More vanity project than Chilean adventure

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It is customary when reviewing celebrity-led documentaries to invoke Alan Partridge, whose idea for “Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank” now sounds completely unremarkable. To keep things more up-to-date, though, we should look to Philomena Cunk, whose BBC mockumentaries are now virtually indistinguishable from the real thing. Here is Cunk talking to an expert: “Why do they say it’s a mystery how the pyramids were built when it’s obviously big bricks in a triangle?”

And here is Nick Knowles, in his new show Nick Knowles in South America (Channel 5), striking up a conversation with a park ranger: “So. Penguins. Why?” The penguins in question were on an island across the Magellan Strait in southern Chile. “I like penguins but I’ve only ever seen them in a zoo,” Knowles said. “This is where they live. This is what they do. This is proper penguin-ing.”

Knowles, best known for his sterling work on DIY: SOS, is a likeable presenter. Which is lucky, because this is one of those travelogues that is more about the host than the country. The first 10 minutes involved him climbing up a rock face, which taught me a lot about how he deals with heights but not very much about Chile.

This is not a programme to make you think, ooh, I quite fancy going there on holiday. Unless, that is, you like holidays that involve visiting biofuel plants or finding worms in big tanks of sewage. “When they said, ‘Would you like to go around the world and visit amazing places’, I never thought I’d be digging through poo,” Knowles said, in as cheery a voice as he could muster.

Why was he grubbing through sewage? I’m not quite sure. The series makes some odd choices. Rather than focus on locals, it featured a Frenchman who jacked in his job in order to cycle around South America after testing positive for Huntington’s disease. There are clusters of the neurodegenerative condition across the continent, Knowles told us, due to a concentrated gene pool. This was an interesting detail, but was it the best thing the programme-makers could find to teach us about Chile?

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Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/2024/06/05/nick-knowles-in-south-america-chile-channel-5-review/ Author : Publish date : 2024-06-05 15:00:00 Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source .

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More vanity project than Chilean adventure

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