Some jolly TV artifice and a rare moment of authenticity: C4’s Miriam and Alan – Lost in Scotland reviewed

Thanks to Covid, the days are gone — or at least suspended — when a TV travel programme meant a thespian in a Panama hat wandering around souks and bravely trying some funny foreign food. Instead, we now have shows in which the presenters, often operating in pairs, drive around picturesque parts of Britain cranking up the bantz, with plenty of aerial shots of their car bowling along an abnormally empty road.

Take Miriam and Alan: Lost in Scotland — by my reckoning approximately Exhibit P. The premise here is that Alan Cumming and Miriam Margolyes are seeking to reconnect with their proud Caledonian roots, which is why the first stop was a Glasgow front door behind which Miriam’s father lived as a boy in 1901. And with that, her reconnection was pretty much complete, leaving her free to do what she does best — or anyway, most habitually: demonstrating how outrageous she is.

The irony is a rewilded Lake District would be just as man-made as the one’s that’s already there

To this end, she recalled how her ‘knickers fell off’ just before her driving test, kept us fully up to speed on her defecatory activities and gave a rare 21-century outing to the phrase ‘as the actress said to the bishop’. At times, mind you, it did seem as if she was having some help from set-ups the producer had prepared earlier. During the inevitable visit to a tartan factory, the only piece of machinery she asked about turned out be called a ‘vibrator’. Walking round a castle garden, the only plant of which she wanted to know more was immediately described by the host as ‘a wild rose with massive hips’. (And Miriam, of course, was never going to miss from there.)