Tonight's TV
Warm reception
I WON'T hear a thing against Sir
David Frost after he gave me a lift in
his chauffeur-driven Bentley. He
concluded our interview by commanding
his driver to take me where
I wanted to go.
So it would be bad manners for me to go
on about the rather smug back-slapping
and didn't we do well atmosphere of The
Frost Report Is Back. After all, the participants
- and the cast list is an impressive
one - have done a good job.
Not only is sketch show The Frost Report
still funny 40 years on but the programme,
and by association Frost, was responsible
for bringing together the two
Ronnies, the Pythons and the Goodies. Not
a bad achievement.
The Frost Report Is Back is a stroll down
memory lane hosted by Sir David, whose
greeting of "Hello, good evening and welcome" hasn't changed over the years.
Ronnie Corbett, Sheila Steafel, Nicky
Henson and singer Julie Felix join him in
the studio to talk over old times. John
Cleese, Michael Palin and Terry Jones
have a chat on film. Then we get a re-run
of the show, Frost Over England, that won
the Golden Rose of Montreux.
There's a bit of TV history with the first
sketch - just two lines - in which Ronnies
Barker and Corbett appeared on TV.
"Hello, super," says one policeman to another.
"Hello, wonderful," comes the reply.
The show marked Cleese's TV debut and
being a live show made it all the more
nerve-wracking.
"I've never been so frightened in my
life," he admits, adding that the auto-cue
in those days resembled a large yellow toilet
roll and that trying to read it was terrible.
Writers, including Barry Cryer and
Denis Norden, pop in to recall old times,
with David Nobbs asserting there was no
dumbing down in those days. "We assumed
the audience were intelligence and
quick-witted," he says.
Most importantly, much of the comedy
- or at least the bits they show in this programme
- remains funny.
Not as politically sharp as Frost's That
Was The Week That Was but still more
laugh-inducing than much of today's TV
comedy.
Illness is no laughing matter and Professor
Kathy Sykes continues her series on
Alternative Therapies with reflexology, a
treatment that works by pressing the soles
of your feet to aid everything from infertility
to asthma.
What she discovers is that there's little
scientific fact to back up the claims of
those in this £1.5bn a year business.
She traces the map of the feet, which
links it to other parts of the body, back to
the Thirties while considering claims that
the Chinese, Egyptians and people in the
Bible practised some form of reflexology.
All this is interesting enough and, while
the science doesn't appear to exist to back
up the claims, she finds that massage and
touch can help people in pain.
She ends up, with a degree of self-consciousness
and embarrassment, at a "cuddle
party" in Los Angeles (where else?).
This cuddling up to strangers is non-sexual,
she emphasises.
Because we're all "hungry for connection",
as she puts it, she comes away admitting
that "it was astonishingly nice,
I'm shocked it was so nice and I wanted to
stay".
Some may consider that Bear Grylls
needs his head examined as he sets out to
fly higher than the summit of Mount Everest
hanging from a parachute with an engine
strapped to his back. Daredevil or
dope? You decide.
His companion in adventure is Gilo, a
self-taught engineer who has built the
paramotors they will use.
These are light paraglider chutes powered
by a backpack motor.
All that just to look down on Everest
from above.
These daring young men and their flying
machines face a number of difficulties
- extreme cold, untested paramotors, bad
weather and their other halves.
Gilo's wife of six months isn't exactly
over the moon about this foolhardy venture.
Neither is Bear's wife and mother of his
two children as she breaks down in tears
at the airport while saying goodbye. The
film has the good sense to show that one
man's adventures is his wife's misery.
10:31am Monday 24th March 2008
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