All Roads Lead Home

(BBC2)

The forthcoming BBC cuts to save £670m a year from their budget will apparently mean more repeats and fewer entertainment shows. And they’re not kidding if last night’s viewing is anything to go by. Just, please, don’t bring back Dad’s Army.

All Roads Lead Home, a show in which three celebrities have to navigate their way through a field with only the sun, wind and animal poo as their guide, provided a fruitless 60 minutes that promised so much more.

In the second of this three-part series, Stephen Mangan (Green Wing, Episodes), took Alison Steadman (Gavin and Stacey, Shirley Valentine) and Sue Perkins to the west coast of Ireland to retrace the rugged terrain where his relatives grew up. Cue the Cranberries soundtrack and plenty of false soul searching while staring out into the Atlantic Ocean from a stone ruin.

Instead of providing a high-octane tale of adventure into the wilderness, All Roads led to dead ends, boggy fields and……a fallen gate.

It was akin to one of those tedious geography videos I was forced to watch at school while the teacher dozed off in the corner.

The show kicked off with the three touching down at a windswept Knock Airport. So hell-bent on adding an injection of drama into the show, Perkins and Steadman looked like they’d never seen rain before as they huddled together in disgust. Their first task was to find their way around Achill Island, which involved groping a statue of the Virgin Mary and Perkins offering to sell her body in exchange for directions to their destination.

Mangan and Perkins tried desperately to shoehorn the odd one-liner into proceedings while squelching in a peat bog and a breathless Steadman looked like she was questioning why she had agreed to even participate in the show.

It was clear as the show progressed that tripping over a shrub wasn’t going to cut it on the entertainment front, so the trio stopped for a rest while Mangan fished for salmon with the locals. They then visited Tullaghanduff where Mangan met up with one of his cousins before visiting his uncles and sampling traditional home-made cake (hang on, there’s a foil-wrapped Mini Roll on the table).

Before the celebrities could hop back on Aer Lingus they had to make their way across yet another bog… in search of a gate and this time using a spider to guide them in their quest. The tense moment came when the art of natural navigation had deserted them and they couldn’t make north from south. As a worn-out Steadman sat down on a rock, Perkins shouted: “Where is this fence post?” “Who cares?” I screamed back at the TV.

It’s nice to see the BBC keeping celebrities in a job with yet another travelogue after having sent thespians up mountains, down dirt tracks and across poles. All Roads Lead Home left such a faint impression that I had to look up the name of show on the TV guide before I wrote this.

And it appears all roads on the BBC path to cheap TV lead to yet another programme featuring Sue Perkins.

Bring back Dad’s Army, all is forgiven.

By Melissa Coombs