebrity travelogues. The programme, for instance, began with a knowing pastiche of their usual introductions, especially the sort of ringing questions whose answers are unlikely to surprise us: ‘Is Uganda all about Idi Amin? Is Madagascar full of animated talking lions?’ Yet, once he was in Uganda for the first episode proper, the scepticism became much more sporadic.

Granted, he was understandably amused to find that the source of the Nile is now sponsored by a beer company. He later visited what ‘has been described by people who are almost certainly wrong as the world’s most powerful waterfall’.

Most of the time, however, he was only a Panama hat away from performing the role of a bog-standard travel presenter: marvelling at the scenery, pretending that he thought he ‘was actually going to die’ while white-water rafting and being rubbish at basket-weaving. There was also the inevitable trek through a wildlife trail which (like most of them in my experience) was notable for its total lack of wildlife. Ranganathan’s guide was a Ugandan woman called Alex, who laughed gamely, if a little wearily, at his many jokes and responded gamely, if a little wearily, to his many inquiries about Idi Amin. (Another example of Ranganathan’s cakeism was that he both declared how silly it is to keep banging on about Amin and kept banging on about Amin.) Where she wouldn’t play ball was in their discussion about Uganda’s new, ferociously anti-gay legislation. ‘I think it represents what we believe as a people,’ she told Ranganathan, who was even more aghast to discover that this was probably true – that most Ugandans do seem to be proud of laws that have apparently led to, among other things, the widespread ‘corrective rape’ of lesbians.

Ranganathan didn’t note the dark irony that his (surely righteous) objections represent an old-school colonial belief in the superiority of European values. Nonetheless, he ended his trip obviously, even tearfully troubled by the contradiction between the ‘lovely’ Ugandans he’d met and their support for a ‘disgusting’ decision to ‘make it illegal for people to be who they are’. After a programme that, while perfectly enjoyable, hadn’t always made it easy to tell when Ranganathan was reacting naturally and when he was just playing the part of a travel presenter, this felt almost joltingly authentic.

All of which leaves less room in this column than it deserves for The Sympathizer, a classy new series from HBO that offers the ever-reliable pleasure of being intriguingly tangled and straightforwardly exciting at the same time.

The setting for the opening episode was Saigon in the terrifying weeks, and then days, leading up to its capture by North Vietnam in 1975. The main character, known only as the Captain, is a communist spy working for the secret police in the South. Or maybe a secret policeman in the South pretending to be a communist spy working for the North. Either way, it already looks as if it’s going to be a lot of sophisticated fun finding out which.

Less sophisticated, mind you, is Robert Downey Jr’s performance as the American éminence grise in the city. Chewing a cigar and the scenery with equal vigour, Downey gurns and mugs his way through his every appearance.

On the one hand, the sight of him in full bonkers flow has a certain brazen charm. On the other, in a show that otherwise seems to be aiming for nuance and complexity, his casting feels mystifying – or would do if the closing credits hadn’t revealed that he’s also an executive producer.